Other studies, however, show that these lower yields are usually the result of lower use of labor and fertilizer per acre rather than managerial and technical inefficiency. Unequal rights and obligations within the household, as well as limited time and financial resources, pose a greater constraint to women. Given equal access to resources and human capital, women farmers can achieve equal or even, as some studies show, significantly higher yields than men. Including women in the evaluation of new technologies is an excellent way of efficiently diffusing technology since women are likely to share their knowledge with other women farmers, whereas male farmers are reluctant to impart such information to women. Laws governing women's rights to land vary widely.
Some religious laws forbid female landownership.
Even when civil law gives women the right to inherit land, local custom may rule otherwise. Women tend to be allocated poorer land, whose quality deteriorates even further as it is intensively cultivated. Some resettlement and irrigation projects have actually eroded women's rights to land by providing formal titles only to men. This insecurity of tenure reduces the likelihood that women will invest much time and many resources in usufruct land or adopt environmentally sustainable farming practices. The weakness of women's land rights also results in an inability to use land as collateral to obtain access to credit, which is often critical to the timely purchase of productivity-enhancing inputs such as improved seed varieties and fertilizer.