Finally, the feminization of agriculture also occurs by women taking up waged employment on
large plantations, sometimes located at some distance from the home or even requiring her to
migrate for long periods: it is then linked, not to the small-scale family farm sector, but to the
shift to more capitalized forms of agriculture, and often to an increase in land concentration.
Though both forms of "feminization of agriculture" will show up in statistics as increases in the
female agricultural workforce (in proportion to the employment of men or even, though less
frequently, in comparison to the female employment in other sectors), each in fact will result in
a very different set of gender relationships, and each will correspond to a very different type of
agrarian transition.
These different forms of "feminization of agriculture" call for separate questions, that this
article seeks to address. The following section examines the nature of the discrimination that
women face as small-scale, independent food producers. But, though these various forms of
discrimination can and should urgently be addressed, not all the constraints women face can be
removed at once, particularly when those constraints relate to existing gender roles: the
various types of support given to farmers, therefore, may have to be made "gender-sensitive",
taking into account the specific constraints women face. But here emerges a dilemma:
recognizing such constraints, and organizing the support given to women farmers to take such
constraints into account by relieving them from some of the burdens that they shoulder, may