Improved Cross-Sector Collaboration Can Advance Gender Equality in Fisheries – Pew Charitable Trusts.
Excerpts:
Gender equality is important in fisheries to make sure that policies are mindful of everyone’s needs and challenges. It also ensures that we’re benefiting from knowledge from both women and men. Women have expertise to lend to better fisheries management and practices, and women also impact their local environments. So not involving them in the fisheries sector has ecological and social repercussions.
Leaving women out of these types of fisheries management decisions limits innovation and the ability to sustain local fisheries. And if women aren’t engaged in fisheries planning or management, they may overfish certain areas.
“The fisheries institutions we evaluated focus more on involving people who work in the industry in projects such as making sure they’re attending fisheries training workshops. But, ultimately, this is not effective, because these small-scale interventions don’t change the lives of women or the power dynamics they have to navigate within their communities.
For example, if you involve a woman in a new project to grow seaweed in her local environment but she’s working a 12-to-14-hour day taking care of her family as well, giving her another project to handle won’t improve gender equality long term because it doesn’t address underlying inequities, like the disproportionate burden of care she has. All you will do is make her even more overworked than she already is.”
