In Panama, Honduras, and El Salvador, households headed by women represent an estimated 22 percent of the total rural households. As subsistence activities become the sole responsibility of women, such crucial tasks as gathering wood products and securing food become ever more encumbering. Adding to their difficulties, rural women usually lack access to credit and seldom own land in Central America. Credit is often a bottleneck for all small farmers in Latin American countries, but more so for women, usually because of gender biases in credit policies. Such constraints often impeded their ability to improve resource management practices and increase their welfare.
Few women have opportunities for education and training in forestry and agroforestry.
Worldwide the forestry profession is male-dominated. For example, in North America, only 10 percent of the total 18,000 professional forester members of the Society of American Foresters are women, according to 1993 figures. In the U.S. Forest Service, women comprise only 26 percent of the total professional staff of 12,054 people, and only 7 percent of senior executive officers are women, as of 1992. In Central America, such detailed data are not available for forestry institutions, but general estimates suggest that fewer than 10 percent of the professional staff in the region's government forestry services are women. In this region's educational and training institutes for forest professionals and technicians, women comprise only about 2 to 6 percent of the graduates, based on a study of 17 institutions with a total of 130 graduates annually.