In their quest to complete a literature review of research about women and agricultural development, Jacqueline Ashby and Jennifer Twyman found themselves stalked by what seemed to be zombie myths: concepts, ideas and statistics that — no matter how thoroughly debunked — just refused to die.
“You can read papers from the 1980s and they don’t look terribly different from the papers that are being written now,” said Ashby, senior adviser on gender and research for CGIAR, an international consortium of agricultural research organizations, in an exclusive interview with Devex in Paris.
Nobody can explain zombies. And nobody knows why there’s been so little progress in research on agriculture and gender.