فصل 7

PART III

Design

CHAPTER 7

The Plough Hypothesis

It was the Danish economist Ester Boserup who first came up with the plough hypothesis: that societies that had historically used the plough would be less gender equal than those that hadn’t. The theory is based on the relative female-friendliness of shifting agriculture (which is done using handheld tools like hoes or digging sticks) versus plough agriculture (usually driven by a powerful animal like a horse or an ox), the idea being that the former is more accessible to women. This sex difference in accessibility is partly because of the differences between male and female bodies. Ploughing requires ‘significant upper body strength, grip strength, and bursts of power, which are needed to either pull the plough or control the animal that pulls it,’ and this privileges male bodies. Upper-body mass is approximately 75% greater in men because women’s lean body mass tends to be less concentrated in their upper body, and, as a result, men’s upper body strength is on average between 40-60% higher than women’s (compared to lower-body strength which is on average only 25% higher in men). Women also have on average a 41% lower grip strength than men, and this is not a sex difference that changes with age: the typical seventy-year-old man has a stronger handgrip than the average twenty-five-year-old woman. It’s also not a sex difference that can be significantly trained away: a study which compared ‘highly trained female athletes’ to men who were ‘untrained or not specifically trained’ found that their grip strength ‘rarely’ surpassed the fiftieth percentile of male subjects. Overall, 90% of the women (this time including untrained women) in the study had a weaker grip than 95% of their male counterparts.

But the disparity in the relative female-friendliness of plough versus shifting agriculture is also a result of gendered social roles. Hoeing can be easily started and stopped, meaning that it can be combined with childcare. The same cannot be said for a heavy tool drawn by a powerful animal. Hoeing is also labour intensive, whereas ploughing is capital intensive, and women are more likely to have access to time rather than money as a resource. As result, argued Boserup, where the plough was used, men dominated agriculture and this resulted in unequal societies in which men had the power and the privilege.

According to a 2011 paper, Boserup’s hypothesis holds up to scrutiny. Researchers found that descendants of societies that traditionally practised plough agriculture held more sexist views even if they emigrated to other countries. The paper also found that sexist beliefs correlated with the kind of geo-climactic conditions that would favour plough agriculture over shifting agriculture. This suggested that it was the climate rather than pre-existing sexism that dictated the adoption of the plough – which in turn drove the adoption of sexist views.

The plough theory has its detractors. A 2014 analysis of farming in Ethiopia points out that while farming is strongly identified with men in that country (the farmer is male in ‘virtually all Amharic folklore’), and ploughing in particular is exclusively male, the upper-body-strength argument doesn’t hold there, because they use a lighter plough (although this of course doesn’t deal with the capital investment or childcare issues). This analysis also cites a 1979 paper which disputes the theory on the basis that ‘even where the plough never was introduced, among South Cushites in particular, still men are the cultivators’.

Are they though? It’s hard to say, because the data on who exactly is doing the farming is, yes, you’ve guessed it, full of gaps. You’ll find no end of reports, articles and briefing papers that include some variation on the claim that ‘women are responsible for 60-80% of the agricultural labour supplied on the continent of Africa’, but little in the way of evidence. This statistic has been traced back to a 1972 United Nations Economic Commission for Africa, and it’s not that it is necessarily wrong, it’s just that we can’t prove it one way or the other, because we lack the data.

This is partly because, given men and women often farm together, it is difficult to accurately determine how much of the labour of either sex goes into producing an end food product. In a United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) paper, economist Cheryl Doss points out that it also depends on how we define and value ‘food’: by caloric value (where staple crops would come out on top), or by monetary value (where coffee might win)? Given women ‘tend to be more heavily involved in the production of staple crops’, comparing calorific value ‘might indicate a significantly higher share being produced by women.’ ‘Might’ is doing a lot of work there, though, because national surveys often don’t report on whether farmers are men or women. Even where data is sex-disaggregated, careless survey design can lead to an under-reporting of female labour: if women are asked if they do ‘domestic duties’ or ‘work’, as if they are mutually exclusive (or as if domestic work is not work), they tend to just select ‘domestic duties’ because that describes the majority of what they do. This gap is then compounded by the tendency to ‘emphasize incomegenerating activities’, the result being that they often underestimate (often female-dominated) subsistence production. The censuses also tend to define agriculture as ‘field work’, which leads to an undercounting of the women’s work ‘such as rearing small livestock, kitchen gardening, and post-harvest processing’. It’s a fairly clear example of male bias leading to a substantial gender data gap.

A similar problem arises with the division of work by researchers into ‘primary’ and ‘secondary’ activities. For a start, secondary activities are not always collected by surveys. Even when they are, they aren’t always counted in labour-force figures, and this is a male bias that makes women’s paid work invisible. Women will often list their paid work as their secondary activity, simply because their unpaid work takes up so much time, but that doesn’t mean that they aren’t spending a substantial proportion of their day on paid work. The result is that labour-force statistics often sport a substantial gender data gap. This male bias is present in the data Doss uses to check the 60-80% statistics. Foss concludes that women make up less than half of the global agricultural labour force, but in the FAO data she uses, ‘an individual is reported as being in the agricultural labor force if he or she reports that agriculture is his or her main economic activity’. Which, as we’ve seen, is to exclude a substantial chunk of women’s paid labour. To be fair to Doss, she does acknowledge the issues associated with this approach, critiquing the absurdly low 16% reported share of the agricultural labour force for women in Latin America. Rural women in Latin America, notes Doss, ‘are likely to reply that “their home” is their primary responsibility, even if they are heavily engaged in agriculture’.

But even if we were to address all these gender data gaps in calculating female agricultural labour we still wouldn’t know exactly how much of the food on your table is produced by women. And this is because female input doesn’t equal male output: women on the whole are less productive in agriculture than men. This doesn’t mean that they don’t work as hard. It means that for the work that they do, they produce less, because agriculture (from tools to scientific research, to development initiatives) has been designed around the needs of men. In fact, writes Doss, given women’s various constraints (lack of access to land, credit and new technologies as well as their unpaid work responsibilities) ‘it would be surprising if they were able to produce over half of food crops’.

The FAO estimates that if women had the same access to productive resources as men, yields on their farms could increase by up to 30%. But they don’t. In an echo of the introduction of the plough, some modern ‘labour-saving’ devices might more precisely be labelled ‘male labour-saving’ devices. A 2014 study in Syria, for example, found while the introduction of mechanisation in farming did reduce demand for male labour, freeing men up to ‘pursue better-paying opportunities outside of agriculture’, it actually increased demand ‘for women’s labour-intensive tasks such as transplanting, weeding, harvesting and processing’. Conversely, when some agricultural tasks were mechanised in Turkey, women’s participation in the agricultural labour force decreased, ‘because of men’s appropriation of machinery’, and because women were reluctant to adopt it. This was in part due to lack of education and sociocultural norms, but also ‘because the machinery was not designed for use by women’. It’s not just physical tools that can benefit men at the expense of women. Take what are called ‘extension services’ (educational programmes designed to teach farmers science-based practice so they can be more productive). Historically, extension services have not been female-friendly. According to a 1988-9 FAO survey (limited to those countries that actually had sex-disaggregated data) only 5% of all extension services were directed towards women. And while things have slightly improved since then, there are still plenty of contemporary examples of development initiatives that forget to include women – and therefore at best don’t help, and at worst actively disadvantage them.

A 2015 analysis by Data2x (a UN-backed organisation set up by Hillary Clinton that is lobbying to close the global gender data gap) found that many interventions simply don’t reach women in part because women are already overworked and don’t have time to spare for educational initiatives, no matter how beneficial they may end up being. Development planners also have to factor in women’s (lack of) mobility, in part because of their care responsibilities, but also because they are less likely to have access to transport and often face barriers to travelling alone.

Then there’s the language and literacy barrier: many programmes are conducted in the national language, which women are less likely than men to have been taught. Due to the low global levels of female education, women are also less likely to be able to read, so written materials don’t help either. These are all fairly basic concerns and shouldn’t be hard to account for, but there is plenty of evidence that they continue to be ignored. Many development initiatives exclude women by requiring a minimum land size, or that the person who attends the training is the head of a farming household, or the owner of the land that is farmed. Others exclude women by focusing solely on farms that have enough money to be able to purchase technology, for example. These conditions are all biased towards male farmers because women dominate the ranks of poor farmers, they dominate the ranks of small-scale farmers, and they are overwhelmingly unlikely to own the land that they farm. In order to design interventions that actually help women, first we need the data. But it sometimes feels like we’re not even trying to collect it. A 2012 Gates Foundation document tells the story of an unnamed organisation that aimed to breed and distribute improved varieties of staple crops. But ‘improved’ is in the eye of the farmer, and when this organisation did its field-testing it spoke almost exclusively to men. Male farmers said that yield was the most important trait, and so that was the crop that the organisation bred. And then it was surprised when households didn’t adopt it.

The decision to talk only to men was bizarre. For all the gaps in our data we can at least say that women do a fair amount of farming: 79% of economically active women in the least developed countries, and 48% of economically active women in the world, report agriculture as their primary economic activity. And the female farmers in this area didn’t see yields as the most important thing. They cared about other factors like how much land preparation and weeding these crops required, because these are female jobs. And they cared about how long, ultimately, the crops would take to cook (another female job). The new, high-yield varieties increased the time the women had to spend on these other tasks, and so, unsurprisingly, they did not adopt these crops.

The only thing that development planners need to do to avoid such pitfalls is speak to some women, but they seem bafflingly resistant to this idea. And if you think the decision to design a new staple crop without talking to women is bad, wait until you hear about the history of ‘clean’ stoves in the developing world.

Humans (by which I mean mainly women) have been cooking with three-stone fires since the Neolithic era. These are exactly what they sound like: three stones on the ground on which to balance a pot, with fuel (wood or whatever else you can gather that will burn) placed in the middle. In South Asia, 75% of families are still using biomass fuels (wood and other organic matter) for energy; in Bangladesh, the figure is as high as 90%. In sub-Saharan Africa biomass fuels are the primary source of energy used for cooking for 753 million people. That’s 80% of the population.

The trouble with traditional stoves is that they give off extremely toxic fumes. A woman cooking on a traditional stove in an unventilated room is exposed to the equivalent of more than a hundred cigarettes a day. According to a 2016 paper, in countries from Peru to Nigeria, toxic fumes from stoves are between twenty and a hundred times above World Health Organization guideline limits, and globally they cause three times more deaths (2.9 million) every year than malaria. This is all made worse by the inefficiency of traditional stoves: women who cook on them are exposed to these fumes for three to seven hours a day, meaning that, worldwide, indoor air pollution is the single largest environmental risk factor for female mortality and the leading killer of children under the age of five. Indoor air pollution is also the eighth-leading contributor to the overall global disease burden, causing respiratory and cardiovascular damage, as well as increased susceptibility to infectious illnesses such as tuberculosis and lung cancer. However, as is so often the case with health problems that mainly affect women, ‘these adverse health effects have not been studied in an integrated and scientifically rigorous manner’. Development agencies have been trying to introduce ‘clean’ stoves since the 1950s, with varying levels of success. The initial impetus was to address deforestation rather than to ease women’s unpaid labour or to address the health implications of traditional stove fumes. When it transpired that the environmental disaster was in fact driven by clearing land for agriculture rather than by women’s collection of fuel, most of the development industry simply dropped their clean-stove distribution initiatives. Emma Crewe, an anthropologist at SOAS University of London, explains that clean stove initiatives were ‘deemed to be a failure as a solution to the energy crisis, and not relevant to any other development area’. But clean stoves are back on the agenda, and in September 2010 Hillary Clinton announced the formation of the Global Alliance for Clean Cookstoves, which calls for 100 million additional homes to adopt clean and efficient stoves and fuels by 2020. This is a laudable aim, but if it is to be implemented, and if women are actually to use the stoves, a lot of work still remains to be done, not least on data collection.

A 2014 UN publication notes that, relative to data on water and sanitation, country data on access to efficient cookstoves is ‘sparse’, with national energy policies and poverty reduction strategy papers tending to focus on electrification instead. According to a 2005 World Bank report when it comes to collecting data on people’s access to energy governments also tend to measure things like the number of new grid connections, rather than the socio-economic impact of development projects. They also don’t generally collect data on what user needs actually are (for example, drinking-water pumping; food processing; fuel collection) before starting on their development projects. And the result of this dearth of data is that, to date, clean cook stoves have nearly all been rejected by users.

In the 1990s Emma Crewe was informed by stove technicians that low adoption was because users came from a ‘conservative culture’. They needed ‘educating’ in proper stove usage. Women are still being blamed in the twenty-first century. A 2013 WASHplus-and USAID-funded report on user experiences of five stoves in Bangladesh repeatedly acknowledged that all five stoves increased cooking time and required more attending. This prevented women from multitasking as they would with a traditional stove, and forced them to change the way they cooked – again increasing their workload. Nevertheless, the main and repeated recommendation of the report was to fix the women, rather than the stoves. The women needed to be educated on how great the ‘improved’ stoves were, rather than stove designers needing to be educated on how not to increase women’s already fifteen-hour average working day. Despite what academics, NGOs and expatriate technicians seem to think, the problem is not the women. It is the stoves: developers have consistently prioritised technical parameters such as fuel efficiency over the needs of the stove user, frequently leading users to reject them, explains Crewe. And although the low adoption rate is a problem going back decades, development agencies have yet to crack the problem, for the very simple reason that they still haven’t got the hang of consulting women and then designing a product rather than enforcing a centralised design on them from above. One Indian programme failed because while the new stove worked well in the lab, it required more maintenance than traditional stoves – maintenance the designers had simply assumed the ‘household’ would take care of. But structural repairs in Orissa are traditionally the responsibility of men, who didn’t see fixing the new stoves as a priority, because their wives could still prepare meals using the traditional stoves. So the women went back to using the toxic fume-producing traditional stoves, while the new stoves gathered dust in corners.

The issue of gendered priorities also affects household spending and therefore, if a household will adopt a stove at all. Despite hundreds of attempts to introduce a variety of clean stoves in Bangladesh since the early 1980s, over 98% of the rural population continue to cook with traditional biomass-burning stoves. A 2010 study which set out to understand why, found that women ‘seemed to exhibit a stronger preference than men for any improved stove, in particular for the health-saving chimney stoves’, and were more likely to order stoves when asked without their husbands present. But when the team returned to deliver the stoves four months later, the gender gap had disappeared; women’s preferences had fallen back into line with their husbands’.

That women’s failure to adopt clean stoves may simply result from a lack of purchasing authority is backed up by a 2016 report which found that ‘female-headed households are more likely to adopt cleaner cooking solutions than male-headed households’. Meanwhile a 2012 Yale study found that 94% of respondents ‘believed that indoor smoke from the traditional stoves is harmful’, but ‘opted for traditional cookstove technology so they could afford basic needs’ – although this didn’t prevent the university from headlining a press release on the study ‘Despite efforts for change, Bangladeshi women prefer to use pollution-causing cookstoves,’ as if the women were perverse rather than lacking in purchasing authority. Perhaps silly women obstreperously choosing air pollution for no good reason made for a better headline than endemic poverty.

This decades-long failure to design either stoves or implementation plans that account for women’s needs is a health disaster that is set to get worse. As climate change makes high-quality fuel increasingly scarce (because of soil erosion and desertification), women are forced to use leaves, straw and dung, which give off fumes that are even more toxic. And this is a travesty because there is no doubt that clean stoves would significantly improve women’s lives. A 2011 Yemen study found that women who lacked access to water and gas stoves spent 24% of their time engaged in paid work; this rose to around 52% for women who did have access. A 2016 report into stove use in India found that when women did adopt clean stoves (for example the cheap and portable Anagi 2 which has been found to substantially decrease cooking time), they had more time for social and family activities and community meetings. Households with clean stoves also reported sending their children to school more often. There is some cause for hope. In November 2015, researchers in India reported that they had conducted a successful field study using ‘an inexpensive (USD $1) device that may be simply placed in existing three-stone hearths’. This simple device cut wood use and smoke ‘to levels comparable to those achieved by the more expensive high-efficiency cookstoves’. This breakthrough came about as a result of filling a decades-long data gap: noting that the two decades of government attempts to implement high-efficiency cookstoves (HECs) in rural India had been largely unsuccessful, the researchers decided to investigate why.

And by speaking to women, they found out: HECs were unable to accept ‘large pieces of wood without having them split lengthwise’, an issue also uncovered in the 2013 study of five clean stoves mentioned earlier. These researchers understood that everything to do with cooking, including fuel, was the domain of women, and that since splitting wood was ‘very difficult for the women to do’, it was perfectly rational for women to ‘abandon these HECs since their traditional chulha (mud and brick stoves) have no such size limitation’.

Based on their findings they set about fixing the stove technology to fit the women. Realising that ‘a single HEC stove cannot possibly replace all of these traditional stoves’, the researchers concluded that ‘significant fuelwood reductions can only be achieved with locally customizable solutions in different parts of the world’. The result of their data-led design was the mewar angithi (MA), a simple metal device that ‘was engineered to be placed in a traditional chulha in order to provide the same airflow mechanism in the traditional chulha as occurs in the HEC stoves’.

To keep costs down (another regular concern of stove users), they constructed the device from metal washer industry scrap metal that they found in a local market ‘at one-fourth the cost of solid metal sheets’. And because of the ‘simple, bent plate design of the MA, it is easily customized to individual chulha units’. Since then, studies in Kenya and Ghana with the same device have found similarly positive results, showing what can be achieved when designers start from the basis of closing the gender data gap.