




































Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal 2 (2): 111–116, July 2019 

 
NOTES FROM THE FIELD  
 

What Does ‘Gender’ Mean in Myanmar’s Rural 
Fishery Communities? 
 

Sayuri Ichikawa   
 
1. INTRODUCTION 

Throughout much of the world, fishing industry is perceived to be 
dominated by men. While its iconic figure, „fisherman‟, is indeed usually a 
male, 1  and the term itself a telling indication of how the industry is 
gendered in the public eye, in this essay, I‟m likely to complicate this 
picture, by discussing the important and unseen role of women in the 
processing and sale of marine products, which too often is unrecognized or 
underrepresented (Fröcklin 2013; Resurreccion 2008; Weeratunge et al., 
2010).  

In doing this, I take the readers to the field - the fisheries of Myanmar. The 
country is still struggling with internal conflict, and its many ethnic groups 
exhibit social norms that might fairly be glossed as patriarchal. In Myanmar, 
as in many other countries, the gendered division of labour and restrictions 
are observed in most aspects of domestic and public life, and this is more 
emphatically apparent in rural communities.2 Myanmar‟s fishing industry is 

                                                           
 Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, J. G. Crawford Building, 
132 Lennox Crossing, Acton ACT 2601 Australia; Sayuri.Ichikawa@anu.edu.au 

Copyright © Ichikawa 2019. Released under Creative Commons Attribution-
NonCommercial 4.0 International licence (CC BY-NC 4.0) by the author.  

Published by Indian Society for Ecological Economics (INSEE), c/o Institute of Economic 
Growth, University Enclave, North Campus, Delhi 110007.  

ISSN: 2581-6152 (print); 2581-6101 (web). 

DOI: https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.80  
1  There are, of course, many exceptions to this. See, for example David Palazon‟s 
documentary on female fisherfolk of Atauro Island in Timor-Leste (Palazon 2013), Kuntala 
Lahiri-Dutt‟s documentary on women‟s role in the fishery sector of Mumbai, India (Lahiri-
Dutt 2019), and Charotte Moser‟s work “Listening to Women Fishers on the Sekong River” 
(Moser 2015). 
2 For a more detailed discussion on the status of women in present day Myanmar, see, 
Raising the Curtain from Gender Equality Network (GEN 2018). 

https://doi.org/10.37773/ees.v2i2.80


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [112] 

no exception; women make a significant contribution to fish processing and 
marketing, yet their role is not fully acknowledged in the official statistics 
and is largely ignored by the policy-makers.  

My research focused on the small-scale fishery value chain of fishing 
communities of Ayeyarwady region and was carried out as part of an 
internship for Network Activities Group.3 I carried out the research in early 
2019 using qualitative methods for analysing the roles of multiple actors in 
Myanmar fisheries value-chain, their genders, their relationships and the 
opportunities and constraints they face, with the aim of identifying spaces 
for interventions that will better the lot of women working within the 
industry. My fieldwork revealed surprising and unexpected aspects of 
„gender‟, and some even contradicted with the main-stream associations and 
perceptions of the term. In this note, I share these unexpected findings to 
illustrate the complexity and diversity of gender issues and challenges 
present in rural communities.  

 

2. IS THE PHRASE ‘WOMEN ARE CHATTY’ COMMON 
ACROSS CULTURES? 

A popular belief is that men tend to look for peace and quiet to cope with 
stressful situations in contrast to women, who look for a chat to cope with 
the stress of everyday life and enjoy their time (Gray 2004; Pease and Pease 
2016). In my experiences of growing up in Japan, I saw generally more men 
than women enjoyed drinking and talking for hours at the end of the 
working week. This experience made me sceptical about this gendered 
perception of women in Myanmar. As a gender researcher, I have come to 
realise that such perceptions are built upon the gender perspectives that 
societies usually impose on individuals (Cornwall 2000). Yet, what I found 
even more surprising was how this perception surfaced in many of the rural 
fishery communities where I conducted my fieldwork. 

A gendered pattern of behaviour that emerged in the focus-group 
discussions is one of the most undeniably astonishing findings that I came 
across, and one that made me reconsider what these so-called relationship 
books talk about. In each of the four villages, where my research was based, 
I conducted separate focus group discussions with a male group and a 
female group, each comprising 5-6 participants representing different 

                                                           
3 The Network Activities Group is a major NGO in Myanmar that works on community 
development and governance throughout the country. See, https://nagmyanmar.org/who-
we-are/ 

https://nagmyanmar.org/who-we-are/
https://nagmyanmar.org/who-we-are/


[113] Sayuri Ichikawa 

activities in the fishery value chain. I conducted easy-to-grasp activities such 
as mapping the fishery value chain and gender access and control matrix, 
but also somewhat awkward activities that go into unfamiliar concepts like 
identifying gender-based role associations, gendered perspectives and 
expectations from “male” and “female”. In all four villages, I observed that 
the focus group discussions with men were quiet and consisted of minimal 
conversations, making the atmosphere serious with almost no smile or 
laughter. Often, I would have to ask additional questions to the set 
questions I had prepared in order to get the information I sought. In 
instances where they found the questions or topic awkward, they would 
only show an awkward smile in response. On the other hand, the focus-
group discussions with women were always “chatty”, making the 
atmosphere lively with constant talking and laughing. In one of the villages, 
women could not stop laughing at the fact that we were asking them about 
what roles they associated with “male” and “female” in the community. 
Yet, from the reports of researchers who conducted the women‟s focus-
group discussions, we found that most of their chats were neither relevant 
nor helpful in achieving the objective of the activity.  

In another case, while we were informally talking with the women of the 
house where focus-group discussions were held, they told us that “men 
must listen to our concerns and our issues, and if they don‟t listen we will 
make them listen, because we are strong enough to do so and that is what 
they need to do to be good husbands.” This particular case surprised me for 
two reasons; first that women do indeed want to talk about and ask for a 
partner who will listen to their concerns, and second, women do have the 
power to ask for such things to men within the household. In Men are from 
Mars, women are from Venus, which has become one of the greatest bestsellers 
writing about relationships, Gray (2004) states that men will withdraw into 
solitude to deal with the issues he faces while women will look to share her 
issues with people whom she trusts, and in doing so demand such attention 
from their partners. Assuming that these women and men in Myanmar‟s 
rural fishery communities might have never come across such books, their 
statement presumably comes from the gendered perceptions that their 
society has imposed on them. This made me consider where gender 
perceptions come from and how they can interestingly be identical across 
cultures sometimes.  

 

 

 

 



Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [114] 

3. GENDER PERSPECTIVES AND OCCASIONAL 
CONTRADICTIONS 

Another unexpected finding, and one that has confused me in my 
interpretation of gendered perspectives in Myanmar‟s rural fishery 
communities, is how women, being associated to “home,” do not always 
mean restricted mobility. When I conducted fieldwork in an inland village 
where fish processing is a popular livelihood option for women, I found 
that these female fish processors were one of the most mobile, making 
regular travels of approximately 2-3 hours one-way to Yangon‟s central 
market and back to sell their products directly to fish traders and the 
middlemen. However, at the same time, I observed that women are 
associated with the “home”, responsible for everything ranging from house 
chores and raising children to collecting fish from fishing nets and fish 
processing. In the light of works of gender researchers such as Resurreccion 
(2006), which show that women‟s association with home restricts their 
overall mobility, my observations in Myanmar troubled my interpretation of 
this association between women and home. This was even more troubled 
when I compared these results with the results of the focus group 
discussions with female actors. In a delta-area village, from where access to 
Yangon‟s central market would require approximately five hours of travel 
one-way, two hours by boat to the regional city and then another 2-3 hour 
by bus to Yangon, female fish collectors stated that the women stayed 
home, and the men travelled. In interviews, these female fish collectors, 
who are engaged in the business with family and relatives, stated that 
women stay at home and take responsibility for collecting fish and 
managing finance, while men travel with the fish products to the market to 
ensure safe delivery and payment from collectors in the central market. 
While a comparison between fish processors and fish collectors from 
different regions is difficult, a possible interpretation is that two gender 
perceptions, “women are chatty, thus are more suited for bargaining and 
sales” and “women are associated with home” clashed but the former 
trumps the latter for leveraging economic gains and influences women‟s 
mobility related to sales activity, which is counterposed to their 
predominant role of homemaker. Such contradicting findings have made 
me realize the complexity of gender studies, and how it can change 
depending on various aspects such as culture, time and location.  

 

 

 

 



[115] Sayuri Ichikawa 

4. LEARNING THE COMPLEXITY OF GENDER RESEARCH 

As is often concluded in gender research and observed in rural fishery 
communities, women are associated with “home” and “being chatty”, thus 
often making them responsible for house chores and raising children as well 
as selling their products (Resurreccion 2006). In our fieldwork in 
Myanmar‟s rural fishery communities, we came across unexpectedly 
universal gendered behaviour such as women being chatty and wanting 
someone to listen to their issues and at the same time unexpectedly 
contradicting gendered behaviour by being the most mobile at the same 
time associated with home. Such mixed findings made my interpretation of 
the gender perspectives in these rural fishery communities difficult, but at 
the same time made me appreciate what gender studies have always 
emphasized: gender differs based on many factors such as time, culture, 
location, and society.  

 

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 

This fieldwork was conducted as part of the Institute of Coastal and Water 
Research project supported by the Livelihoods and Food Security Funds 
through a research internship at Network Activities Group (NAG) in 
Myanmar. I would like to express my gratitude to NAG and their research 
team for assisting me in this research and fieldwork. I would also like to 
thank Keith Barney and Kuntala Lahiri-Dutt for their guidance, and 
Michael Rose for his valuable feedback. 

 

REFERENCES 

Cornwall, A. 2000. Making a Difference? Gender and Participatory Development. Brighton: 
Institute of Development Studies. 

Fröcklin, S., M. de la Torre-Castro, L. Lindström, and N. S. Jiddawi. 2013. “Fish 
Traders as Key Actors in Fisheries: Gender and Adaptive Management.” AMBIO 
42 (8): 951–62. https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-013-0451-1 

Gender Equality Network. 2018. Raising the Curtain. Yangon: Gender Equality 
Network. 

Gray, J. 2004. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus: The classic guide to understanding 
the opposite sex. New York: Harper Collins Publishers 

Lahiri-Dutt, K. 2019. “Fished! Fisherwomen of Mumbai.” Video, 19:28. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pQaDImryQA  

https://doi.org/10.1007/s13280-013-0451-1
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-pQaDImryQA


Ecology, Economy and Society–the INSEE Journal [116] 

Moser, C. 2015. “Listening to Women Fishers on the Sekong River.” Journal of Lao 
Studies Special Issue: 140–160. 

Palazon, D. 2013. “Wawata Topu (Women Divers in Rasua dialect) - Mermaids of 
Timor-Leste.” Video, 32:53. https://vimeo.com/81265144  

Pease, A. and B. Pease. 2016. Why Men Don't Listen & Women Can't Read Maps: How 
to Spot the Differences in The Way Men & Women Think. United Kingdom: Hachette. 

Resurreccion, B. P. 2006. “Rules, Roles and Rights: Gender, Participation and 
Community Fisheries Management in Cambodia‟s Tonle Sap Region.” International 
Journal of Water Resources Development 22 (3): 433–47. 
https://doi.org/10.1080/07900620500482949 

Weeratunge, N., K. A. Snyder, and C. P. Sze. 2010. “Gleaner, Fisher, Trader, 
Processor: Understanding Gendered Employment in Fisheries and Aquaculture.” 
Fish and Fisheries 11 (4): 405–20. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-2979.2010.00368.x 

https://vimeo.com/81265144
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