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Despite gender mainstreaming in other sectors, agriculture often remains a male-dominated blind spot. GRASS Ceiling set out to change this.
Led by South East Technological University (SETU) in Ireland, and active in nine countries, the GRASS Ceiling project explores why women remain overlooked in decision-making, funding and recognition. It poses a long overdue question: What happens when women’s ideas, enterprises and needs are placed at the centre of rural development? As it turns out, quite a lot.
A ground-level approach
At the core of GRASS Ceiling are Living Labs: community-based hubs where women farmers and rural innovators meet with enterprise officers, banks, local authorities and researchers. The idea was to co-design, asking: What do women need to succeed? What barriers are they facing? What’s already working?
Paying the participants for their time proved crucial, as this acknowledged the value of lived expertise and helped them balance participation with farming and caregiving. The result was full engagement and more honest conversations.
“We really wanted to work with rural and farm female innovators and co-create the knowledge,” says project coordinator Sally Shortall, professor of Rural Economy at Newcastle University/SETU. “We learned from them what they needed, what they were doing, what the challenges were, and then matched support to those needs.”
The findings were consistent across all nine countries. Many participants were running farms and businesses that reflect EU sustainability goals: low-input, regenerative, deeply rooted in local economies. But traditional funding and advisory systems weren’t built with them in mind. Requirements around farm size or ownership status often exclude women, while business support is typically geared towards large, export-focused farms rather than female-led local enterprises.
Even inheritance law, supposedly gender-neutral in places such as Norway, doesn’t help. Farms are still often passed on to sons, while daughters are sometimes actively discouraged from taking over. Legal frameworks can help to change this, but they are only a part of the picture.
“Change is possible,” says Shortall. “But it’s not going to happen without policy incentives and a real commitment to structural change.”
From insights to action
What began as a deep listening exercise has already delivered tools, policy proposals and visible results. Through its Living Labs, GRASS Ceiling has supported 72 rural women innovators across the nine participating EU countries. Some launched new businesses. Others built partnerships and networks that extended their impact.
Key outputs include the GRASS Ceiling policy toolkit that will launch in December, and which includes a gender proofing template for agriculture, a benchmarking tool, and a training module for evaluating gender balance in rural policies. The hope is that Member States will use the gender proofing template when designing their national common agricultural policy (CAP) plans.
To bring grassroots voices into policy, GRASS Ceiling also created a European Policy Forum. This allowed women from the Living Labs to speak directly with officials from DG AGRI, Copa-Cogeca and EU equality bodies. These sessions helped shape policy recommendations grounded in real-world experience.
Among the proposals are calls for mandatory gender impact assessments for national CAP plans, gender balance in agricultural leadership bodies, and funding models that reflect the scale and structure of rural women’s enterprises.
Visibility and confidence also grew as the women (many of whom were from remote areas) spoke at large events for the first time, and shared their stories through the media and vlogs. It is ultimately these stories that form the foundation of GRASS Ceiling.
As Shortall puts it: “What women are doing on the ground is exactly the kind of farming the EU wants – but the system hasn’t been set up to support them. That’s what we’re working to change.”
Changing the narrative
GRASS Ceiling runs until December 2025, but it will leave behind far more than just reports and toolkits. It offers a model for inclusive innovation, one that values lived experience, invests in co-creation and recognises the power of small, localised solutions to create broader change.
“Rural women have always been central to how farms and communities function,” adds Shortall. “We’re just finally starting to recognise them as innovators and leaders in their own right.”
The ceiling hasn’t disappeared yet, but cracks are beginning to show.