Innovations in agriculture and natural resource management are crucial to address food and nutrition insecurity, poverty climate change and environmental degradation. However, innovations do not affect everyone equally. They can change the balance of power in gender relations within households and across entire communities. Innovations can accentuate or worsen current patterns of gender inequality. On the other hand, they can also improve equality, if constraints and opportunities are explicitly addressed and reformed with community members.
In every human society, the relationships between men and women are subject to local norms, and influence how work gets done, decisions are made and benefits are distributed. This means that although men and women collaborate in many different tasks, they also develop different and complementary areas of specialised knowledge, skillsets, responsibilities and priorities. These are contextually-specific and can change over time.