The role of women in the fisheries sector

A lack of detailed gender specific data led to an approach where reviewing existing literature was backed up by field enquiry by a team of specialists based throughout the Member States. The wide geographic coverage required (EU 15) meant that, given the study’s scope, (i) enquiry needed to be mostly limited to specific key Fisheries Dependent Areas (FDAs) or pockets of fisheries activity in “non FDAs” and (ii) fully statistically rigorous surveys could not be undertaken and surveys had to rely upon opinion from a limited number of key knowledgeable individuals in the FDAs. A template was devised to impose a common approach, and this was successful up to a point, though variations in the different team members perception of the issues led to a diverse response. However value was seen in this in that where there were common results, these were seen as being the more valid because of the diversity of the researcher’s outlooks.