Empty Plates: Responses to Gender Disparities to Food Access
By Tom Inouye
Food Access, Malnutrition, and Starvation Trends
The number of undernourished individuals across the globe increased to 735 million in 2023, an alarming trend for the health and wellness of the world. Since 2017, around 137 million have been declared newly malnourished due to various armed conflicts, income inequality, and significantly, the effects of environmental destruction. These statistics are not gender-neutral: 45 million people in 2023 were on the verge of starvation, with the majority being women and girls, and today, 60% of food insecure individuals are female.
Multiple environmental, economic, and political factors are responsible for the distressing increase in food insecurity. Climate change and rising global temperatures will set the stage for a reduction in crop yield and a subsequent decrease of food access. As explained by the United States Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), “more extreme temperatures and precipitation can prevent crops from growing. Extreme events, especially floods and droughts, can harm crops and reduce yields.” Environmental degradation like deforestation erodes soil, leading to floods that wipe out agricultural plots, and reduces the fertility of land meant for growing food. Generally, with every degree Celsius of warming, cereal crop yields are expected to decline by about ten percent, with estimates running as high as 17 percent. An increase in deforestation and global temperatures across the world has left communities living in forested areas– like indigenous populations– with less food from their farms and less food on their plates.
Exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic, food insecurity is widespread: economic turmoil that forces families to cut down on or eliminate their food budgets has left women and girls in a position to eat less. An alarming 33% of women in Bangladesh reduced their personal food consumption to save money for their other necessary family-related expenses. While starvation does devastate male populations as well, women are substantially more likely to reduce their access to steady nutrition than men for the benefit of their children and husbands. In the food-insecure country of Afghanistan, both men and women reported eating around 3 fewer meals every week to cut costs, but women generally skipped one more day of meals a week than men.
This systemic imbalance in the amount of food eaten by women is detrimental to their health, safety, and is linked to a myriad of other significant social and economic problems. As environmental and public health concerns around food production become more prominent, women will struggle with nutrition access on a larger scale. Why are women more likely to give up their own satiation for their children and male partners? And when and how do women choose to stand up for their right to eat? This paper seeks to answer both questions through two case studies sourced from India.
Why do Women and Girls Eat Last and Less?
While it is common to write off the fact that men eat more than women because they simply need to eat more food to maintain their energy and, on average, higher body weight, such a judgment undermines the role of oppressive patriarchal structures that subvert the role of women and creates the expectation that women must sacrifice their food for the benefit of their families.
Women across the world– not just in one country or community– eat less than men. What makes the phenomenon of female food insecurity pervasive and nearly universal in hundreds of countries, tribes, and agricultural communities?
First, patriarchal family structures purport the concept that men need more food because they participate in more physically demanding jobs compared to the traditional homemaking careers of women in countries with substantial food insecurity. This comparison not only devalues the importance of female participation in the labor force and in the family, but leaves space for the oppressive claim that men are more deserving of food than women because of the physically demanding labor they perform at work. But the problem with this claim is deep rooted. Indeed, men work a vast majority of physically demanding blue-collar jobs, whether that is because of societal standards of “masculinity,” the historical reverence for the physical strength of cisgender male individuals, or because of the supposed “physical weakness” of women. But even in families where men are not working physical jobs– usually white-collar jobs– husbands, fathers, and male partners still expect to be prioritized in food distribution at the dinner table. Additionally, as countries modernize, more women join the workforce. Yet, discussions of food equality in the home never claim that women should receive equal or more food than their male partners. Thus, the assertion that men need to eat more because they need to replenish their energy from a long day of physical labor seems to be tied less to their occupation and more to the simple fact that they claim that they, as men, are intrinsically entitled to more food than their female partners.
Second, familial gender hierarchies enforce the narrative that women should serve their husbands first to ensure that his portion is the most plentiful. Then, she should fill the plates of her children by virtue of the fact that mothers are expected to act as the child caretakers more than fathers. Finally, after ensuring that her husband and children are satiated, she should take whatever is leftover– often not enough for an adult woman to sustain an adequate, plentiful, and diverse diet. The inequities at the dinner table even expand further than women eating last. The 2011 India Human Development Survey also found that in one-fourth of all Indian households, women are expected to wait until their husbands completely finish their food before they can eat.
Problematically, this norm exists to allow men to “go back for seconds,” or eat their female partner’s portion of the meal. Consequently, women don’t only eat last; but might not get to eat at all.
Third, organizations like the UN World Food Program that distribute foodstuffs to under-resourced communities unintentionally only feed men. In a program to aid starving Afghan communities, the Taliban passed an edict “banning the employment of women and restart[ing] food deliveries only by men to men.” The terrorist organization also decided to bar women “from working in national and international nongovernmental organizations,” an indicator of serious gender inequality for food access in territories where food aid is desperately needed. Thus, even food aid programs that are meant to be evenly distributed across all demographics are sometimes hijacked and redirected toward only men.
The denial of food to women across the world doesn’t just mean that women feel hungry or have less energy. Rather, a consistently inadequate diet affects nearly every aspect of a woman’s experience in her body, in her home, and in her community. The next section will explore the impacts of food inequality on vulnerable female populations.
Outcomes for Women in Undernourished Communities
Food is a crucial component of life. For human bodies to function, vital organs must maintain a stable intake of different carbohydrates, proteins, fats, and vitamins. Without proper nutrition, human organs can fail to function properly, leading to a myriad of health issues. As such, the Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights at the United Nations recognized the right to adequate food as a fundamental right according to the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and yet pervasive female food insecurity has only grown as a problem that inhibits or seriously degrades the structures of women’s lives.
First, inadequate nutrition and chronic malnourishment can cause substantial problems for the functioning organs that are required for survival. Among women in food insecure areas, anemia and devastating weight loss lead to feelings of physical weakness, exhaustion, and increased susceptibility to life-endangering infections. Reduced caloric intake forces the human body to supplement lost energy with “energy reserves” to replace food. However, the body’s energy is finite without food and cannot supply enough energy to vital organs and tissues. For malnourished or starving women, this deficiency translates to a shrunken heart, shrunken ovaries, and even “hallucinations, convulsions, and disruptions.” For younger women, low caloric intake can cause severe growth stunting, of which 250,000 deaths are attributed to yearly.
Second, in times of food insecurity, women are less likely to pursue education or employment outside the home, as their responsibilities like childcare, cooking, and fetching water and food at far distances increase. This increase leads to vulnerabilities for female populations in food-insecure communities. More time in the home is generally associated with a greater chance of genital mutilation in many African nations.
Education “provides opportunities for individuals to take on social roles that are not dependent on the practice of FGM for acceptance.” Further, when women are expected to complete the task of searching for potable water, they may have to travel long distances. This unsupervised travel substantially raises the chance of sexual assault and violence against women. Further, the expectation that women stay home when food is scarce destroys their educational potential and strips them of their right to pursue a career other than homemaker or farmer. However, women are most often not fairly compensated for their agricultural work. Even though women compose around 80% of all agricultural processing and 70% of all agricultural labor, men more frequently obtain those profits on behalf of their female counterparts. Thus, women are caught in a self-fulfilling cycle: those that are forced to stay at home receive no out-of-home education, and thus cannot pay for school or begin a job in the workforce. This lack of education and work experience reduces their chances of working, and they have no choice but to continue working in the home, and receiving inadequate compensation for their work.
Third, families that are suffering from food insecurity will sometimes sell their daughters into forced marriages, which frequently lead to gender-based violence and sexual assault. Families that sell off their female children feel that they have no other choice but to reduce the number of mouths to feed, and see the income from selling their daughters as money that can be put to the rest of the family’s food budget. Child marriage has been shown to increase “the risk for depression, sexually transmitted infection, cervical cancer, malaria, obstetric fistulas, and maternal mortality.”
The denial of nutrition to women in food insecure areas expands far past pure hunger. While husbands, fathers, and men in many societies are guaranteed food when they sit down to dinner, their wives and daughters experience adverse health effects, stunting of educational and economic liberty, and autonomy over their bodies. In what ways and when do women respond to the denial of food in their daily lives? And what circumstances are conducive to effective movement towards equal food access?
Case Studies
Women in communities facing food insecurity respond to deficiencies in their personal access to nutrition differently depending on who or what is withholding the access to food. I will argue that women are less likely to stand up to personal barriers to food security– often their husbands and fathers– but will stand up to systemic sources of food insecurity that affect their communities as a whole– namely environmental factors. Two separate examinations of Indian women’s responses to low food access– one due to patriarchal structures and one to environmental degradation– will help to illustrate when and why women mobilize to gain food access. India serves as an effective case study, as chronic malnutrition has affected Indian society for decades and still today. Recent studies estimate that the “prevalence of underweight… 46 percent for children, 33 percent for women of childbearing age…” With the systemic and widespread malnutrition of women and children in India, it is crucial to examine not only the forces causing shortages of foodstuffs, but the conditions in which women are motivated to stand up for their right to eat.
Modern Day Indian Households
First, we turn to the ways that many modern day Indian households operate when it comes to the gender distribution of food. As explained above, one-fourth of all Indian households have adopted the rule that women in the family should not eat before their husband or father has completely finished his food.
This has myriad implications for the type and quantity of food eaten by women. First, women are more likely to eat worse quality food as it is usually left over from the plate of the patriarch of the family. Second, women were more likely than men to eat no food at all, which has historically led to severe malnutrition. In an Indian National Family Health Survey taken in 2015 and in 2016, women at all ages were found more likely to be underweight. In 2005, the India Human Development Survey found that there was a direct correlation between women only eating after their husbands and dangerously low Body Mass Indexes (BMIs).
This devastating discrepancy in food access for men and women has shown to harm both the physical and mental health of women across India. Women that were found to develop chronic illnesses from starvation also saw massive increases in depressive and anxiety orders and many patients studied saw a comorbid depressive-anxiety disorder more frequently than just one mental disorder.
Why are so many Indian women reluctant to revolt against the egregious inequities in food distribution? Women in India are less likely to stand up to their husbands, who frequently become perpetrators of domestic violence when questioned. Financial insecurity and food insecurity create mental health problems for both men and women within the family structure. However, men are more likely to be perpetrators of domestic violence against their wives or daughters as a way to release “chronic stress.” A 2015 study examining the mental health of Indian women across the country found that nearly a third of married women were victims of domestic violence across 29 provinces in India. Women, who do not want to anger or upset their husbands by asking for a fair portion of food, are more likely to stay quiet, even in times where they are on the verge of starvation.
Second, women may be socialized to believe that their husband’s right to eat is more important than their own. In cross cultural examinations of societal perceptions of food, women that ate less were considered “more feminine” than women who ate more. Nutrition distribution is deeply connected to what society expects from women and men; that is, women are meant to eat less to preserve their femininity by eating less than men. In societies that heavily reinforce gender roles– women must be feminine and men must be masculine– the impact is amplified. Women may come to believe that eating less is intrinsically tied to their nature as women, meaning they will be less motivated to oppose the system that deprives them of food.
Many women in Indian households thus are not likely to stand up to forces causing food insecurity, particularly when husbands and fathers are eating the portions meant to feed the entire family. However, women may mobilize to end food insecurity when the barriers to food security are more systemic, rather than personal.
Indian Chipko Andolan Movement
In the early 1970s, the Indian government backed new deforestation and logging operations to boost economic growth across the region of Uttarakhand in the Indian Himalayas. The Sino-Indian border conflict of 1963 came with the creation of roads built for the transportation of military equipment and personnel. When the war ended, the roads remained, which attracted loggers that saw the region as a source of valuable resources and high quality timber. However, these logging operations did not benefit the local populations living in the Uttarakhand region and caused significant environmental destruction.
Rural women, who not only made a living from forests, but relied on them for subsistence, saw the threat of loggers as detrimental to their economies and health. When trees were cut down, the soil quality was destabilized, potable water became scarce, and most importantly, flooding of agricultural plots caused a drastic decline in agricultural yields. Further, women used the wood from local trees to make farming tools, and having timber resources taken away caused fear among the local populations about how they were going to get food to bring to their families.
As a form of radical nonviolent resistance, women of the villages in India mobilized to create what is now known as the Chipko Andolan, or Chipko movement.
The word “Chipko” translates as “to hug” or “to stick” in Hindi, which is reflected in their style of anti-deforestation protest. To prevent logging and the resulting harm to their agricultural plots, women began to “hug” trees to prevent loggers from destroying nearby ecology. As logging contractors approached, Chipko organizers would cling to the trees, making it impossible for the deforesters to cut them down without injuring or accidentally killing the local women. Thus, the loggers, for fear of accidentally being charged with murder, could not cut down trees near the villages.
Video: The Chipko movement as it stands today
Chipko Andolan was an overwhelming success. The Simon Company, one of the main contractors responsible for deforestation, lost their logging contract having not successfully cut down a single tree in the forest after local women began to hug trees. The movement was composed of nearly all women and is considered one of the first major feminist ecological coalitions in the world.
Chandra Singh, the son of Gaura Devi, who organized the very first protest of the Chipko Andolan said:
“Millions of Himalayan trees were saved from felling because of Chipko. Due to natural calamities, today we are forced to look for a new place for our children. But I don’t want to leave my house. Where else will we get this shade of trees?”
-Chandra Singh, the son of Gaura Devi, who organized the very first protest of the Chipko Andolan.
Why were women willing to mobilize against imminent food insecurity when the forces causing it were more systematic and less personal?
First, advocating for community food security is more favorable to men than female food security. In other words, the mobilization of women in the Chipko Movement took place because women were fighting for nutrition for their whole families, including their husbands and fathers. Men in the family would be less likely to commit domestic violence against women organizing in Chipko Andolan because men also wouldbenefit from that advocacy. In contrast, when women stand up for their own right to eat as women in the home, men are more likely to commit violence, as they see their entitlement to food being taken from them by their wives or daughters.
What does this indicate about the gendered dynamics of food? Men not only have an overwhelming grasp on food supplies in India, but they even restrict how women mobilize against forces of female food insecurity. The resulting problem is a cycle of constant male food prioritization in communities experiencing famine. While the story of the Chipko Andolan is an inspiring example of successful female-led agricultural and environmental activism, it also reveals a disturbing trend: men only accept women’s activism when it directly benefits them and restrict anything that doesn’t benefit them using acts of domestic violence.
Past Steps and Solutions
Past steps by UN organizations like the UN World Food Programme and USAID’s Bureau for Humanitarian Assistance have been instrumental in increasing food access for some communities across the world, but many policies do not focus specifically on female malnutrition. Existing frameworks fall short in researching and addressing immediate and distinct needs of women, and data on female wellbeing often fails to be disaggregated from data on the general population. In a study compiled by the organization CARE International, in 46% of all reports– sourced from international organizations like the United Nations, Food and Agriculture organization, USAID, IPC, World Bank, and the World Food Programme– gender is not mentioned a single time. Contrastly, only 5% of major hunger reports propose solutions specifically tied to gender inequality and the overlooked reasons for discrepancies in food distribution.
With the Covid-19 pandemic upending structures for food production and distribution, women have been dealt with a disproportionate burden, but are left without the means to actively participate in emergency response related to the pandemic and food access.
Only making up 24% of national-level COVID-19 response teams, women are purposefully or unconsciously disenfranchised from creating crisis response frameworks that consider women.
Instead, new frameworks with more deliberate plans for gender minorities are being created to address food insecurity, starvation, and mass famine. The Gender-Transformative Framework for Nutrition, led by the Canadian government, attempts to tackle these issues through a lens of gender. They examine “education, agricultural resources, markets, and technologies and facilitates solutions that can address the full social complexity of malnutrition,” and aim to “reframe nutrition programming to understand how gender norms, institutions, and power relations are causing unequal access to food.” In tandem with international organizations, including the UN, this framework is taking shape in actual policy decisions. The Women’s Resilience to Disasters Programme implemented by UN Women aims to establish similar protocols to give autonomy back to women on issues of COVID-19, poverty, and food access.
Next steps for the inclusion and protection of women must be implemented with two things in mind:
1. First, women must be protected from domestic violence and IPV, especially in the realm of food distribution in the home. Unfortunately, changing social and cultural norms around gendered violence is not a simple task, especially when gender inequality is a long standing structure in the community. However, norm setting of healthy and communicative relationships, as well as legislation prohibiting child marriages have shown to be effective at reducing domestic violence in the home. Most crucially, protecting women from violence and the overhaul of societal systems that perpetuate oppressive gender norms must be a goal. That goal must be achieved
2. Second, international organizations, countries, and community governments must effectively implement plans using the research and frameworks created utilizing the voices of women. Effective progress for women and girls will come when they have a say in the decision making process and when multiple economic, educational, social, and gendered factors affecting female nutrition are considered and addressed.
While women in food insecure areas are typically dealing with the brunt of food insecurity, new frameworks and institutions are providing promising ways to ensure that no woman goes hungry. Without frameworks that look critically at gender, women and girls will continue to be subjected to a smaller portion; or no portion at all.
