Gender relations and the family farm in Western Europe

This study of the changing nature of farmwork for farmers' wives focuses on two central questions. The first concerns the effects on the wife's labour of scale- enlargement and specialization. Both of these processes can be considered as the accumulation of technological, economic and political changes in the agricultural sector over the last decades. The second concerns the degree and manner in which gender and gender relations play a role in decision making over the introduction and implementation of these processes at farm level. In other words, what role does gender play in decisions on the degree and tempo with which scale enlargement and specialization are carried through at farm level and over the concomitant reorganization of labour on the farm. Gender refers here to the socially constructed differences between men and women. Gender relations are (at least they have been until now) dominant relations. Gender includes the division of labour between the sexes, gender symbols, gender ideology and gender specific identities. Gender is at work at all levels, at the personal and institutional level, at the psychological and behavioural level, at the economic, social, cultural and political level.As a consequence of opportunities for producers to interpret these external developments in their own way, considerable differences in Dutch agriculture can still be seen, making it possible, to a degree, through cross-sectional analysis, to study their effects. In this way the farm labour of the wife is compared with varying degrees of scale enlargement and specialization of the farm, giving us thereby certain insights into recent historical changes in their labour. The comparison between large-scale specialized, and small-scale mixed dairy farms (i.e. that also make their own cheese), is particularly important here because both types of farm form, as it were, opposite poles of an agricultural modernization process in progress since the fifties.To investigate the influence of gender, a comparison was made between labour organization on farms with partners of the same and of different gender. At the same time gender on the family farm itself was also examined.The research, which is confined to dairy farming in the central part of the Netherlands, looks at different aspects of female farm labour, defined as all those activities that women engage in that underpin the farming household and ensure the family farm's continued existence and progress. To determine which activities are, and which are not included as work or labour, account was taken of the ideas of the group of researched farm women themselves. Although their descriptions and criteria were quite diverse, some appeared to have more general validity than others. These were descriptions about work associated with activities that could not be left undone and were thus deemed to be 'necessary', or which were considered 'obligatory', or 'brought in money' or 'bounded by time'. Usually a combination of criteria were used. Women's labour involved different sorts of work which could be carried out on the farm as well as off it. This was stated by the women themselves. In broad terms the following kinds of labour can be delimited: household labour, bringing up children, farming activities, non- agricultural income-generating activities on the farm, paid or income-generating activities off the farm and voluntary work that is seen as socially relevant for the farming household. For the farmers' wives in the study, the emphasis lay on the first three kinds of labour.Besides labour time, and the division of time given to different sorts of work and the women's judgement about this, the study particularly looked at aspects of the quality of women's labour. The stress here is on the labour content of the work done by women on farm related tasks. In addition to collecting data on what their task packet or allotment was, the study also examined the degree of task control that women had and the degree to which they worked together with their husbands. Task control refers to the extent to which one can decide on the issue, implementation, checking, evaluation and apposition of the task or task packet. The higher the degree of control, the higher the demand is for expertise and the greater the opportunity to gain new knowledge and experience. That also goes for the damage risk - the consequences of making a big mistake - and for insights into and overviews of the production process. The degree of task control is closely associated with the organization of production (i.e. the degree to which scale enlargement and specialization are carried through) and the way in which labour is organized internally. This means that task control cannot be studied in isolation from the division of labour and the nature of cooperation with the others involved. On a family farm this will be mostly the husband. That means that the degree of control exercised by women has to be seen in relation to that of their husbands and that the relation between the sexes plays an important role in the degree of control that women acquire or are allowed. This also holds for the relative share of both in decision making over the farm set-up and development. The research examines how the different areas of farm decision making are divided between farmers and their wives, and whether a relation exists between the labour content of wives' tasks and their influence on decisions over the inset and use of production factors, the farm labour process and the sharing and spending of income. Labour content is also examined in relation to the work experience of farmers' wives.The research on the mechanisms which gender differences create, sustain and transform in the area of labour, touches upon all farm tasks. That is to say that existing practices, explanations and legitimateness of the division of labour in the household as well as on the farm were researched. Within that framework, questions were asked concerning the views of the women on their most important roles - farmer's wife, mother, housewife. These views were compared with those of the farmers on their own corresponding roles.In summary, the empirical research led to the following findings:1 Almost all the wives involved in the research had been, since childhood, conversant with working on a farm, with a specific division of labour according to sex, with specific ideas of what is women's and what man's work, and of what it is to be a farmer or farmer's wife. On the farms where they grew up the division between men and women' tasks was in part parallel to the division between enterprise and family, since work within the family was exclusively women's work and tasks on the farm were primarily those of men. Although no men were kept busy in the house, wives did work on the farm, though men made a distinction between what was men's and what was women's work and only a few tasks were carried out by both sexes. Clear gender differences also existed regarding future perspectives. Over succession to the farm only sons were mentioned, daughters were excluded from this. They could marry a farmer and thus become a farmers wife or marry outside agriculture. It goes without saying that the separation in tasks and perspectives goes hand in hand with the difference in upbringing and training enjoyed by farmers' sons and daughters. Farmers' daughters, in contrast to their brothers follow no agricultural education. For many of them, both young and old, the emphasis is on household education. For the older generation of women it was taken for granted that after school they would work on the parental farm if it was necessary. For the younger generation that was less so and it was also less necessary. But that they would stay close by was taken for granted. Younger women far more often than their older colleagues followed a training that had nothing to do with agriculture. However, since they were also confronted outside of agriculture with a division of labour on the grounds of gender, such a training was typically for women's occupations such as nursing, family care, dressmaking or cutting, secretarial work, selling and so forth. Often, solely with a view to marrying a farmer, many followed agriculturally based courses, mostly connected with typical women's work on the farm, such as cheese-making and bookkeeping.2 Differences in scale enlargement and specialization appear to have little influence on the total amount of labour time. Farmer's wives all have a work week of a good seventy hours (from 71.5-72.5 hours). Scale enlargement therefore does not lead to a decrease in total work time for women, though differences do seem to occur in how the available time is divided between the various kinds of work she does. The time that is spent on farm work is diminishing. Taken on average, wives of specialized dairy farmers are occupied about ten hours less on farm work than those that make cheese. in contrast, with an increase in scale and specialization more time is spent on activities within the family field. Relatively speaking, there appears to be more time spent on the children and productive household work, such as in the kitchen garden and in processing products, on keeping house, and on making children's clothes etc. The experience of women on dairy farms in terms of time spent appears to coincide with the way in which time is spent in practice. In the ideal situation as they see it, they would rather spend less time on household chores and relatively more time on activities outside the farm and/or though to a lesser degree, on farm activities. Routine household work such as dusting, polishing and tidying are mentioned as the first to be shed, and are activities that the majority of farmers' wives considered the 'least rewarding'. Small-scale cheese makers, in the ideal situation - at least as concerns the cheese season - would like to put less time into farm work and more into outside activities. Also for large- scale cheese makers, the time ideally spent in the cheese season contains less farm work and time to give more attention to their children. One might thus conclude that the average farm wife of the specialized dairy farmer - hence of the large-scale type - sees herself as too much a housewife. The average cheese-maker - particularly on the large scale enterprise - sees herself, at least in the cheese period, relatively as too much farmer's wife and too little as mother.3 The quality of farm labour - measured in terms of labour content - appears to decrease as scale and specialization rises. In essence, with specialization, the average wife loses her own labour domain on the farm. Instead she works together in the labour domain of her husband. The actual consequences of this appear to be that her own fixed farm tasks are converted into helping out labour. Instead of a task which she can largely control herself, which requires specific skills and which involves high damage risk, she gets work to do that is dominated by tasks done at the request of and on the instructions of someone else. Such work consists of a number of unrelated tasks that could be done by anyone and where mistakes have little damage risk for the farm. In short, with scale enlargement and specialization the average farmer's wife goes from a farming task load needing a relatively high qualification level to one with more restricted task control and needing far fewer qualifications. For good task performance, availability, precision and neatness are deemed to be the most important. The difficulty lies in being able to combine an these tasks with her other kinds of work, placing high demands on her organizing skills. At the same time it appears that with raising the degree of scale and specialization, the help which the farmer's wife receives in the family field diminishes, which means that work in this sphere also includes more tasks of a routine nature - routine household work.Helping out, and fixed tasks with a low degree of control appear to give less satisfaction. While cheese-makers get satisfaction from the labour process itself (having their own domain, from their skills and responsibility for a good quality product) and from the results (a fine product, income, a good name), wives who just help out, seek this, as it were, in the more general notions of being involved in the farm, being a farmer's wife or co-entrepreneur or being active with and in nature. Scale enlargement and specialization thus lead not only to loss of task control and specific professional skills but also to a reduced chance of finding personal satisfaction in farm work and deriving a feeling of self worth from it. But the enjoyment cheese makers derive from their work can also decline, which is the case if the total work load is too high. This happens to cheese makers on large-scale farms. The daily pressure of work can become so great (financial pressures to keep on making cheese, less flexibility in the work scheme and/or through having to combine different sorts of work), that the wish to cut back on their own production work creeps in.Scale enlargement and specialization of course do not always lead to a packet of farm tasks that are predominantly of a helping out kind. It seems possible for women to again create their own labour domain on the specialized farm. Specific qualifications appear to be one of the basic conditions for this.4 A farmer's wife is not only involved in the implementation, control, opposition to and/or design of specific farm tasks or packets, but also in the design of the production process as a whole. It is actually on the family farm that the direct producers, among them the farmer's wife, largely decide which techniques and how they will be used, on the organization of labour, and on how the income obtained will be divided and spent. But although the wife undoubtedly has an influence on the design of the production process and on changes in it, her influence appears selective and narrower than that of her husband. The various areas of decision making appear to be shared between farmer and wife in a specific way, with decisions over the organization of production and farm practice considered to be the husband's field. The average wife gets involved in such decisions only when the demands of farm and family threaten to come into conflict with each other, particularly on decisions that involve great financial returns or risk. Whenever women get involved with decisions in this area, without there being any question of conflicting interests, then it always seems to involve farm tasks, or to be more precise, farm tasks that involve a high degree of task control. These appear to lead to greater influence on decisions over the associated labour process, farm practice and set up. The processes of scale enlargement and specialization thus entail a reduction in the involvement of the farmer's wife in a number of decision over the direct production process and its organization. That, however, does not hold for all such decisions. Those involving heavy financial risk are generally speaking, with increased scale and specialization, more often areas for joint decision making. At the same time there seems to be a contrary tendency: on some of these large scale specialized farms there is an increasing separation of decision making ares between the sexes, where wives retreat as it were into the family domain, while their husbands control the farming domain.5 On all family farms there is a clear division of labour according to gender, in which inequality forms the basic pattern. Although such inequality is sharpened by scale enlargement and specialization, its roots are not there, but in gender. This becomes clear from a comparison of the labour organization and decision making on the kind of farms managed by male partners. Here one finds no talk of structural patterns of unequal labour relations.The research shows that existing (skewed) labour divisions on gender and gender stereotyping ideas (of men and women of themselves, and their own and each others work) are the essential mechanisms in which inequality and domination are rooted. In decisions over the division and re-division of tasks between the farmer and his wife, as well as in decisions over farm practice and development, the ideas of those involved play a crucial role; ideas about women's and mens' work, about fulfilling gender specific labour roles (farmer's wife/farmer, mother/father), about masculinity and femininity and the relation between women and men, farmers and farmers' wives. Gender specific identities strengthen the exchange of ideas and behaviour of men and women. In the world outside the farm gender differences are again also to be found. A division of labour according to gender and living stereotypes of farmers, farmers' wives, their activities and the relations between them, likewise exists in all sorts of institutes closely linked to the farm and farming household, Men try, through all kinds of strategies, to maintain the status quo. They present obstructions if women want to expand their room to manoeuvre, use discriminatory behaviour against women (by stigmatizing, or by systematically rejecting or criticizing their behaviour or ideas); they introduce techniques that are tailored to the size of men; they make women's work invisible; they are selective in the composition of membership or administration of organizations, study clubs, commissions; they set demands and qualifications on task content that are not easily achieved by women (such as for example man/woman social contracts). In their turn women also appear to use strategies to exclude men from their domain (such as the family domain) or place themselves outside the man's domain. This behaviour is also based on and stems from existing labour divisions, gender stereotyping of work, ideas about men and women, farmers' wives and farmers and the relations between them.The above summarized findings in my opinion demonstrate that:A) the processes of scale enlargement and specialization entail for farmers' wives a loss of control over their own labour, and the labour process as a whole. On farm work tasks are to a greater degree than before controlled by the farmer, and those tasks that the wife performs demand fewer professional skills and involve less damage risk. This has consequences for the satisfaction derived from work, to wit, it diminish . That means that the quality of her labour declines as scale enlargement and specialization increase.B) These particular consequences of scale enlargement and specialization processes for women's labour are brought about through the mediation of the category gender. Gender is part of all social relations and in this way is an existing part of the economic, technological and political processes that have led to scale enlargement and specialization and of the farm as labour organization, as it is also a part of the economic, social, cultural and political environment in which the family farm is embedded.

Participation in land rental and labor markets and agricultural economic performance of banana farmers in China

In the past two decades, the sustained and rapid rise of housing prices has become a typical phenomenon in the process of China’s economic development. At the same time, the labor force participation rate has been declining, which is not conducive to promoting China’s sustained and stable economic growth through the demographic dividend. Classical economic theories show that when rising housing prices bring wealth appreciation, individuals may increase leisure consumption and reduce labor supply. Therefore, there may be a close relationship between the decline of China’s labor participation rate and the unilateral rise of housing prices.Therefore, based on the theoretical model of labor participation in decision-making, combined with the data of China Household Finance Survey（CHFS）in 2013 and 2015, this paper studies the impact of housing prices on urban residents’ labor participation by using Probit model, BiProbit model and Conditional Mixed Process（CMP）estimation, and discusses the heterogeneity and mechanism of housing price impact. Furthermore, it introduces the “provincial per capita land acquisition area” as the instrumental variable of urban housing prices to alleviate the endogeneity. The results show that a 1% increase in housing prices will lead to an average decrease of 0.066 percentage points in the labor participation probability of homeowners. Specifically, it reduces the labor participation probability of both men and women within the family, increases the probability that only one person participates in the labor and both sides do not participate in the labor, and has a greater negative impact on the labor participation of women. The heterogeneity analysis shows that housing prices have a great negative impact on the labor participation of residents with low education level; housing prices have a positive impact on young people’s labor participation, and a negative impact on the labor participation of adults and the elderly, and the negative impact increases with age. The mechanism analysis shows that rising housing prices affect residents’ labor participation through the wealth effect, cost effect, and bequest motivation.This paper has three main contributions: Firstly, different from the previous literature that examines the labor participation behavior of family members in isolation, this paper considers the correlation of family members’ labor participation behavior and uses the BiProbit model to jointly examine the impact of housing prices on the labor participation of couples. Secondly, unlike the previous literature, which mainly limits the research object to homeowners, married women, or elderly people, this paper takes married people in the labor market as the research object, and explains the declining trend of the labor participation rate in China from the perspective of rising housing prices. Thirdly, this paper relatively effectively verifies the wealth effect, cost effect, and bequest motivation of housing prices affecting the labor participation of family members. Among them, it also discusses the additional wealth effect of “parents’ property may belong to themselves in the future”. In general, the research of this paper has important implications for the government to regulate housing prices and promote social stability and healthy economic development. Therefore, in order to achieve social stability and sustainable economic development, the government should adopt policies to stabilize housing prices, improve the overall educational level of residents and provide support for young people to buy houses.

In the Republic of Azerbaijan, the opening up of borders and the transition to a free market economy have paved the way not only for economic transformations but also for cultural intrusion from the West and the South. This has coincided with the intensification of globalizing processes across the world over the past two decades. This article examines the impact of the ensuing changes on gender norms and the position of women in public and domestic spheres in Azerbaijan. Pointing to the paradoxical gender ideology under the Soviet system and the way that it has evolved in recent years, the article examines the impact of conflicting ideologies and exogenous influences, such as the advent of the commercialization of sex, on women's economic position and public presence. It finds that, although some of the old ambiguities in gender norms and relations are being eroded, new gender asymmetries are arising along with contradictions and new tensions in gender and family relations. The diversification of perceptions of femininity and gender norms is shown to have occurred in tandem with the intensification of regional disparities, in particular the metropolitan-periphery divide, which has resulted from globalizing processes.

Previous research show that the quality of marriage is determined by harmonious gender relations and high family resilience. This study aims to analyze the influence of gender relations and family resilience on the quality of marriage in the families of farmers and fishermen. This study used a cross-sectional study design and was conducted in Pantai Sederhana Village, Bekasi Regency for participants of fishermen and Losari Lor Village, Brebes Regency for participants of peasant farmers of ‘brondol’ onions. The research participants was chosen by purposive sampling with a total sample of 130 families. The results of the independent t-test showed that fishermen's families had better gender relations compared to the families of peasant farmers. Overall, family resilience of fishermen and peasant farmers had a very significant difference. The average index of family resilience of peasant farmer families (88,9) was higher than fishermen families (83,7). The average quality of marriages of fisherman families (84,7) was better than peasant farmers families (58,6). Regression results indicate that the factors that influence the quality of marriage are gender relations, per capita income, and family resilience. Hence, the fishermen families and peasant families of red onion are expected to be able to improve gender relations whether in public, domestic and social activities as well as improve family resilience so the quality of the marriage will increase.

ABSTRACTThis article examines the education provided by the Young Farmers' Club organisation for its female members across the 1950s. Numerous historians have highlighted the central role of domesticity in the philosophy behind girls' education and training in 1950s Britain. Few, however, have explored this from the rural perspective. Drawing upon a range of organisational material, alongside both the farming and popular press, this study argues that female members of the organisation were trained to negotiate a dual role both in the home and on the farm and were regularly taught agricultural skills alongside domestic crafts. This training was often framed through a language of opportunity and equality and was shaped by the expectation that, as a farmer's wife, they would undertake agricultural duties. As a result, rural notions of femininity embraced technical skill and physical work in a way that urban domesticity did not and conceptualisations of the rural domestic sphere were restructured to include numerous spaces on the family farm.

One way that farm households may adjust to downward pressures on farm incomes is by diversifying their sources of earned income. However, a variety of different factors could lead to a farm household having a member with off farm work. A logit model was estimated to determine whether farm income levels are a determinant of the likelihood of a household member having off farm employment. The model emphasized the role of the family composition and farm size in influencing whether household mem¬ bers worked off-farm. Although there was evidence that the incomes from farming of households with off farm work were significantly below those without off farm work, income variables were not significant in the estimated logit model. Two financial variables appear to be important, higher farm net worth decreased, and higher current liabilities per hectare increased, the likelihood of off-farm work.

Analysis of level and distribution of economic well-being in North American agriculture is, without doubt, underdeveloped and fraught with ambiguity. Bawden refers to this situation as the neglected human factor (p. 879). It stems from censuses of agriculture that are typically enterprise-oriented, problems of monitoring selfemployment incomes, incomplete income measurement, and inadequate information on increasing importance of off-farm work in family income equation. In Canada, paucity of quantitative studies on subject is highly visible. Examples of few and far between include Fitzpatrick's regional analysis of family income based on a 1958 survey; a Federal Task Force on Agriculture evaluation of low income problem using limited data on sales and capital value; Gellner and Davey's study of incomes using aggregate tax data; McClutchy and Campbell's estimates of farm family real income, using questionable 1972 Agriculture Enumerative Survey; and Kulshreshtha's 1967 measurement of farm:nonfarm incomes in historical perspective. Most of these studies are comparable in neither methodology nor empirical coverage. Absence of information on returns to off-farm work is particularly conspicuous. With exception of Kulshreshtha's work, little attempt has been made to evaluate alternative farm:nonfarm income measures, or extent to which their viability depends on context in which they are being used. These shortcomings prompted a complete linkage of Canada's 1971 Censuses of Agriculture and Population, resulting in a unique data base with a wealth of income data. Some 365,000 enterprise questionnaires (with 199 questions) have been computer matched with independently enumerated Census of Population questionnaires for respective households. One-third of latter have been enumerated on a detailed sample basis. They contain approximately sixteen detailed income and employment-related questions and cover all members of census household. The linkage was designed and performed under direction of author. For details see Shaw (1971, 1979a) and Freeman. Income questions on 1971 Census of Population pertain to 1970. Total family cash income is sum of all income earned by family members from wages and salaries, net selfemployment, nonfarm self-employment, transfer payments, interest, rent, and other. This linkage commences a new decennial series with advantage that income coverage for and nonfarm families will stem from same census methodology and will pertain to same time period. We draw on this improved source (a) to place disparities in farm:urban incomes in Canada in clearer perspective, and (b) to single out incredible impact that off-farm work is having on reducing disparities.

In the flow of the material, cultural and moral influences shaping contemporary Chinese society, individual desires for emotional communication are reconstituting the meaning of the subject, self and responsibility. This article draws on fieldwork conducted in Beijing between 2000 and 2004 to discuss the gendered dimensions of this process through an analysis of the implications of the “communicative intimacy” sought by mothers and daughters in their mutual relationship. What could be termed a “feminization of intimacy” is the effect of two distinct but linked processes: on the one hand, a market-supported naturalization of women's roles, and on the other, the changing subjective articulation of women's needs, desires and expectations of family and personal relationships. I argue that across these two processes, the celebration of a communicative intimacy does not signify the emergence of more equal family or gender relationships, as recent theories about the individualization and cultural democratization of daily life in Western societies have argued. As families and kin groups, communities and neighbourhoods are physically, spatially and socially broken up, and as gender differences in employment and income increase, media and “expert” encouragement to mothers to become the all-round confidantes, educators and moral guides of their children affirms women's responsibilities in the domestic sphere. Expectations of mother–daughter communication reshape the meaning – and experience – of the individual subject in the changing character of the urban family at the same time as they reinforce ideas about women's gendered attributes and the responsibilities associated with them.

Grandparents, and in particular grandmothers, are an important source of informal child care for their grandchildren in most developed countries. The literature shows how these informal transfers of care can help promote female labor participation. However, less is known about how working-age grandmothers are combining care with their own labor participation. In this paper, I use data from the Survey of Health, Aging and Retirement in Europe and analyze to what extent child care is provided by grandmothers in ten European countries and how grandmothers are combining this task with paid work. I also revisit the question of whether the child care provided by grandmothers is encouraging the labor participation of their offspring. The empirical approach takes into account the simultaneity of labor market decisions and caregiving activities while controlling for grandmother’s unobserved heterogeneity on their willingness to provide care to their grandchildren. I find a negative and significant effect of participating in the labor market on the probability of taking care of the grandchildren on a regular basis. I also find evidence that, for some countries, the child care provided by working-age grandmothers has a positive effect on the labor participation of their daughters.

In the European Community (EC), women's labour market participation lags behind the rate of men's participation. In Sweden and Finland, labour participation of women was almost as large as that of men in 1995; the ratio between women's and men's labour participation was almost one. In the Netherlands, in contrast, this ratio was approximately 0.7. Countries like Denmark, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, Austria, and Portugal lie somewhere in the middle (Jaarboek Emancipane, 1997). Despite the general employment situation of women, the Netherlands is a front runner with regard to part-time work. Almost 70% of working women in The Netherlands work less than 12 h a week! In Sweden and the United Kingdom, this figure is respectively 40 and 45%. Of all Dutch working men, almost one-fifth work part-time. Denmark and Sweden come in second and third place, with more than 10% of the men working part-time (Jaarboek Emancipane, 1997). In the coming years, women's labour participation is expected to rise, especially in The Netherlands. By 2010, the labour participation of Dutch women will be up from 49% to 61% (Commissie THOA, 1995). An increase in professional child-care facilities and other institutional arrangements, along with a growing acceptance of women and men combining paid work with child-care and housekeeping, will stimulate this development. In this respect, the National Commission for Day Scheduling, which was inaugurated in 1997 by the Dutch Minister of Labour, was an important player. The commission was focused on reducing the constraints on combining paid labour with housekeeping and child care (Commissie Dagindeling, 1997). How will these developments affect the labour market with respect to transportation? So far, studies shows that the commuting distance of women is smaller than that of men (Madden, 1981; Knippenberg et al., 1990; Singell and Lillydahl, 1986; Pickup, 1981; Pratt and Hanson, 1991). One of the reasons for this difference between the sexes is the inequal distribution of housekeeping and child care over the spouses. A short commuting distance makes it easy to combine these activities. As a consequence of reducing the constraints on combining different activities, the daily journey to work of women can increase. This will be more likely if part-time jobs are exchanged for full-time jobs. Working women are less dependent on the automobile and more on public transport and walking (Pazy et al., 1996). In spite of this general observation, two-earner families are characterized by the highest car ownership and car use (Vijgen, 1993). The car offers them the opportunity to combine in a relatively short time paid labour with housekeeping and child care. Thus, an increase in women's labour market paricipation may be expected to stimulate use of the private car (Jansen, 1993; Van Schendelen and Quist, 1990). According to Pazy et al. (1996), the gap between the sexes with respect to travel patterns is already narrowing! It is no exaggeration to say that the increase in women's labour market participation will lead to an increase in the number of miles traveled by private car. This development can be a threat to the policies which aim at creating a sustainable environment. With regard to transport, these policies ncourage the use of public transport, bicycling, and walking at the expense of the automobile. In what way can the expected developments in travel patterns of two-earner households be modified to meet the demands of a sustainable environment?

Domesticated gender (in) equality: Women’s education & gender relations among rural communities in Pakistan

This chapter addresses agriculture and family farming, using this entry point to scrutinise gender relations and thereby disrupt the stereotypical view of rural Australia. The economic prosperity of rural communities is often inextricably linked to farming, and this gives farmers prominence in public affairs and community activities. Arguably there is a contrasting lack of space and services accorded to women and, at least historically, a more limited number of female leaders and opinion shapers. The chapter explains the Australian Women in Agriculture Movement during the 1990s. It focuses on changing gender relations in agricultural production over time; in doing so, it presents a far less harmonious, even conflicted, understanding of 'the rural' than that represented in folkloric imagery. It provides a brief historical summary that clarifies why family farming is the dominant form of agricultural production in Australia and why this is not only based on but also dependent on inequitable gender relations.

Purpose Family farms, in which business and family life are intricately interwoven, offer an interesting context for better understanding the interdependence between the family and business system. Many family farms struggle to survive, and the succession process is a key period in which the low returns on investment become evident but also the emotional attachment of the family to the farm and the willingness to transfer the business to the next generation. We take the perspective of non-succeeding siblings since they are crucial for a successful succession but their role and position in this process is far from clear. This study will help to increase our knowledge of how fairness is perceived by non-successors and of the impact of perceived (in)justice on the family business system. Design/methodology/approach To analyze the effect on sibling relationships of an unequal outcome of the succession process, we choose the family farm context. We used interview data from multiple family members from several family farms in the Netherlands in different stages of succession. We utilized a framework based on justice theory to analyze perceptions of fairness among non-succeeding siblings. The central research question for this study is as follows: How do non-succeeding siblings perceive justice with regard to family firm succession? Findings The acceptance of the outcomes of the succession process by non-succeeding siblings is influenced by their perception of the fairness of the process itself and decisions made by the incumbent and successor with regard to these outcomes. It seems that stakeholders who occupy multiple roles with conflicting justice perspectives handle these contradictions with the help of an overarching goal—in this study, preserving the continuity of the family farm—and by prioritizing and adjusting the justice perspectives accordingly. The findings further show that both distributive justice and procedural justice are important and interact with each other. Originality/value Our study contributes to the literature by applying the theoretical framework of distributive and procedural justice to the context of family farm succession. This helps us to understand the position of non-succeeding siblings and their role and position in the succession process, which is important because sibling relationships have a significant impact on family harmony, with potential consequences for the business as well.

Based on nationally representative survey data, this paper investigates the mechanism of employment flexibility of rural labor in China. By analyzing the dynamic adjustment process (the entry and exit of different industries and sectors), we find that the new entering off-farm workers and off-farm workers exiting the non-agricultural industry/sector play a main role in the employment flexibility, rather than the off-farm workers smoothly transfer among different non-agricultural industries/sectors in the labor market. To explain the difficulty of rural laborers employment transformation, we establish the empirical model for multiple regression analysis and the estimation shows that the relative lack of human capital is still the main factor. Acknowledgement :