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Gender and Sexualities

Gender-Inclusive Agriculture? A scoping review of 35 years of academic research into women and gender-minority farmers’ participation in sustainable agriculture in the Global North. Alex Wenger*, N. Alex Wenger, Dr. Kathleen Sexsmith, Dr. Alfredo Reyes,

This scoping literature review investigates the participation of women and gender-minority farmers in sustainable agriculture in the Global North since 1990. A PRISMA search combined with a snowball methodology yielded 95 articles that qualified for our analytical review. We develop an epistemological typology to characterize each document in terms of a positivist, critical, or interpretivist approach and to assess literature contributions and gaps. We find that the field is dominated by qualitative research from an interpretivist tradition, which often assumes an ecofeminist or essentialist quality to sustainable agriculture without fully investigating power dynamics that shape women’s experiences. This subset of the literature lacks an intersectional and critical feminist perspective; information on the identity characteristics of study participants is often absent, generating empirical and theoretical gaps related to the intersectionality of class, race, and ethnicity of women and gender-minority farmers. White farming communities were the most frequently sampled and serve as a kind of absent referent in the significant share of the literature that does not identify the race or ethnicity of study participants at all. More recent literature from a critical epistemological tradition shows that minoritized groups, such as Black, immigrant, and queer farmers, engage in sustainable farming practices that contest the white heteronormative family farm model but may replicate the tendency in the interpretivist literature to assume intrinsically positive work experiences in sustainable farming. Quantitative research from a positivist tradition is also prevalent within this literature, yet is highly concentrated in the U.S., leaving a significant gap with respect to large-scale censuses or surveys from other Global North contexts. Researchers are thus limited in their ability to make comparisons and identify trends across Global North contexts.