A number of generalisations, often quite sweeping, have been made and conclusions drawn under rather simplistic assumptions (for example, that women constitute a homogeneous group) based on sketchy data and on analysis that lacks penetration. For example, it is concluded that changes in technology that accompany ‘modernisation’ have, for the most part, led to a female concentration in domestic and non-market roles and in labour-intensive activities. While this is no doubt true, little light is shed on why this has occurred and what policy measures need to be adopted to improve women’s position in this respect. Similarly, it is repeatedly established by the literature that men take over responsibility for women’s tasks as soon as they are mechanised or when they are transformed from a subsistence into market production. Not much diagnosis is offered on the causes of such a trend, so the necessary policy insights are not provided. The existing studies on rural women also conclude that technological change leads to harder work for longer hours with less appropriation of the economic returns to their own labour. Such broad generalisations would not apply to all technologies and every segment of women’s work.

Two books have recently appeared that attempt to analyse the role of women, technology and development (Dauber and Cain, 1981: D’Ononfrio-Flores and Pfafflin, 1982). Both these volumes try to cover too much ground by extending their analysis to all spheres of developing countries’ economies, and one of the volumes includes empirical coverage of industrialised countries and touches on the international dimension of the problem. This volume, in contrast, focuses specifically on women in rural areas and, as a result, is able to treat the issues in much greater depth. The generalisations arrived at here are more meaningful for policy-making and for the formulation of programmes and projects of concrete operational activities.

The first basic question is whether traditional macro-economic theories of technological change, which are primarily concerned with analysing the impact of technological change on the class distribution of income, can be extended to gender-based distributional questions. If these are not adequate, what modifications are necessary in order to make these more applicable to studying the impact of technological change on rural women?¹

Difficulties in predicting the impact of technological change on rural women arise from a number of intricacies of the labour process. Interrelationships between tasks (multiple tasks simultaneously undertaken by women at a single location),² sex-sequential nature of the work³ and a team of participants in a single labour process⁴ make it difficult to trace the direct and indirect consequences of technological intervention in any segment of the rural production system. Another problem (especially in agriculture) arises from the institutionalisation of the female labour input (i.e. whether it is a mode of production based on female family labour or on female wage labour). Such problems are made more difficult when a given task performed by rural women is designated as ‘unproductive’ because it is unpaid and non-monetised (producing ‘use value’ for subsistence consumption) but becomes ‘productive’ as soon as it is commercialised (‘exchange value’), mechanised or employs hired labour. For example, when water collection is commercialised, male hired labour replaces female household members. Further, fuel wood collection and water collection are non-monetised tasks performed by women even though these could serve as inputs to poultry and animal husbandry raised for the market. Even a cooked meal provided by the farmer’s wife to farm labourers hired for crop harvesting is classified as unproductive.

Although it has been established empirically that men take over tasks performed by rural women as soon as they are mechanised or commercialised, existing literature does not provide a satisfactory analysis of the causal factors. This volume not only confirms this trend but, more importantly, it attempts a rationalisation of this phenomenon on the basis of economic factors and of the results of gender-based inequalities in the agrarian structure that in turn contribute to the institutionalisation of discrimination. In particular, this volume examines whether the principles of economics (for example, distortions in relative factor prices) that contributed to the emergence of capital-intensive industries in Third World countries despite the availability of a pool of unemployed labour have contributed to higher capital-intensity (which is detrimental to incomes and employment) in the rural production system relying on female wage labour.

One principal contribution of this volume is the attempt (at the conceptual level and in empirical applications) to extend current theories of rural factor market imperfections, which are designed for class-based analysis, to gender-related questions, and to assess their implications for choice of techniques and resource allocation in rural women’s production processes. This could provide the clue to why rural women are left in labour-intensive sectors characterised by low productivity and low returns.

Easing the time disposition with respect to arduous and non-monetised activities is often assumed to be the major constraint to women’s adoption of income-generating technologies. This volume examines empirically whether the time budget is in reality a binding constraint where economic opportunities are available (taking due account of the size of household and operational holdings). In particular, the volume tries to determine whether time budget (through reallocation of time) or resources constitute a more binding constraint to increasing the productivity of women’s existing work and to the undertaking of income-earning activities. A related question is whether technologies intended to improve women’s time disposition are frustrated by intricacies in the labour process. For example, as a result of improvements in the provision of water supply, help previously received from other members in water collection is withdrawn or the availability of additional water generates more work for women in washing or for provisions of water to the household’s economic activities.

The volume indentifies the social, economic and technical constraints to the diffusion of technologies relevant to rural women’s tasks. In assessing the appropriateness of technologies, a multidisciplinary approach is adopted. In particular, the volume examines factors that favoured the adoption of improved technologies. While most of the diffusion questions are considered at the micro (household) level, macro (national) level policies are also reviewed for their consistency with micro-level measures.

Undertaking a disproportionately large share of the family’s work burden does not necessarily give women access to or control over a proportionately larger share of the household cash income (and consumption).⁵ This is important because the way in which cash income actually gets spent (that is, in whose interests it gets spent) could vary according to who controls it within the household. Therefore, an attempt is made in the volume to identify appropriate organisational forms that would help women retain control over their increased incomes brought about by investments and improved technologies.

The book is divided into three distinct parts. Part I deals with conceptual, analytical and theoretical approaches (although the empirical overview and the country case studies also attempt conceptualisations to different degrees on the basis of a priori reasoning and analysis of evidence). It begins with a theoretical piece (Chapter 2), which attempts the formulation of a macro-quantitative model for analysing the impact of technological progress on rural women. This is followed by the formulation (Chapter 3) of a conceptual framework for analysing the effect of technological change; it relies exclusively on empirical evidence and analytical arguments.

Part II consists of two empirical overviews of the impact of technological change on the condition of rural women. The first focuses on women in the agricultural sector and attempts conceptualisations, based on a comparison of the Asian and African experience, about the effect of technical change on women engaged in crop production. This is followed by a regional overview of the problems involved in the introduction, evaluation and dissemination of technologies to rural women in Africa.

Part III contains four country case studies from Africa (Chapters 6–9), which help to articulate the analytical arguments and reinforce the general conclusions drawn in Parts I and II through in-depth country-level data. These case study chapters are more operational and project-oriented.

The concluding chapter (Chapter 10) does not list the conclusions arrived at by individual chapters (which are available at the end of each chapter). Instead, it discusses analytically the highlights of the major themes of the volume at both the conceptual and empirical levels. In the summing up, the approach followed was to further refine analytically the broad conclusions so that the contribution made by the volume to both theory and policy-making in this field is clearly brought out. Finally, this chapter identifies some areas of future research based on suggestions made by authors of some of the chapters.

Chapter 2 analyses how the traditional macroeconomic theories of technological change, which have primarily been concerned with analysing its impact on the class distribution of income, are inadequate in providing a framework for analysing the question of technological change and rural women. They nevertheless offer some valuable clues, on the basis of which the author suggests some modifications in order to make these more suitable for studying the impact of technological change on rural women. A mathematical expression is formulated for measuring the change in time disposition that results from technological change affecting both rural women’s gainful economic activities and their unpaid household work. Two important indices of rural women’s welfare in terms of income earned and leisure time consumed are introduced. A four-fold classification is presented for quantitatively capturing the impact of technological change on the welfare of rural women in terms of the two indices. This involves income comparison and time disposition comparison, before and after technological change. A set of conditions have been established that help identify whether the likely direction of the impact of innovation is ‘labour-using’, ‘labour-saving’ or ‘neutral’. In the light of the conceptual analysis, the chapter derives and discusses the specific conditions under which innovations become socially acceptable to rural women. Finally, a set of general hypotheses regarding the impact of technological change on rural women by various socioeconomic groups is generated using the logic of the previous sections and modified to make them suitable for empirical testing.

Chapter 3 argues that the relative positions of men and women vis-à-vis the benefits of rural development have an institutional basis from which are derived forms of sexual hierarchy that lead to greater exploitation of women. It conceptualises some aspects of this institutional basis and examines why the issue of gender is so markedly absent from much of the traditional theory and framework of analysis of the impact of technological change. It empirically demonstrates the interaction between biochemical and mechanical innovations on the one hand and institutional sources (wage and family) of women’s labour input on the other. It qualitatively evaluates the impact of this interaction on women’s work burden and income. Another institutional aspect brought out by this study is that some technological change has the effect of reinforcing the patriarchal or entrepreneurial role of men in the household to the detriment of women. On the conceptual plane, the study draws the analogy between class and gender as a system of inequality and hierarchy in rural societies and postulates that technological change is not ‘indifferent’ to gender any more than it is to class. Just as one manifestation of the rural factor market imperfection is higher labour-intensity on small farms, so also rural women tend to be confined to labour-intensive sectors characterised by low productivity. Chapter 3 also analyses the differential impact of technological change on rural women on the basis of sex-sequential tasks (labour inputs required from each sex at different times to produce a single product – as, for example, cocoa in Africa) or sex-segregated tasks (one or the other sex performs all the operations to produce a given product, such as cotton cloth in nineteenth-century Mexico).

Chapter 4 traces the impact of agricultural modernisation on rural women in the Third World. Women, by virtue of their gender, are typically left worse off than the men of their culture and socioeconomic class. In the Asian context, one can often assume that the direction of the effect would tend to be the same for women and men of the same class of households, even if the relative levels and forms of impact would be different; in the African context, on the other hand, even this usually cannot be assumed to hold true: here, schemes that clearly have been beneficial to the men of a household have often been detrimental to the women of that household. The ...