Most of us picture a man — usually a man behind a plough or a tractor, as in pictures 1 and 2 of Fig. 1.1. The chapter asks us to notice that this picture is incomplete.
The figures say the opposite. In rural India, more than 75 per cent of the people working in agriculture are women (2025). They “perform most of the farming operations, from sowing to harvesting and threshing”. Look again at Fig. 1.1 on the chapter's first page: picture 3 shows women transplanting rice seedlings.
Why does the wrong picture stick in our minds?
- Photographs, films and advertisements usually show a man with a plough or a tractor.
- Land is most often recorded in a man's name, so the man is called “the farmer” while the woman is called “a helper” — even when she does more of the work.
- The work women do — transplanting, weeding, winnowing, threshing, caring for cattle, storing seed — is done quietly, close to the home, and is rarely photographed.
Why it matters. If we picture only men, then training programmes, tools, loans and government schemes get designed for men. Equipment is made for a man's height and grip. The person actually doing the sowing and the threshing is then left out of the help that was meant for her.