A new study from University of Guelph researchers found women are typically undervalued in the industry, while doing additional unpaid work
Farming is notorious for being a high-stress occupation given its unpredictability, which often leads to poor mental health.
That is especially the case for women in the industry, according to a new study by U of G researchers. In fact, in many cases, the mental health of women farmers is more negatively impacted than men.
This is in part due to the extra unpaid work women are often tasked with, as well as a lack of inclusivity and respect when it comes to women in farming, said Briana Hagen, the lead author on the study and current CEO and lead scientist at the Canadian Centre for Agricultural Wellbeing.
Hagen, along with veterinarian Dr. Andria Jones and a team of researchers interviewed 74 farmers throughout Ontario and beyond as part of the study, looking at mental health trends through a gendered lens.
“Women traditionally experience poor mental health at an increased prevalence compared to men,” Hagen said.
“They’re also just traditionally a group who are understudied and tend to have additional workload put on to them, including learning about mental health and protecting the people around them, so we wanted to make sure that we could have a peek at what was going on through a gendered lens,” she said.
Farming already has a lot of unique stressors – a lack of control over things that could lead to disaster on a farm, like trade agreements, weather and climate change.
But women have additional unpaid workloads, which she called a triple shift – paid farming work, unpaid farming work, and unpaid non-farming work.
“Women are equal partners on the farm, but they also tend to be in charge of managing their household,” she said.
That could include making sure kids are getting to their activities and have everything they need, making sure everyone on the farm is taken care of and fed; that the bills are paid and the books are done.
Hagen said when they asked farmers where they would go for mental health support, it was almost always women.
There was a belief that women should be the ones to learn about mental health, that they’re naturally more suited to it.
“So there was a really interesting conundrum of women who are already taking on so much and experiencing poor mental health being tasked with the responsibility of maintaining everybody else’s mental health,” she said.
All these factors, she said, can exacerbate poor mental health in women farmers.
Their research also found the industry is not especially inclusive to women, which leads to them not being taken seriously.
People might come to the farm, for instance, and ask a woman to talk to the decision maker, rather than assuming they’re in charge.
“That can really wear on your mental health in an ongoing way when being a farmer is something you value so much and is your lifestyle, your identity, and then someone is questioning that anytime they step on the farm,” she said.
Fortunately, there are some easy solutions the industry can start implementing right away.
“It should be very easy to use inclusive imagery and inclusive language when we’re talking about women,” she said. “Farmers are women, so let’s put a billboard up that has a woman on it instead of a man.”
When farms and agricultural colleges are recruiting, they should use language that includes women, she said.
“Let’s acknowledge the fact that women farm too,” she said. “Those are very, very easy fixes.”
Encouraging farming men to learn about mental health is also an important next step.
“You can learn those things too, and help protect your farm, your family, in that way,” she said.
“We can do better for farming women,” she said.