Women’s Employment in Agrifood Systems in the UNECE Region (Food and Agriculture Organization)

Global and national policy discourse and agendas are moving beyond traditional silos of agriculture and other economic sectors to address the challenges facing agrifood systems (AFS). Davis et al. (2023) estimate that 1.23 billion people are employed in AFS and that 3.83 billion people worldwide live in households reliant on AFS. Costa et al. (forthcoming) expanded this study and produced global and regional estimates for people working in AFS disaggregated by sex. In this paper, we present the findings for women and men working in AFS focusing on the countries of the UNECE region by analysing the trends from 2005 to 2019 and the heterogeneity across countries and sub-regions within the UNECE region. The analysis shows that, in 2019, 36.5 million women and 50 million men were employed in AFS within the UNECE region, which corresponds to 13% of working women and 16% of working men. This reflects a decline of four percentage points for women and three percentage points for men since 2005, mainly driven by a decline of employment in agriculture. The paper identifies significant gender inequality in employment in AFS, which worsened during the first year of the Covid19 pandemic.