GTA aims to address this by including both men and women as equal partners. The interventions targeting men or women alone may reinforce existing gender norms and accentuate gender gaps. A relatively new response, that of gender transformative approaches (GTAs), is gaining momentum in recent years in Africa and Asia. The individualistic approach of addressing gender inequality is problematic as there is every likelihood that contextual issues like established gender norms or institutions may pose barriers to any change that might benefit women (Cole et al., 2014). This approach, thus, ensures that the symptoms of inequality such as individual access to land, resources and technology are problematized rather than the structural or contextual issues that lead to these inequalities (Okali, 2012). This homogenization, primarily on men and women's roles and access to resources does not recognize the power relations operating at various levels of society and their interaction (intersection) with individual characteristics such as age, race, ethnicity, social status, and so on (Wong et al., 2019). The gender integration practices, though useful for identifying individual needs of women, have been critiqued for fixing men and women as categories. However, the approach still portrayed women as a category in isolation and devoid of the gender dynamics (Okali, 2012). The prominent frameworks for this approach popularized the use of sex‐disaggregated data to reflect the inequalities in gender roles, access to assets and control over the same. The criticism of WID led to Gender and Development (GAD) approach that emphasized mainstreaming gender into the development process with the objective of tackling women subordination and promoting empowerment.
Consequently, the agricultural projects at that time focused on women as a category devoid of any social context. The WID approach was centred around addressing women's invisibility in economic contribution and exclusion from development opportunities. Much of the agricultural research and practice so far has been confined to using a women‐in‐development (WID) or gender‐accommodative approach which promotes women's participation within existing institutional and social contexts. Although these statistics highlight women's contribution to agriculture to a limited extent, they systematically obscure the issues of unequal access to land, capital, natural resources, and assets among women (Doss, 2014). Their share in the agricultural labour force ranges from almost 20% in Latin America to about 50% in Eastern and South‐Eastern Asia and Sub‐Saharan Africa (Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations, 2011). Women constitute 43% of the agricultural labour force in low‐ and middle‐income countries.
Gender inequality as a persistent problem
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