Gender Perspective in Fisheries: Examples from the South and the North

Abstract

Women have an active role in fisheries and aquaculture all over the world where fisheries activities related to resources, like fish, shell, and seaweed, take place. Women’s participation in fisheries is diverse as they are involved in different ways depending on the cultural, social, and material conditions. In Western areas, women’s contribution has mostly been performed on land, while in Southern areas, more examples of women fishing or collecting shells are found. However, everywhere, women in fisheries have either fewer rights than men or completely lack formal rights and political attention. Knowledge about women’s roles, gender relations, women’s ways of life in fishing areas, and the changes women and men face, is scarce and varied but necessary in order to conduct transdisciplinary research. Studies within social and cultural fishery research, most often carried out by means of qualitative methods, try to get deeper into women’s lives, their actions or practices, identities, their relations with men, and how women and men as categories are constructed, most often within a specific timespan and places. Constructing gender and gender relations differs from gender as a variable in the fields of fisheries and aquaculture. Both approaches are applied, but highlight different aspects and gender issues in fishery-related societies. An integrated gender dimension in transdisciplinary approaches is necessary to achieve sustainability of resources and society, by bringing together scientists working on different areas and different stakeholders to find responses to major problems.