Presentation short abstract

This study explores gender in agriculture on the Iberian Peninsula, analysing structural inequalities and rural women’s visions for change. Based on 24 interviews, it highlights their roles, barriers, and collective strategies, framing rurality as a space of life, dignity, and transformation.

Presentation long abstract

In recent years, the integration of a gender perspective into agricultural and food policies in Europe has gained significant traction. This shift reflects both the urgency of revitalising rural areas—faced with depopulation, ageing, and masculinisation—and the imperative to challenge persistent gender stereotypes and address the underrepresentation of rural women in decision-making spaces.

Focusing on the Iberian Peninsula, this communication offers a critical and situated analysis of the structural dynamics that marginalise and render invisible peasant and rural women, and foregrounds their visions for a more inclusive and transformative agricultural policy. Drawing on 24 interviews with peasant and rural women from Portugal, Galicia, and the Basque Country, this presentation highlights their roles in food production, the barriers they encounter, and the strategies they develop—particularly through collective action. The methodological approach, grounded in oral histories, recognises these women as political subjects and knowledge holders.

Despite their diverse backgrounds, these women share a deep connection to the land, a life-centred rather than productivity-driven sense of time, a commitment to cooperative and care-based agricultural models, and a strong engagement with ancestral knowledge. Their voices articulate a vision of rurality as a space of life, dignity, and transformation. Only by acknowledging the heterogeneity of rural women—beyond universalised images and stereotypes—and ensuring spaces for their voices to be heard, can agricultural and gender policies become more just, inclusive, and responsive to the realities of those who sustain rural life.