Celebrating Rural Women

October 15th is The International Day of Rural Women. The theme of this year’s event is building rural women’s resilience in the wake of COVID-19. Globally and at home, rural women are leaders in agriculture, food security, nutrition, land, natural resource management and unpaid domestic care work.

Here’s four things you might not have known about Rural Women (Source)

• Rural women – a quarter of the world’s population – work as farmers, wage earners, and entrepreneurs.
• Less than 20% of landholders worldwide are women. In rural areas, the gender pay gap is as high as 40%.
• Reducing the gap in labour force participation rates between men and women by 25% by the year 2025 could raise global GDP by 3.9%.
• If women in rural areas had the same access to agricultural assets, education, and markets as men, agricultural production could be increased, and the number of hungry people reduced by 100-150 million.

Natural gas projects around Australia could not operate without the support of both the rural women who work on these projects, and the rural women who work alongside them in their community in agriculture, technology and land management.

Our regional communities depend on the resilience of these women. Today, tag #RuralWomen on social media to show the world that you stand with rural women locally, and around the world.

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