CHAPTER SEVEN
Seeing Gender Bias
Women in Agriculture
On Christmas Day in Dimi village, a remote farming community in Malawi, everyone had gathered to celebrate the day except for one woman, Patricia, who was in a field a mile away, kneeling on the damp earth in her half-acre farm plot, planting groundnuts.
As the rest of her village shared food and festive conversation, Patricia worked with exacting care, making sure her seeds lined up in perfect double rows—75 centimeters between each row, 10 centimeters between each plant.
Six months later, I visited Patricia at her farm plot and told her, “I heard how you spent Christmas Day!” She laughed and said, “That’s when the rains came!” She knew her crops would do better if she planted them when the ground was still damp, so that’s what she did.
You’d think that someone with Patricia’s dedication would be hugely successful, but for years, she had struggled. In spite of her painstaking work, even the basics had been out of reach for her and her family. She didn’t have money for school fees for her kids, the kind of investment that can help break the cycle of poverty, or even money to buy a set of cooking pots, which can make life a bit easier.
Farmers need five things to succeed: good land, good seeds, farming supplies, time, and know-how. There were barriers standing between Patricia and every one of these things, simply because she was a woman.
For one, and this is common in sub-Saharan Africa, Malawian tradition in most communities dictates that women cannot inherit land. (Recently passed laws in Malawi give women equal property rights, but customs are slower to change.) So Patricia didn’t own her plot. She paid to rent it. It was an expense, and it kept her from investing in the land to make it more productive.
Also, because Patricia is a woman, she didn’t have a say in the family spending. For years, her husband decided what the family spent—and if that didn’t include farming supplies for Patricia, there was nothing she could do about it.
Her husband also decided how Patricia spent her time. She did a funny impression of him ordering her around: “Go and do this, go and do this, go and do this, go and do this, all the time!” Patricia spent her days cutting firewood, fetching water, cooking meals, cleaning dishes, and caring for the kids. It gave her less time to spend on her crops or take her produce to market to make sure she got the best price. And if she wanted to hire help, laborers wouldn’t work as hard for her as they would for a man. Men in Malawi don’t like taking orders from women.
Remarkably, even the seeds Patricia was planting were affected by her gender. Development organizations have long worked with farmers to breed seeds that will grow bigger plants or attract fewer pests. For decades, though, when these groups consulted with leaders in the farming community, they would speak only with men, and men are focused on growing only the crops they can sell. Almost nobody was creating seeds for farmers like Patricia, who are focused also on feeding their families and who often grow nutritious crops like chickpeas and vegetables.
Governments and development organizations offer frequent sessions to train farmers. But women have less freedom to leave the house to attend these sessions, or even to talk with the trainers, who tend to be male. When organizations tried to use technology to spread information—sending tips via text message or over the radio—they found that men were the ones controlling that technology. If families had a cell phone, men were carrying it. When families listened to the radio, men were controlling the dial.
When you add it all up, you start to understand how a smart, hardworking farmer like Patricia was never able to get ahead. There was one barrier after another blocking her way because she was a woman.
Understanding Patricia
By the time I met Patricia in 2015, I had come to understand the gender roles and biases that limited her success as a farmer. It had taken me a long time to figure it out—and it began when Warren Buffett gave the bulk of his fortune to our foundation.
Warren’s gift opened up new frontiers for us at the foundation. We suddenly had the resources to invest in areas we knew were important, and where we saw huge promise, but hadn’t yet entered in a big way. We’re a learning foundation. If we see opportunity in an area that’s new to us, we start by making small grants. We watch what happens; we try to figure things out. We look for points of leverage. Then we see if a larger investment makes sense. When Warren told us about his gift, we had been exploring a number of new areas but hadn’t yet made the decision to scale up. His resources drove us forward and would soon lead us to gender equity as an important new focus of our giving.
Bill and I decided that we would use the new resources to move outside global health and begin making direct efforts to reduce poverty. “How do you help people in extreme poverty get more income?” That’s the question we started with, and our first step was to learn more about how they live their lives, how they get their income now. It turns out that more than 70 percent of the world’s poorest people get most of their income and their food by farming small plots of land. This combination presents a huge opportunity: If these smallholder farmers can make their farms more productive, they can grow more crops, harvest more food, enjoy better nutrition, and earn more income. In fact, we believed that helping the poorest farmers grow more food and get it to market could be the world’s most powerful lever in reducing hunger, malnutrition, and poverty.
We decided to put our principal focus on Africa and Southeast Asia. Sub-Saharan Africa was the only region of the world where the crops grown per person had not increased in twenty-five years. If the world could help develop crops that could resist floods, drought, pests, and disease and deliver higher yields on the same land, life would improve for millions of people. So our strategy seemed clear: We would focus on the science, trying to help researchers develop new seeds and fertilizers that could help smallholder farmers grow more food.
That was the approach we set at the very beginning, in 2006, when Rajiv Shah, the head of our new agriculture program, attended a World Food Prize symposium in Iowa and gave a speech to top agriculture experts, explaining our hopes and asking for advice and ideas. The event called for Raj to speak and then hear responses from four eminent figures. Dr. Norman Borlaug was the first to respond. He had received the Nobel Peace Prize for launching the Green Revolution that created a surge of farm productivity and saved millions of people from starvation. The next speaker was Sir Gordon Conway, the chief scientific advisor at the UK’s Department for International Development. Then Dr. Xiaoyang Chen spoke, who was president of South China Agricultural University.
By the time Dr. Chen finished speaking, the event had run long past its allotted time, and there was one person still to respond, a woman, Catherine Bertini, who had been executive director of the UN’s World Food Programme. She sensed that the audience was tired of all the talking, so she came straight to the point.
“Dr. Shah, I would like to remind you of the quote from one of our founding mothers of the United States of America, Abigail Adams, who wrote to her husband while he was in Philadelphia working on the Declaration of Independence, and said, ‘Don’t forget the ladies.’ If you and your colleagues at the foundation don’t pay attention to the gender differences in agriculture, you will do what many others have done in the past, which is waste your money. The only difference will be you’ll waste a lot more money a lot faster.”
Catherine sat down, and the meeting adjourned.
A few months later, Raj hired Catherine at the Gates Foundation to teach us about the links between agriculture and gender.
“They’re Almost All Women”
When Catherine came on board, there was no talk at all of gender at the foundation. It wasn’t anywhere in our strategy. I don’t know what others were thinking at the time, but I’m embarrassed to say that I had not thought of gender in connection with our development work. I’m not saying that I missed the fact that women were the principal beneficiaries of many of our programs. Fa
mily planning was clearly a women’s issue, as was maternal and newborn health. To reach more children with vaccinations, we had to target mothers with our message. The gender element in those issues was easy to see. But farming was different. There was no obvious gender aspect to it, at least not to me, and not at the start.
That began to change about the time Catherine joined Raj in a meeting with Bill and me to review our agricultural strategy. Raj introduced Catherine and said, “She’s here working on gender.” That word seemed to provoke Bill, and he started talking about being effective, getting results, and staying focused on that. Bill supported women’s empowerment and gender equity but thought they would distract us from the goal of growing more food and feeding more people—and he thought anything that would blur our focus would hurt our effectiveness.
Bill can be intimidating, but Catherine was eager to have that conversation. “This is completely about effectiveness,” she said. “We want to make smallholder farmers as effective as they can be, and we want to give them all the tools—the seeds, fertilizer, loans, labor—they need to achieve it, so it’s very important for us to know who the farmers are and what they want. Next time you’re in Africa driving in a rural area, look out the window and see who’s working in the fields. They’re almost all women. If you listen only to the men, because they’re the ones with the time and social permission to go to the meetings, then you’re not going to know what the women really need, and they’re the ones who are doing most of the work.”
Catherine left the meeting and said to Raj, “Why am I here? If he doesn’t buy it, it’s never going to work.” Raj just said, “He heard you. Trust me.”
A few months later, Catherine was driving down the road listening on her car radio to an interview Bill was doing on NPR about economic development, and Bill said, “The majority of poor people in the world are farmers. Most people don’t know that the women are doing most of that work, and so we’re giving them new seeds, new techniques. And when you give women those tools, they use them very effectively.”
Catherine almost drove off the road.
What Catherine experienced there, which Raj predicted, is that Bill learns. He loves to learn. Yes, he challenges people very hard, sometimes too hard, but he listens and learns, and when he learns, he is willing to shift. This passion for learning is not just Bill’s approach; it’s mine as well. It’s the central pillar of the culture we’ve tried to create at the foundation, and it explains how we all—some faster than others—came to agree that gender equity should drive the work we’re all trying to do.
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The fact that most of the farmers in Malawi are women wouldn’t matter if gender differences and inequalities didn’t exist. But as Patricia’s life shows, gender differences and inequalities do matter—in ways that make it much harder for women to grow the crops they need.
Hans Rosling once told me a story that helps make the point. He was working with several women in a village in the Congo to test the nutritional value of cassava roots. They were harvesting the roots, marking them with a number, and putting them into baskets to take them down to the pond to soak. They filled three baskets. One woman carried off the first basket, another woman carried the second basket, and Hans carried the third. They walked single file down the path, and a minute later, as they all put down their baskets, one of the women turned around, saw Hans’s basket, and shrieked as if she’d seen a ghost. “How did this get here?!”
“I carried it,” Hans said.
“You can’t carry it!” she shouted. “You’re a man!”
Congolese men don’t carry baskets.
Strict gender rules extend to other areas as well: who clears the land, who plants the seeds, who weeds the field, who does the transplanting, who runs the house, cares for the children, and cooks the meals. When you look at a farmer, you’re looking at a mother. Household labor not only takes time away from farming but keeps the woman from attending meetings where she could get tips from other farmers and learn about improved seeds, best practices, and new markets. As soon as you see that most farmers are women, and that women are beneath men, everything shifts.
A landmark 2011 study from the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organization showed that women farmers in developing countries achieve 20–30 percent lower yields than men even though they are just as good at farming. The women underproduce because they do not have the access to the resources and information that men do. If they had the same resources, they would have the same yields.
The report said that if we could recognize poor women farmers as clients with distinctive needs and develop technology, training, and services designed specifically for them, then women’s crop yields would be the same as men’s. That would put more income in the hands of women, give them a stronger voice in the household, lead to better nutrition for the children, add income for school fees, and—because of the rise in food production—reduce the number of undernourished people in the world by 100 to 150 million.
The rewards are immense, but so are the challenges. Patricia is not just one woman; she is millions of women. And those millions of women have smaller plots of land than men. They have less access to extension services, to the market, and to credit. They lack seeds and fertilizer and training. Women in some areas are not allowed to hold bank accounts or enter into contracts without the endorsement of a male family member.
If you’re working to help women change their lives and you hit these gender barriers, it could make you step back and say, “Culture change is not our role.” But when you learn that women are more than half of all farmers and can’t get what they need to make their plots productive, and as a result their children go hungry and their families stay in poverty, it forces you to choose. You can keep doing the same thing and reinforce the biases that keep people poor. Or you can help women get the power they need to feed their children and reach their potential. It’s a clear choice—challenge the biases or perpetuate them. Politically, it’s a tricky question. Morally, it’s easy: Do you submit to the old culture that keeps women down, or do you help create a new culture that lifts women up?
Fighting for gender equity in agriculture was never our plan. We had to spend some time trying to take it all in. That is one of the great challenges for anyone who wants to help change the world: How do you follow your plan and yet keep listening for new ideas? How can you hold your strategy lightly, so you’ll be able to hear the new idea that blows it up?
We started out thinking that poor farmers just needed better technology, such as new seeds that would allow them to grow more crops on the same land in harsher weather. But the potential for a farming revolution was not only in the seeds; it was in the power of the women who plant them. This was the huge missed idea. This was the new plan. If we want to help farmers, we have to empower women. Now, how do we get everyone on the team to see it that way?
Whispering About “Women’s Empowerment”
As I saw it at the start, the goal of empowering women was not in addition to, but on behalf of, more food, better nutrition, and higher income for the poorest people in the world.
Gender equity is a worthy goal for its own sake. But that was not how it was going to be sold in our foundation. Not back then. This was a new idea, and there were skeptics. One highly placed person shut down a conversation by saying, “We don’t do ‘gender.’” Another person pushed back, “We are not becoming a social justice organization!”
When we started, we were mindful of the resistance. Even the most passionate advocates wouldn’t talk about empowerment. That term put people off and obscured the core message, which is “you have to know what the farmer needs.” We simply had to remind people working on agriculture that the farmers were often women. That meant that the researchers had to start gathering information from women, not just men. It meant that the scientists working on new seeds needed to talk to women.
Here’s an example. When agricultural researchers want to improve a new rice seed, they ofte
n leave their labs and go talk to the farmers about the traits they want to see in an improved seed.
This is a great idea. But many of the researchers are men, and they often talk only to male farmers. The woman farmer very often isn’t part of the conversation because she is too busy on other tasks in the household, or because it’s culturally inappropriate for a male professional to speak with a woman, or because the researcher doesn’t realize how critical her input is.
Often, then, what happens is that the researchers tell the men about the traits of an improved seed, and the men like what they hear. So the researchers go back to the lab and finish the seed and help get it to market. The men buy it, and the women plant it, and then the women (who do most of the harvesting) see that the rice stalk grows too short, and they have to stoop over to harvest it. After a while, the women tell their husbands they want a taller plant that doesn’t break their backs during harvest. So the farmers don’t buy the seeds anymore, and a whole lot of time and money and research has been wasted that could have been saved if only someone had talked to the women.
The good news is that the International Rice Research Institute (IRRI) has learned that women and men farmers have some differences in what they’re looking for in a good rice variety. Both men and women prefer traits like high yield; obviously, they want to produce more crops if they can. But because women’s jobs on the farm include harvesting and cooking, they also prefer rice varieties that grow to the right height and don’t take as long to cook. So the IRRI researchers make a point of talking to men and women when they consult with farmers on the traits they want in the improved seeds. They know that if input from both men and women is included in seed development, farmers are more likely to adopt that seed in the long run.
The Moment of Lift Page 16
