Abstract

Most research on women’s empowerment in agriculture focuses on households that rely on crop farming activities and livestock systems. Despite an estimated 12 million dairy farms in the Global South, less is known about women’s empowerment in dairy farming. Recognising the unique structure of dairy production, we adapted the Abbreviated Women’s Empowerment in Agriculture Index (A-WEAI) to include dairy-specific tasks across four domains: production, resources, income, and leadership, offering an adapted tool to examine women’s empowerment in dairy farming. This study draws on survey data from 435 husband-wife couples in smallholder dairy households in West Java Province, Indonesia. Using a modified A-WEAI, our calculation suggests that, although both women and men in dairy households are generally empowered, women exhibit higher levels of empowerment than men. However, looking at the individual indicators that construct the index, women are less empowered in specific domains. For example, in the leadership domain, women participate less in dairy cooperatives, which provide key services such as access to market, inputs and training. Sensitivity analysis using different thresholds (80%, 70%, and 60%) showed that while women’s empowerment levels remained unchanged, men’s varied considerably. This variation reflects the key role women play in managing household income in Southeast Asian societies, highlighting the importance of context-specific interpretation of metrics. These findings reflect the gendered division of responsibilities in dairy farming households and highlight the need to adapt women’s empowerment indicators to specific farming systems and interpret them within the local institutional and cultural contexts in which they are measured.