March is Rural Women’s Month which meant I had the delight of speaking with rural women last week about why this support is needed (East Central Trader, March 11, page 7).
Agriculture is one of those industries where its media is dominated by men.
How often do we see a woman driving the combine, or out in the pasture with the cattle?
The press release from the Saskatchewan government tells an entirely different story.
“Nearly one in four farm operators in Saskatchewan is a woman, and one in 10 of those is a sole proprietor,” the press release says. Also that, “agriculture is the second-largest employer of rural women.”
How often are our women farmers represented by society as being part of the agriculture industry?
Like I said in the article last week, there are 41,500 people employed in the agriculture industry in Saskatchewan at the end of February 2016.
By government numbers, 4,150 own their own farm and 10 thousand operate a farm.
And these numbers are not just the farm wives who take care of the kids and take out meals to the field. These are women who also run the machinery, and as farm owners, make most of the decisions when it comes to running and maintaining their own farms.
That is a big number of women who are not being recognized for their accomplishments and a large group of people we do not see in this, like agriculturally based commercials and programming.
I know women who have to deal with this stigma on a daily basis.
Can we stop pretending that our genitals are what makes us good at something or bad at something?
One friend works as an agronomist and earned a position high on the ladder right off the bat out of university.
It took a long time before she was respected in any way by many of her male colleagues.
I’m not saying that their reasoning was only because she is a female in the agriculture world.
She is young, which can also cause a lot of unnecessary attitude among older employees, and was fresh out of university, which is a challenge for some people who have worked in the same industry for a while without a university degree.
Based on many of her experiences, the fact that she is female definitely made a difference in the way she was respected at work.
For the people saying right now, well she still needs to earn respect, would you be saying that if she was male? If it was a male doing grain testing and he said there is something wrong with the grain, would their word be challenged or his word more trusted because of the fact that he knows what he is doing?
That should be the common test. Change the sex of the person you are dealing with. Would you treat them any differently if the sexes were reversed?
