This post was written by Amanda Garris and Liz Alexander.

When Rita Gurung was a graduate student in India, she witnessed her male friends finding paid research fieldwork positions and wondered what cultural assumptions about women’s aptitude or suitability for fieldwork were limiting her access to these opportunities. 

“Professors and project leaders routinely excluded female students from fieldwork because they thought they couldn’t safely send the women alone in rural areas or that their efficiency would not be on the same level as the men,” said Gurung. 

Now an assistant professor at Nepal’s Agriculture and Forestry University, Gurung is determined to create career-building opportunities for both male and female students. As a project co-principal investigator and gender specialist with the Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety, she started by recruiting and training six female and four male graduate students to conduct a large-scale survey of farmers’ food safety knowledge, attitudes, and practices across farming communities in Nepal. Her goals were to: integrate classroom theory with real-world practice; strengthen local research capacity; and challenge gender norms for field research. 

Beyond learning about best practices in survey execution — including sample size considerations and use of Qualtrics — female enumerators shared that they gained perspective on the diversity of agricultural practices and challenges farmers face in providing safe, nutritious food for consumers. In addition, they learned the value of teamwork in dealing with unexpected situations in the field. Communicating with farmers of both genders from different regions gave enumerator Shila Bashyal, an M.S. student in horticulture at AFU, the opportunity to develop research skills that would not have been possible in a classroom setting.

“The training enumerators receive before a survey usually focuses on what questions need to be asked, in which order they should be asked, and how they should be asked, but this prepares us to get only 50% of the answers,” said Bashyal. “The rest requires communication and interpersonal skills that we ourselves must develop.”

“Professionally, it enhanced my communication skills and increased my confidence level,” said Bandana Thapaliya, another AFU M.S. student. “Moreover, I worked with communities different from my own, fostering a deeper understanding of cultural diversity and sensitivity. I came across the different cultivation practices used by farmers in different parts of the country and even the farmers' perspectives regarding the use of pesticides and food safety.”

In the end, the team successfully conducted 1,057 surveys in 10 districts, collecting valuable data on current food safety knowledge and practices for the project. Beyond a complete data set, Gurung also observed the female students developing confidence in dealing with the challenges of rural fieldwork and skills in communication, while keeping pace with their male peers in meeting daily quotas.

Thapaliya suspects this challenge of fieldwork gender norms will leave an impression beyond the scope of this project. 

“In a few communities, especially in the Terai regions of Nepal, female respondents found female enumerators easier to interact with,” Thapaliya noted. “And they were quite empowered seeing us doing research and visiting different places in Nepal.”

The Feed the Future Innovation Lab for Food Safety is one of more than 20 Innovation Labs with U.S. universities under Feed the Future, the U.S. government’s global hunger and food security initiative led by USAID.