Yadeta, G. and Fojo, G.A. (2019) “Gender differences: Participation in agricultural production in Ethiopia,” Harmoni Sosial: Jurnal Pendidikan IPS, 6(2), pp. 183–194.
According to research, women’s labour, particularly the time spent on various agricultural and domestic tasks, has been undervalued. As a result, the current study focuses on how wives and husbands engage in productive and reproductive activities to look into the relationship between gender and other factors like paid and unpaid work in the Oromia region of Ethiopia. The primary female and male decision-makers within the same household were selected for this study population, which consisted of 114 households in Witate and 48 households in Hamuma. Both quantitative and qualitative research approaches were used to examine how husbands and wives share participation in domestic and agricultural activities. As stated in Yadeta and Fojo’s study, wives take care of almost all domestic tasks, including caring for livestock, making purchases, and managing household chores. The data from FGDs showed that men have little or no participation in domestic activities because the gender division of labour in the community reserved these activities only for women, and as a result, it is shameful for men to perform domestic tasks.
On average, women work 12 to 15 hours per day, which supports the finding that women in developing countries are more time-constrained than men as a result of their engagement in unpaid housework. In investigating the factors that influence wives’ and husbands’ participation in agricultural and domestic activities, the study has found that women’s working conditions are quite more complicated than those of their counterparts, and it is evident that the division of labour between men and women tends to be unequal where men dominate farming and women are mostly involved in domestic work.
In addition, on the finding of women’s participation in decision-making, due to their double responsibilities in the home, women were less likely to participate in meetings and training programmes on agriculture and make decisions related to farming, and this is because male dominance and belief systems that derive from societal norms, like cultural norms and religion, are dominant. According to the finding, Yadeta and Fojo suggest focusing on raising men’s and women’s awareness about the benefits of gender equality in agricultural production in order to create an environment that is conducive to challenging unfair gender roles, which is fundamentally crucial in order to change the typical gender division of labour.
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