In this IUFRO 2014 presentation, CIFOR scientists challenge perceptions about men, women, and forest product use. This presentation was a part of a session which focused on challenges, opportunities, and outcomes of securing women’s participation in forest governance, linking them with issues and experiences in climate change adaptation and mitigation.

1. Myths and realities about men,
women and forest use:
A global comparative study
Terry Sunderland, Ramadhani Achdiawan, Arild Angelsen, Ronnie Babigumira,
Amy Ickowitz, Fiona Paumgarten, Victoria Reyes-García, Gerald Shively
THINKING beyond the canopy
IUFRO World Forestry Congress
Salt Lake City
6th October 2014

2. THINKING beyond the canopy
Introduction
 Many of the claims often
made in the literature on
gender and forest products
are based on case studies
 However, it is unclear how
generalizable they actually
are
 We investigated whether
several commonly held views
on gender and forest use are
supported by the global PEN
dataset

3. THINKING beyond the canopy
PEN is…
Large, tropics-wide collection of detailed & high-quality &
comparable data by PhD students on the poverty-forest
(environment) nexus, coordinated by CIFOR, with
numerous partners
It is the most comprehensive analysis of poverty-forest
linkages undertaken to date

4. Features of PEN
 Approach: a network
• PhD students: Long
fieldwork & student
engagement
• Supported by senior
resource persons
• Mutual benefits
 Capacity building
• Majority of partners from
developing countries
 State-of-the-art methods
• Quality data – short recall
• Comparable methods
THINKING beyond the canopy

5. PEN: the numbers..
 24 countries
 38 PEN studies
 239 households in the average study
 364 villages or communities surveyed
 >8,000 households surveyed
 40,950 household visits by PEN enumerators
 2,313 data fields (variables) in the average study
 294,150 questionnaire pages filled out and entered
 456,546 data cells (numbers) in the average study
 17,348,734 data cells in the PEN global data base!
THINKING beyond the canopy

6. The PEN data set
THINKING beyond the canopy

7. crops
forest
wages
livestock
business
environment
Income sources in the PEN dataset
0.0 0.1 0.2 0.3
income shares
other
Source: CIFOR-PEN dataset
~22%
~6.4%
T = 27.5%
=> Clearly supports “high env. income” hypothesis
– …much more than some of us had thought! 

8. Is the harvesting of forest products mainly
undertaken by women?
Share of income from unprocessed forest products by region and gender
THINKING beyond the canopy

9. Pen and gender analysis
 We disaggregated forest
activities and income by
gender using descriptive
and regression analysis
 Dependent variable:
share of hh forest product
income collected by
women
THINKING beyond the canopy

10. Is the harvesting of forest products
mainly undertaken by women?
 Our data do not support
this claim
 For unprocessed
products, this claim only
holds in Sub-Saharan
Africa
 For processed products, it
does not hold in any
geographical location
THINKING beyond the canopy

11. Do women collect primarily for
subsistence and men for sale?
THINKING beyond the canopy

12. Do women collect for primarily for
subsistence and men for sale?
• Both women and men
collect predominantly for
subsistence use, but …
• Men´s sale share is
higher than women´s
• However, in Sub-
Saharan Africa, the share
is almost equal
THINKING beyond the canopy

13. Do women collect a greater share of forest
products from lands under common property
tenure regimes than men?
THINKING beyond the canopy

14. Do women collect a greater share of forest
products from lands under common
property tenure regimes than men?
THINKING beyond the canopy
 The vast majority of products for
both genders is collected under
state property tenure regimes
 In the global sample, the
proportion collected by men and
women from common property is
about the same
 The conventional claim holds for
Latin America and Asia, but not for
Africa

15. Summary of PEN gender findings
 There is large regional variation in both the shares of
forest products collected by women
 Even after controlling for most of the factors discussed in
the literature as well as differences in level of market
integration, women in Africa collect a much larger share
of forest products than women in Asia and Latin America
 Many of the claims that originate from the gender and
forest literature do not hold using the PEN global data
sample
 Men play a much more important and diverse role in the
contribution of forest products to rural livelihoods than is
often reported
THINKING beyond the canopy

16. Conclusions/Reflections
 Deeper understanding of gendered patterns of income
generation are important for designing policies aimed at
improving HH welfare in general, but especially those
aimed at improving the livelihoods of women
 Culture, ethnicity, wealth and other variables are
important!
 Interesting methodological issue: what we can learn from
case studies vs. global data
 This kind of study helps us to see overall patterns, but..
 To understand the stories behind the patterns, case
studies can be useful, but not as stand-alone reference
points
THINKING beyond the canopy

17. Read more…
 Special Issue of
World Development
including all of the
PEN-related
research findings
 PEN website:http
://www.cifor.org/pen/
THINKING beyond the canopy

18. THINKING beyond the canopy
http://www.cifor.org