Resumen
SWIFT's overall objective is to foster transitions towards sustainable, balanced and inclusive
development of rural areas in Europe by favouring the deployment of women-led innovations (WLI)
acting for change in agriculture, promoting gender equality in rural areas from an intersectional,
feminist and human rights-based perspective. SWIFT pursues this by engaging in applied feminist
innovation studies research better reflecting feminist and human-rights based approaches. This will
enable to facilitate a change of framing in agriculture to address the social realities that
perpetuate inequalities. Women, in all of their diversity, play a central role in agriculture and
food systems. Their knowledge, skills, labour and leadership, however, are frequently invisible and
undervalued. At present, the European agricultural sector is characterized by high levels of
inequality. The multiple barriers to gender equality in European agriculture are socio- cultural,
economic and political, and perpetuate women's inequality within the mutually constituting
'productive' sphere of farming outputs and in the 'reproductive' sphere of unpaid and undervalued
labour that occurs on the farm, in the family and community. Some examples include i) unequal
access to land and productive resources, that shape and limit women's participation in agriculture,
constructing gender roles and identities and resulting, among other things, in ii) women
under-representation in agricultural organizations and holding very few decision-making positions;
iii) current agricultural education and training that reinforce stereotypes about farming as a male
activity and which do not encourage young women to pursue agricultural careers; iv) social closure,
characterised by interactional dynamics of discrimination, exclusion and/or harassment, that lead
to women being discouraged from taking up tasks or acquiring relevant farming skills. The
structural gender inequalities in agriculture are acutely felt by social groups that experience
multiple and intersecting forms of oppression, including migrant farmworkers and LGBTIQ+ farmers.
These intersecting forms of discrimination have not yet been extensively documented, however, they
constitute significant barriers to transformative
change in rural areas in Europe.
