Measures of feminisation of agriculture

Due to different social contexts the involvement of women in agriculture has been increasing significantly. Feminisation of agriculture index was developed to analyse the increased participation of women in the field of agriculture. Through rigorous reviewing of literature, a list of sixty items under decision making and labour participation dimension was prepared and sent to 100 experts. Based on the 60 experts' responses 20 items in decision making and 19 items in labour participation were finalised through item analysis and relevancy test. Later, the index was administered to 60 respondents including farm women of migrant and non-migrant households for extracting weight of the items through principal component analysis (PCA). Validity and reliability of the constructed index were worked out with the help of content validity and split-half technique respectively. This developed tool will be useful to measure the extent of feminisation of agriculture and thereby providing impetus to the gender mainstreaming in agriculture.