Impact of technology on women : a case of rainfed and irrigated villages in the Bhaktapur District of Nepal : AIT-GASAT Asia conference, August 4-7, 1998, Bangkok, Thailand

A comparative study conducted in the rainfed and irrigated villages of Bhaktapur district in Nepal indicated that the gender roles and relations are responsive to technological changes. The patterns of labor allocated by men and women are influenced by the facilities created by new technology. Such influence is evident not only in the productive sector but also in the reproductive works. In the rainfed and irrigated production environments the technological combinations used by the household had three different alternatives: (a) some households had followed traditional technologies that involved no monetized input, (b) another set of households used intermediate technologies where some use of modern inputs were evident but the farms were not mechanized, (c) the third category of households were using modern technologies which followed the use of modern inputs as well as mechanization. In these three different technological environments, the patterns of labor use were also different at the intra-household levels. Depending upon the nature of work related to these environments and agricultural seasons, the allocation of labor in the rainfed and irrigated farms varied. The study reveals that to empower women adoption of labor saving technologies will be necessary not only in the productive sector but also in the reproductive sector. Any labor saved from the reproductive sector as an influence of the change in technology has greater scope for its use in the productive sector. Such shift had contributed to the social transformation process in the recent years as women were increasingly assuming their roles in the productive sphere than before.