The challenges facing women and youth in agriculture are different by country but there are some underlying factors across the developed and developing world. In the UK, farming women who are now in their eighties and older faced deep-seated institutional inequality because of:

lack of access to agricultural education, (many educational institutions were male only or women in farming communities were expected to develop the home skills because they fed so much of the workforce),

social structure, (women were expected to give up work and care for their husband and children when they married),

rural society (womens’ unpaid contribution runs much of the structure of rural society, especially as a result of rural isolation from welfare services e.g. through informal systems centred around the church, pastoral people care systems, and civilin agriculture meant that the businesses had to find an alternative source of income. In short, women had skills the non-farming labour market would buy. Therefore many women worked off the farm as well as contributing to the running of the farm business itself or ran an alternative enterprise on the farm. Many of their children grew up in farming families and saw what their parents had to do to keep their businesses afloat and often just standing still in the 1990s. Increasing legislation, and administration demands in many small family businesses also fell to the women and at the time there were little in the way of computerization to support. Agricultural family businesses would have collapsed over that time period if women had not taken up the