Necessity as a driver in bending agricultural gender norms in the Eastern Gangetic Plains of South Asia

Figures & data

Figure 1. Map of study sites with community locations of respondents.

Figure 2. Decision-making Dartboard (DmD) framework (Brown et al., 2021, p. 257).

Table 1. Summary of demographic characteristics of respondents.

Demographic characteristics		Men	Women
Respondents		130	31
Average Age		43.7	43.7
Education level	No formal education – illiterate	10	5
	No formal education – literate	4	1
	Primary	6	12
	Secondary	69	0
	Higher Secondary	32	10
	Graduate	6	2
	Postgraduate	3	1
CA trained		130	14
Country wise distribution of respondents
India			Bangladesh		Nepal
Cooch Behar	Malda	Purnia	Rajshahi	Rangpur	Sunsari
21	25	32	22	25	36

Table 2. Regionally relevant gendered norms assigned to various agricultural activities as assigned by respondents.

Activity and assigned gender	Representative quotation	ID
Overall farm work (men)	‘In our family women do not work on the farm. It’s our culture coming from our grandparents’ time. Men do all the farm-related work, and women do housework’	B17
Herbicide spraying (men)	‘Men spray chemicals, do fertilizer application, irrigation application, layout or preparing seed beds, etc.’	B12
Tilling (men)	‘Tilling the land with a spade can only be done by men, things like that my husband comes and does or we hire a labourer [male] and make him do it’	R10
Mobility in public spaces (men)	‘He tells me agricultural information sometimes  … Since he is working in the tea shop, there are discussions when farmers gather there.’	C8 [f]
Housekeeping duties (women)	‘Women cannot do farming … In addition to their housekeeping, they’re hardly free’	J18 [f]
Caring (women)	‘My wife is involved in domestic work … She also must look after the older members of the family. It is her duty’	B14

Table 3. Few exceptions when women engage in agriculture.

Categories of exceptions	Representative quotation	ID
Participation in transplanting	‘We need women for trans-plantation and men for making the edges of the fields’	S28
Manual weeding	‘When the farmer sprays herbicides in the field, then it reduces weeds from the field, but they never spray on bunds. In this case, women have to do manual weeding on the bunds’	B12
Post-harvesting activities	‘The women members of the family do these types of work … After harvesting and threshing of the crop with the help of labour, the drying of the grain is done by the women members’	B26
Taking food and water to the fields	‘Women never go to the farm. Sometimes they come to the farm to provide water or food. They only come to the farm to see how the crop is’	B42

Figure 3. The emergent narrative of contextual changes that are leading to a bending of gender norms across the Eastern Gangetic Plains.

Brown, B., Paudel, G. P., & Krupnik, T. J. (2021a). Visualising adoption processes through a stepwise framework: A case study of mechanisation on the Nepal Terai. Agricultural Systems, 192, 103200. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agsy.2021.103200

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Data availability statement

Anonymized Data can be made available on reasonable request.