Across the world, rural women play crucial roles in agriculture, food security, and nutrition. Nearly one third of women’s employment globally in agriculture, including forestry and fishing, and they make significant contributions to food production, manage land and natural resources, and build climate resilience.

However, in comparison to men, women farmers generally face unequal access to and control over key productive assets that could improve their agricultural productivity and profitability, such as smartphones and mobile internet, savings and credit, land, and other agricultural inputs.

Although these disparate trends are clear, holes persist in our understanding of the full complexity and scope of issues impacting women smallholder farmers; most data collection tends to be at the household level, which often does not capture nuanced intra-familial gender dynamics. Systems for collecting, analyzing, sharing, and using good quality, FAIR (findable, accessible, interoperable, and reusable) sex-disaggregated data are lacking, and opportunities to leverage non-traditional big data sources, such as mobile phone and social media data, for women’s empowerment remain largely unexplored.

In collaboration with CGIAR and partners, the Platform for Big Data in Agriculture is working to improve our understanding of relationships among gender, agriculture, and rapidly digitizing economies and develop FAIR data systems that enable gender data to be used to its full potential.