Climate Change, Agrarian Distress, and the Feminization of Agriculture in South Asia

The feminisation of agriculture—that is, the increase in women’s participation in farming—has long been linked to agrarian distress and male outmigration. This paper presents a quantitative examination of climate change as a driver of that process. Linking socio-economic and demographic data from India, Bangladesh, and Nepal to high-resolution gridded climate data across multiple census and survey rounds, Southard and Randell test whether hotter-than-normal temperatures in the year before a survey are associated with a greater likelihood of a woman working in agriculture. Across the aggregated data representing 675 million women, they find a positive connection between the two. At temperatures higher than the historical district average, a woman has a 26 percent predicted probability of working in agriculture, compared to 17 percent at lower temperatures. The relationship is stronger among two groups—first, married women, likely because men pursue income diversification due to climate change, and second, among less literate, poor women, who have fewer alternatives to earn a livelihood. The paper argues that the feminisation of agriculture is really the feminisation of agrarian distress. With extreme-temperature events, women find themselves pushed into an increasingly precarious sector, leading to a higher probability for smallholder and socio-economically compromised women farmers. For this archive, it provides quantitative grounding across neighbouring countries in South Asia, enabling comparative analyses.