Where to meet?

Holmen, Pirsenteret

Authors

Krzysztof Gorlach, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Zbigniew Drąg, Jagiellonian University, Kraków, Poland

Topic: Gender Inequalities Among Farm Operators in Poland

Abstracts

This paper has been focused on the gender aspect of rural inequalities. In the international literature has been stressed that the situation of women in society has been changed significantly in the last forty years. However, basic changes in agriculture and rural communities has not gone fully in this direction. According to many authors the agriculture has been the area where male domination seems to be quite preserved resulting from the patriarchal tradition in many European societies. It might be seen in various a few areas, namely: a/ female activities traditionally focused on household and not on field work seem to be invisible, b/ women mostly join particular family farms via becoming partners of male successors of farms; c/ women have been also under-representative in agricultural organizations; d/ training programs for agriculture have been mostly focused on males` activities.

In such a context the authors want to analyze some important aspects of females` roles in Polish agriculture. Because of its traditional and peasant character it seems to be an eager and possibly fruitful area of such investigations. Therefore the authors have decided to focus on farm operators in order to grasp the role of women at the very heart of the agricultural activities. In order to analyze the role of women one have been focused on several aspects  situation of women as farming operators: 1/ economic capital of run farms; 2/ embedded form of cultural capital of run farms; 3/ institutionalized form of cultural capital of run farms; 4/ general preferred strategies of the development of run farms; 5/ some particular strategies of development of run farms; 6/ general three years plans of development of run farms; 7/ types of farms run by males and females; 8/ general attitudes of farm operators according to gender. All data have been collected under the research project focused on national sample of Polish farm operators in 2017 with the financial support of Narodowe Centrum Nauki (National Science Center of Poland – UMO-2015/18/A/HS6/00114). Moreover, in order to show some time change the authors have been used also some data collected in 1994 under the project: KBN 1/1628/92/03. The general conclusion seems to be pessimistic: operated by women farms won`t be able to achieve the level of economic effectiveness comparing with the farms operated by males (at least in Poland).

Go back to the workgroup WG 8