Women In Benin

Throughout history, all civilizations have had some form of discrimination, whether that is through slavery or through religious reasons. Many countries, such as the United States, do not discriminate against women in their agricultural sector, yet Benin is not one of these countries. Benin is a smaller, undeveloped country located in West Africa. This makes the country’s production of agricultural products much less diversified and focused on ridding itself of sexism. This article goes into an example of how women are worse off than men when they produce agricultural products.
This article talks about the differences in the production capabilities of men versus women in agricultural production. It discusses a study about an irrigation scheme …show more content…
Twenty women and twenty-five men were used for the study and the data was collected using questionnaires and discussions. This means that almost all of the women who were part of the scheme were involved in the study, which may skew their results. After using a complicated formula to figure out the technical efficiency, the study conductors figured out many things of which there was some differences such as the average age, women averaging 55 years old and men averaging about 38 years old. The study observed three major discrimination incidents. The first being the proportion of women to men in the production process. The second is the difference in the amount of land that each person could have. It can be seen how big of a difference there is in land size when you see how “the man with the smallest piece of land has the same area as the female with the largest land area (.27 ha)” (Kinkingninhoun-mêdag, 2008, …show more content…
It is important for us to realize that the problems that countries like the United States are trying to rid itself of, are also issues that smaller and less developed countries also face. Even if the United States manages to get rid of every single incident of sexism and discrimination, these issues will still exist in other countries unless we work towards preventing in these other countries also. One issue that we would face if we attempt to try to prevent the discrimination in countries such as Benin is that many of the social norms cause females to be viewed as inferior and thus have fewer land rights than men. In some countries, there may be laws to help prevent discrimination yet they do not always work. Benin currently has some “bylaws which allow performance-based increments in allocated land” (Kinkingninhoun-mêdag, 2008, p.67). While these laws help to prevent issues, the laws occasionally need to be kept in