Sometimes, you just have to follow the money. Such as this past weekend, when my inbox pinged with emails celebrating International Women’s Day. Social media was awash with images of women in agriculture, astride headers, mustering or standing in crops and generally exuding authority.
Certainly, it looks like we’ve made it in key rural industries. If I followed the money, surely that would show women well on the way to parity.
Well, no. Family farms continue to be the most common form of farm ownership but what about those multigenerational farms you always hear about? They are still mostly passed on to sons not daughters.
The last major survey on inheritance in Australia by Elaine Barclay in 2007 showed daughters were tapped as successors in only 10% of cases. “Ah, but things have changed!” I hear you cry. We have mentorship programs and rural women’s awards and women are showcased regularly in agriculture. A woman – Gina Rinehart – is one of Australia’s biggest landowners.
Still no. The bottom line is women often don’t hold the power. They keep the books (96% of farm bookkeepers are women) but they don’t hold the purse strings.
Social psychologist Dr Leonnie Blumson of the University of South Australia found that while we think of Australian women in agriculture as having more opportunities, they often don’t.
“In some countries, women are not allowed to own land,” Blumson says. “Women can own land in Australia, they just don’t.”
The daughter of a farming family herself, Blumson examined gender equality via inheritance by interviewing farming daughters about their family interactions and succession results in two South Australian regions.
She found that while gender equality was talked about with farming children until early adulthood, often by their mothers, it was not followed when the farm was passed to the next generation. “Succession eclipses equality” was one of her work’s nine themes.
Yet if the farm was sold, assets were often split more equally. Or as Blumson puts it, “no son, no succession plan”.
In other words, farm families have progressed to talk about equality but there is still marked inequality with succession options almost always provided to sons over daughters. These themes have only slightly progressed since Barclay’s findings nearly 20 years ago.
Although a farm is a workplace, family cultures are very closed shops. In her face-to-face interviews with daughters from 11 families in the Riverland and Yorke Peninsula, women showed family solidarity by justifying unequal succession outcomes with reasons such as farmer brothers having a “hard life” or the need to pass on the farm within the family.
Farm succession had been arranged in a little over half of those families and only one out of nine sons had been excluded from succession.
When Blumson surveyed a wider range of 80 women, providing anonymity for a second survey, many reported feeling a great sense of injustice or sadness due to family rejection over succession results. Yet women without brothers (18 of the 80 women) did not describe the same narratives about the need to pass the farm on, perhaps until a daughter met a male partner interested in farming.
It is true that not all siblings want to farm. But when the inheritance split is not fair, the succeeding sibling not only gets land but access to business tax concessions on expenses and wealth building assets earlier in adulthood as well as emotional support from parents. Money begets money. Money also begets power and authority.
Maybe you think this is a small sample. But a number of mostly female academics have studied succession over the years. The University of New England’s Alison Sheridan and Lucie Newsome have long studied gender and farm succession. Their latest work in 2023 found a “lag” between “embracing women’s roles in the public sphere and equal access to opportunities and the private practice of farm succession”.
Now Sheridan, Newsome and Andrew Lawson, among others, are trying to rerun a farm transfer survey to update knowledge since Barclay’s 2007 work and capture more contemporary data.
In the meantime, women who want to stay involved in farming are increasingly moving into the agricultural services sector. You may think farm daughters are overcoming their family cultures in some cases to rise up the ranks of corporate firms with a keener eye for gender equity.
Not so much.
Recent gender gap reporting on 5,000 large businesses with more than 100 employees shows women in “big ag” (including forestry and fishing) are paid on average 17% less than their male counterparts – which is admittedly a smaller gap than can be found in many industries. Only 13% of their chairs are women and only 21% of board members are women. Just 21% of those companies have a formal strategy to support gender equality in their governing bodies and even fewer (9%) have a target to increase women’s representation at those decision-making tables.
For all that, women contribute so much to rural industry. It is just unrecognised or unpaid. The latest Snapshot of Australian Agricultural Workforce (2021) shows men dominate census workforce figures but women make a significant, often unrecognised and unpaid contribution to farm businesses, particularly as the climate becomes more volatile and labour gets more expensive. Women always have done, yet until 1994, they could not even list their occupation as a farmer.
Women contribute a third of all farm income and a whopping 84% of off-farm income, which is a handy way of smoothing out the economic bumps of farming. More than two-thirds (71%) of women in farming families were doing more than five hours of unpaid domestic work in the week prior to the census and a third (30%) were also doing unpaid voluntary community work.
So by all means, highlight the pretty pictures of women in agriculture and rural communities. But while you’re at it, how about giving them a pay rise, a seat on the board and a cut in the business?
