To be analytically useful, the concept of the division of labor needs to take into account decision making as a gendered activity. Decision making is all-important in the retinue of agricultural activities, but gender dynamics in various social units differentially affect the participation of women in it. In Bali, households and irrigation communities, called subak, each manage different aspects of rice cultivation. Distinct sets of factors account for the dissimilar participation of women and men in decision making in the two domains. [gender division of labor, decision making, household, collective action, irrigated agriculture, development, Indonesia]Studies of the gender division of labor are useful for identifying the points at which men or women can create leverage on the basis of the tasks they perform to secure a greater measure of influence, if not formal control, for themselves.- Bossen, 1989 S ocial scientists using feminist approaches in the study of agriculture remark on two important phenomena. Reversing decades of academic neglect, many researchers are revealing that women have long played and continue to play an active part in agriculture by engaging in a wide variety of tasks related to cultivation. They argue that previous readings of the organization of agricultural communities around the world suffered from a male bias, resulting in an institutional and political blindness that rendered women farmers ''invisible'' (Boserup ). By implication, therefore, all farmers were men. Studies of agriculture in regions of sub-Saharan West Africa where women grow designated crops on land set aside for them-among the few exceptions to this former research tendency toward oversight-have only recently acted as a trigger for full-blown studies of women in areas where cultivation involves farmers of both genders.Simultaneously, others note the growing ''feminization'' of agriculture worldwide, whereby women are performing nontraditional farming tasks and are becoming more responsible for subsistence cultivation as men migrate out of rural areas in search of waged jobs in towns and cities (Besteman 1995; Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations n.d.a). This trend concerns scholars and policy makers alike, who argue that relatively more women are now employed full-time in agriculture than in the past but that few, if any, state policies target their needspractical and strategic (see Moser 1989)-in the processes of household production and maintenance.

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