Highlights:

• Globally, food insecurity is more prevalent among women than men. 

• Women’s food security is more affected by climate shocks than men’s. 

• Women are more concentrated in informal, insecure, and poorly remunerated nodes of the food value chain. 

• Women have less secure land tenure compared to men and are much less likely to own land. 

• The rights to gender equality and to adequate food are mutually reinforcing. Without gender equality and women’s empowerment, ending hunger and malnutrition is not possible. 

• Gender inequalities are both a cause and an outcome of unequal food systems. 

• Gender inequalities need to be considered together with other dimensions of inequality, including wealth, ethnicity, age, disability, sexual orientation. 

• Gender inequalities are rooted in social norms and rules that restrict women’s and girls’ rights, opportunities and access to resources such as land, credit and information. 

• Limited access to resources, services and opportunities undermines women’s economic status, resilience, participation and leadership in food systems. 

• To achieve lasting and equitable change, a gender transformative approach is needed to address the root causes of gender inequality by challenging power dynamics and systemic barriers. 

• Advancing gender equality and women's empowerment must be an explicit goal across the food system, from the individual to the system level. 

• Evidence confirms that women’s empowerment can improve nutrition and food security, but complementary measures (such as social protection, childcare, legal frameworks, infrastructures) are needed to ensure positive trade-offs between gender equality and other food systems outcomes. 

• More research is needed to understand the connections between food systems transformation, gender equality, and women’s empowerment. 

• Sex-disaggregated and gender sensitive data across the entire food system, together with analysis and policy uptake are needed.