Women’s Labor Participation and Gender Equality in Rural Households: A Comparative Case Study on Sri Lanka and Cambodia

• In Event: Rural Women in East Asia and Southeast Asia

Abstract

Rice is one of the most important staple foods in the world and its production remains a main source of employment and livelihoods (Timmer, 2010; Agarwal, 2011). Women play an indispensible role in the global rice production. Collectively, they provide almost half of the labor input across all rice-producing regions. Meanwhile, women’s participation in rice production has profound implications for their empowerment.

In this paper, we focus on the relationship between women’s labor participation and their gender roles in the household and examine how this relationship is shaped by different socio-economic contexts. More specifically, we investigate women in rice-farming sector in Sri Lanka and Cambodia, contrasting rice production for commercial purposes with that for subsistence. We employed a cross-sectional dataset that contains detailed information of household socio-economic characteristics, rice farming and gender roles. We used ordered-probit regression to identify the underlying factors that affect women’s empowerment status.

Our preliminary analysis suggests that women’s labor allocation and their wage rates are closely related to their empowerment. We found women in Cambodia contribute on average 46% of labor input in rice farming and generate almost equal amount of wage as their male counterparts. In contrast, women in Sri Lanka provide on average 21% of total labor and earn much less than men. As a result, compared with the case in Sri Lanka, Cambodian women are significantly more involved in joint decision-making in the household. Education and training opportunity are also found to be important factors for the improvement of women’s empowerment.

Author

• Huaiyu Wang, Beijing Institute of Technology, China