The female
face of farming
«Frauen in der Landwirtschaft»
Short film (2025)
9'52
Language: Swiss German
Subtitles: English, German
Directed by Vanessa Simili
Camera: Daniel Rihs
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Out of a journalistic project
In 2020, when I started with a series of portraits of women in farming, I didn't expect to make a film. It happend, because I thought about the future of journalism and the question, how in future people get informed apart from using Social Media. Today, the project has transformed and I present the short film here, because many people asked me, where they can see it. Enjoy! And if you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me for further information.
2026: The United Nations declare the International Year of the Woman Farmer. Why?
Women farmers play an important role in agricultural transformation achieving sustainibility, such as ending hunger, eradicating extreme poverty. That's why there's a funda-mental global need to empowering women and ensuring the sustainable use of terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems.
Some facts
41 %
In 2021, women made up 41% of the global agrifood workforce—almost equal to men—yet rural women disproportionately face precarious jobs, poor working conditions, and limited rights.
58 Million
Empowering rural women through targeted development interventions could raise incomes for 58 million more people and boost resilience for 235 million—yet this potential remains largely untapped.
52 %
The prevalence of food insecurity is consistently higher among women than men globally and across regions. Reducing gender disparities in employment, education, and income could eliminate 52% of the food insecurity gap.
78 cents
Women engaged in wage employment in agrifood systems earn
78 cents for every dollar that men earn.
Why is it so important to
focus on women farmers?
1
Agrifood systems are a major employer of women
In many countries, agrifood systems are a more important source of livelihood for women than for men.
2
Women play crucial roles across agrifood systems. They are essential to house-hold food security and nutrition.
They play vital roles throughout the far-ming and food value chain, contributing to food production, agricultural work and post-harvest
activities, as well as performing critical care work that helps
sustain agrifood sys-tems and rural communities
3
Despite their essential role in agrifood systems, women farmers face more precarious working conditions, heavier workloads, and unequal access to resources.
Their roles are often marginalized, and their working con-ditions are typically worse than men’s – irregular, informal, part-time, low-waged, labour-intensive and thus vulnerable.
4
Women farmers face persistent gaps in access to land, services, capital, inputs, education, and technology,
and in the face of extreme heat, extreme precipitation and droughts, women increase their work burden more than men.
5
Securing women’s land rights streng-thens agrifood systems and rural development and helps communities to thrive.
Women remain behind in securing access, management, and ownership of land, and face discrimi-nation or inadequate legal protection in these areas. Enhancing women’s land rights boosts their empower-ment, investment capacity, sustainabi-lity, and resilience,
while improving access to services, reducing gender-based violence, and strengthening bargaining power.
6
Women’s empower-ment is a key area of investment for rural development, pro-sperity and environ-mental protection, and critical to ac-celerating the tran-sition to more sus-tainable agrifood systems.
Empowering women farmers can enhance
the well-being of women and their households, reduce hunger, increase dietary diversity, boost incomes and econo-mies, and strengthen the resilience of populations.
7
Rural young women frequently face specific challenges in accessing resources
due to generational and gendered power
dynamics, as well as structural, economic, social and spatial
constraints. Greater unpaid and domestic care responsibilities
contribute to keeping young women out of education, employ-ment and training.
Everyone has
a role to play
From governments, the pri-vate sector, international organizations, and civil so-ciety, to academia and the ge-neral public, including youth. We must recognize, value, and support the indispen-sable role of women farmers.
About me
I'm a journalist based in one of the richest countrys of the world, namely in Switzerland. It was when I came back from a longer stay in southern Italy, that I realized: Something's wrong in our food system. So I started to put my focus on agriculture. On the potential of women in farming. So I started a journalistic project with portraits from women in farming.