Adding a gender lens in quantitative development research on food and non-food biomass production : a guide for sex-disaggregated data collection

A major objective of socio-economic research for agricultural development is to understand, guide and measure technology adoption, support agricultural and rural development policies, and analyse impacts of technological innovations, development projects and policy interventions. Research has clearly shown that gender matters in agricultural development, since women as well as gender issues play a major role in achieving success and impact, especially in family-based production systems. However, there are large data and thus considerable knowledge gaps in this regard. This guide equips you with plenty of advice to collect sex-disaggregated data and add a gender lens to your socio-economic research in the agricultural sector. It makes you familiar with the need for and advantages of sex-disaggregated data and research, it introduces gender concepts and important definitions and provides practical advice for the planning process of your research and for conducting field work. It identifies six key topics where gender plays a major role in the food and non-food biomass production such as the labour division in farming systems, adoption of technologies and impacts, access to and control over resources and assets, access to information and advisory services, and gendered livelihoods. The guide provides you with a wide choice of quantitative survey questions that can be integrated into your questionnaire based on your research needs. There are 40 minimum questions and many advanced questions to choose from so that you can incorporate a perspective on women's and men's farming activities and agricultural livelihoods into your research. The minimum questions in each section help you to cover the most important gender-related aspects of the specific agricultural topic, while the advanced questions will help you to explore a research area or aspect through the gender lens in more detail. Of course, the questions need to be adapted to the local contexts and circumstances. Integrating some of these questions in your research will help you to upgrade your research outputs by producing information that draws attention and that meets current standards of international research and development agendas. To meet such expectations, it remains important that not only relevant questions are included in your questionnaire and considerations of sex and gender are applied while conducting your survey, but also that the sex-disaggregated perspective needs to guide your analysis. Having a detailed sex-disaggregated analysis is attractive for high-ranking scientific journals, and supports your project outcomes with regard to adoption and sustainability of project activities and/or technologies.