This represents a significant obstacle to promoting gender-responsive sustainable development. Comprehensive, reliable and unbiased data and information on the nature and role of women's contributions to food and agricultural production is needed. This is one of the main constraints to incorporating gender issues into agricultural and economic development policies and planning. Data on women is still seen as only marginally relevant to policy-making. Reliable sources for such data, particularly in the agricultural sector, are generally lacking in developing countries.
Gender biases mark every stage of the exercise from design, to field interviews, and to analysis.
This compounds the difficulties of data collection in rural areas, particularly in the informal sector. Women's participation in the labour force tends to be fluid, seasonal and varied. As a result, concepts and definitions relating to women's work and household relationships contribute to their invisibility. In addition, international and national emphasis on economic over non-economic activities has created a focus on statistics relating to the market and to monetary transactions which excludes much of women's work in rural areas. Gender disaggregated data alone cannot provide insights into the processes that determine the differential impacts of policies on women and men.