Fisheries have long been weak on a gender perspective, focusing mainly on the fish stocks and fish production conducted predominately by men. In terms of gender focus, aquaculture has fared only slightly better. Fortunately the tide of attention to women and, more generally, gender in fisheries and aquaculture is turning, due partly to the Asian Fisheries Society symposia that commenced in 1998. The second Global Symposium on Gender and Fisheries, held on 21 November 2007 in Kochi, India, was the latest in that series.

To set the scene for the selection of symposium papers that follow, I offer the perspective that looking at fisheries and aquaculture through the gender lens – that is, with deliberate focus on gender, and age differentiation of roles, responsibilities, access and opportunities – makes sense because it provides a better view of the whole industry and social context. As with any good lens, the picture through the gender lens is more complete, better focused and provides the basis for understanding issues and suggesting more appropriate action. The gender lens also reinforces the importance of an integrated and complete supply chain approach to fisheries, a vital factor for a sector that produces a heavily traded commodity. Without the gender lens, fisheries and aquaculture studies and actions tend to value only fish production and fish stocks, and the knowledge and roles directly linked to these.

Three case studies, chosen because some suitable gender-based information exists, illustrate the importance of using a ‘gender lens’. First, to illustrate a remote society surprisingly strongly affected by global links, I describe fisheries in the Republic of Palau. Second, to look at the impact of resource degradation on fishing communities, I have chosen the east coast peninsular Malaysia fisheries. And, third, to examine a recent and dramatic fisheries issue, I describe the case of HIV/AIDS in Uganda fishing communities. From these three cases, the view through the gender lens provides the clearer and better focused picture.

Republic of Palau, fisheries and globalization

The Republic of Palau is a small and remote Pacific Island country, composed of 586 islands, twelve of which are inhabited (Ministry of Resources and Development, 2004), located in the western Pacific ocean, East of the Philippines and North of Indonesia and Papua New Guinea. Although remote, the Palau Islands were first settled more than 3,000 years ago by people from (present day) Indonesia, Papua New Guinea and Polynesia. The current population consists of 14,000 Palauans and 7,000 non-Palauans (Ministry of Resources and Development, 2004).

After millennia of intermittent contact with other Pacific islands, Europeans first visited in the 1500s; the British came in 1783 and after that European contact increasingly linked Palau to the world beyond the Pacific and began more than 200 years of serial colonizations by Spain, Germany, Japan and the US. In 1994, Palau gained independence. All foreign powers and growing global links brought change to Palau's religion, economy and culture, including its fishing.

In 1981, the late Robert Johannes’ book – ‘Words of the Lagoon’ (1981) – described men's traditional marine fisheries practices and became a global hit, enthusing a generation of fisheries experts – most of them biologists – about the existence and potential use of traditional knowledge in marine resource conservation. However, today Palau's inshore resources are perceived as increasingly overfished as they are harvested to provide for people's food and economic needs (Kronen, 2007 http://www.spc.int/coastfish/Sections/reef/publications.htm). Also, sporadic but sometimes intense commercial export fishing ventures take live reef fish for food and ornamental use (Graham, 2001). In increasing numbers, foreign tourists come to Palau to fish and dive.

Since the 1960s, Palau's tuna fish stocks have been harvested by foreign fishing fleets. This fishing is now formalized in foreign fishing agreements that trade access to local stocks for fees. In 2005, 154 foreign tuna vessels from China, Japan, Korea, Taiwan and others were licensed to fish in Palau waters. Some progress, however, is being made to gain more direct food and employment benefits from tuna through an onshore processing plant and Palaun-owned fishing companies (Sisior, 2006). The global tuna market drives foreign and domestic interests, including illegal fishing from Indonesian and Philippine vessels.

Recent Palaun fisheries law, policies and technical training have focused on seasonal, species, area and gear restrictions for reef and coastal fishing areas (Kronen, 2007).

Many of these fields of fisheries endeavour focus only on fish production and hence men's work. Gender aspects have not been to the fore but a careful look through the gender lens reveals a more complex fisheries picture.

Palauan women traditionally enjoyed high social status but some of this status was lost as colonizing powers instituted new governance structures. Anthropologist Peter Black (Black, 1981) described how women and men on remote Tobi Island in Palau, partition food production, with women farming taro and men fishing from boats. However, women also collected invertebrates and turtles from the inshore and lagoon. The genders exchanged fish and taro in a highly symbolic system that transcended simple interpretations of satisfying basic food needs.

Elizabeth Matthews and Evelyn Oiterong (1991) produced one of the first Pacific studies of women's fishing and fish trading. Their three-month Palau study revealed 13 different fishing methods and numerous marine species fished by women; and that two-thirds of women sold their fish. Almost all women's fishing was from the shore. The study also explored the women's concerns with fish marketing and the degrading environment and resources.

In 1999, this work was updated by the Secretariat to the Pacific Community (Lambeth, 1999). By then, more women were fishing from boats whereas this was rare in the earlier study; more women were selling their fish; competition for resources had increased and the market infrastructure problems largely persisted. The report recommended that government and non-government agencies address women's fishing needs as well as men's and improve training and markets.

Today, conservation bodies such as the Palau Conservation Society, assisted by global organizations and funding, are focusing on reef and coastal resources that women and children fish and involving them in the programmes.

Recently, the Secretariat of the Pacific Community and Palaun fisheries agencies reviewed all previous Palauan coastal fisheries studies and conducted comprehensive and integrated assessments of the community involvement of men and women in fishing, fish marketing and consumption (Kronen, 2007). These studies confirmed that fishing is carried out by three-quarters of households. Men predominantly target finfish but women's fishing for shellfish is dominant in some islands in ecosystems such as reef tops and among seagrasses. Fish are commonly marketed and exchanged in villages as well as sold in town markets. Therefore inshore, small-scale fishing provides considerably more household support than indicated by income figures alone. Traditional marine tenure rules are now less respected than in the past by commercial fishers and the young but are being incorporated into formal environmental and protected area arrangements. As people living in Palau seek greater means to purchase consumer goods, and despite the high price of fish, fisheries seldom provide a household's first or second source of income.

Overall, in spite of its small size and remoteness, Palau society and resources are closely linked to the rest of the world and are increasingly affected by world markets, including those for tuna and tourism, as well as melding old and newer marine conservation ideas. Although fishing is strongly identified with men, women have always had a role and, in the modern world when economic needs are increasing, the gender's roles are overlapping more. More mainstream fisheries interventions tended to focus on offshore tuna resources, live reef fish trade and game fishing for tourism. Gender-sensitive studies revealed the ongoing importance of the inshore resources accessible to exploitation by men, women and youth and their increased need for conservation.

East coast fisheries of peninsular Malaysia

My second case looks at resource depletion in east coast peninsular Malaysia.

Malaysia's east coast fisheries methods and economy were described in Raymond Firth's classical 1939–1940 study (1966), just two decades before they became industrialized. Today, like many fisheries around the world, the fish stocks are a fraction of their former size. Between 1967 and 1998, a drop of inshore fish catch rates of 90 percent was recorded from trawl surveys (Abu Talib et al., 2003a). Today, purse seiners, bottom trawlers and a large number of very small mechanized gillnetters still fish. By Malaysian standards, general economic development on the east coast has been slow and thus alternative economic options are low. Where once only local and inland dried fish markets existed, now markets in Kuala Lumpur, Singapore and further afield also take the fresh and frozen catch.

Over the last several decades, most government and commercial assistance has gone to economic programmes to increase the fishing and market capacity for the larger vessels, largely bypassing the smaller fishers and their communities (Ghee, 1990; Yahaya, 2001). However, the numbers of small vessels are permitted to rise unchecked, and, in 1997, represented three-quarters of the total east coast fleet of 6,000 vessels (Abu Talib et al., 2003b).

In parallel with Raymond Firth's classic study, his wife, Rosemary Firth (1966) published her studies on housekeeping in the same fishing villages. She found that the fishing households did not act as single units – women and men having separate economies tied back to access to shares of the catch based on complex obligations, relationships and responsibilities. Women often dried their share of the catch for inland trade and also made some income by selling homemade snacks.

Since then, fish markets have expanded, fishing practices have mechanized and women's chances for income from direct fish selling and from homemade snacks have been reduced by retail competition. Women hardly rate among the number of fishers, comprising four out of nearly 5,000 traditional fishers on the east coast in 1995 (Abu Talib et al., 2003b) but they still contribute considerable unpaid labour to the processing and support services of the depleted east coast fisheries (Yahaya, 2001), or, as my colleague Choo Poh Sze says, they who can least afford to subsidize the price of fish (Choo, 2005).

In a 2007 survey, Yeo et al. (2007) showed that more than 80 percent of the spouses of east coast fishers did not have any paid employment. Those who are employed are low paying rubber tappers, cooks, cleaners and a few are nurses, teachers and clerks. Thus, the households depended greatly on fishing income – on average over 70 percent of household income is from fishing. Only one-third of households were above the official Malaysian poverty line.

The incidence of poverty among east coast Malaysian fisheries households may have been lower if gender dimensions had received more attention. The focus would have shown the need to create greater economic opportunities, as distinct from welfare assistance, for the women and the men and the negative impact of the severely depleted fish stocks on the households of small-scale and inshore fishers.

HIV/AIDS in Uganda fishing communities

My third example addresses the case of HIV/AIDS in Uganda fishing communities. In Uganda, the first AIDS case was found in 1982 and the country recognized that AIDS was a problem across the society in 1985. In 1992, the government launched a multi-sectoral approach. Even this approach, however, did not trigger awareness of the disease rates in the fisheries sector.

The 2001 Asian Fisheries Society Global Women in Fisheries Symposium sounded the first wider alarm bell on the high rates of HIV/AIDS in the fishing sector (Huang, 2004) and was a key event in alerting the world to the problem (FAO, 2002; Allison and Seeley, 2004). One consequence was that Uganda launched specific studies to examine the rates in their fishing communities and found that rates were more than three times the population rate and a large absolute number of people were infected (Grellier et al., 2004).

Recognizing that fishing communities are HIV/AIDS hotspots, the Uganda Government developed a comprehensive 2005 ‘Uganda Strategy for Reducing the Impact of HIV and AIDS on Fishing Communities’. Behaviours of men and women in the fisheries sector made them susceptible, plus the isolated, itinerant nature of fishing communities meant that they did not receive health education and services to lessen the risk of infection and its impact.

The Ugandan strategy aims to overcome these problems and is serving as a model for other countries bordering Lake Victoria, coordinated by the regional Lake Victoria Fisheries Organization (LVFO). In 2007, LVFO signed an agreement with the African Medical and Research Foundation for joint action against HIV/AIDS and has a new strategy for HIV/AIDS.

In my view, more still could be seen and more solutions suggested, however, with a stronger gender lens.

In the Uganda population overall, women have higher rates of HIV/AIDS infection than men (55 percent of those infected are women (Grellier et al., 2004)). Yet, most of the data I found quoted men's rates – for example, the cross-occupational comparisons refer to occupations of men. The rates for women fish traders, who are known to trade sex to secure access to fish supplies (Allison and Seeley, 2004), for example, are not addressed.

However, the new Uganda and LVFO strategies are fully inclusive of gender dimensions in their intent. And they are also inclusive of the relevant agencies. They aim to reduce the incidence in youths, prevent mother–child transmission and empower women not to be sexual victims in their fish processing and trading roles.

The HIV/AIDS case study in Uganda is an example of how the problem in fishing communities was only revealed through a gender-aware symposium (the 2001 Global Symposium on Women in Fisheries), and then addressed. This is another compelling example of how using a gender lens in fisheries produces a better fisheries situational analysis. The community-based work that has followed should benefit the fishery and those who rely on it, including saving lives and improving health.

Clearer view through the gender lens

The cases of Palau, east coast Malaysia and Uganda fisheries each show that a better view is seen through a gender lens. In Palau, studying gender roles emphasized the importance of the inshore resources and environment for all people living in Palau, and the importance of finding better domestic benefits from tuna stocks. In Malaysia, the gender lens highlighted the dependence of women on the fish caught, even if they are not the catchers. Most importantly, it also showed that the needs of the small-scale fishers are being overlooked in the market competition for limited fish. Uganda's attention to HIV/AIDS in the fishing communities came about because gender and fisheries work highlighted the high rates in fishing communities, including among women seeking access to resources to trade, even though the Ugandan government had long recognized the multi-sectoral nature of the problem.

Using a gender lens shows us much more of the nature of fisheries issues. As fisheries and aquaculture experts and professionals, we have a responsibility and an opportunity to ensure that all projects, programmes and policies consciously use a gender lens.