Research reveals gender discrimination can affect crop yields SHARES More needs to be done to achieve gender equality within farming says the research team A study examining bean productivity among smallholder farmers in Tanzania, has found that on average, yields are six percent lower among female farmers than their male counterparts. Women are often ‘invisible’ in agriculture, researchers say, due to social structural barriers and national agricultural policies, which do not address discriminatory land rights; education and agricultural information and decision making, which must be tackled to reverse this trend. The paper ‘What Does Gender Yield Gap Tell Us about Smallholder Farming in Developing Countries?’ published in the open access scientific journal Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing (MDPI), analysed data from Southern Tanzania gathered since 2016 and also drew on research from case studies conducted in Burundi, Rwanda, Uganda, and Zimbabwe among other countries in the region.