lessons learned the paper concludes with a mechanism whereby the male extensionists were legitimated and mandated to work with female farmers.
CHARACTERISTICS OF EXTENSION SERVICES
Usually it is the male extension personnel who work with farming systems researchers to locate, interview, select trial cooperators, and target disseminators. The number of male extension workers far exceeds the number of women who receive training and who are employed as extensionists in most places. Many writers comment on the paucity of female extension workers compared with male ones (Jiggins, 1984; Berger et al., 1984; Staudt, 1975-76, 1978; Fresco, 1984). The data show that worldwide (including North America and Europe) only 19% of the agricultural extension'staff members are women. The average number of female extensionists for Africa is 3%, for Latin America and the Caribbean it is 14%, and for Asia and Oceania the figure is 23%. Only in the Philippines are 40% of the staff members female. Table 1 gives the figures as of 1981 for these regions. Berger et al. (1984) estimate that of extensionists specially designated as agriculturalists, 41% do home economics rather than agriculture. Tables 2 and 3 show the number of men and women trained in two countries where women are critical in agricultural production: Malawi in Africa and Nepal in Asia. These tables show that women extensionists also are to be found in the bottom education tier and that their training is much shorter than the training for men. A consequence of this is that women extensionists often are not regarded as professionally competent in their knowledge of field crops and of livestock as men. What is not evident in the tables is that female workers are often pressured to work in home economics programs rather than to work in the agricultural programs for which they were trained. The contacts of female workers with male farmers tend to be limited; concomitantly, the male extensionists tend to deal with male farmers rather than with all farmers (Jiggins, 1984, Part 3:16). Whereas it is often the case that only a small proportion of farmers are reached by the extension service in any case, there is no reason to restrict extension to only male farmers.
In the extension service itself, male personnel hold a variety of positions, including decision-making ones that affect programs and policies. The female extensionists, with the exception of a few supervisors, usually are concentrated in the lower ranks. Often male workers are given the tasks of offering concrete agricultural services either through the training and visit system or through other regimes, while the female workers are supposed to form women's groups for small scale income generation activities. Most extension services in developing countries were modeled after the systems in North America and Western Europe during the colonial period with men providing agricultural information to male farmers and women providing home economics and nutrition information to women (Mead, 1976; Berger et al., 1984). Ironically, home economics programs in the developed countries have changed a great deal since the late 1800s and have become relevant to the needs of American farm women today, focusing on such topics as human development, consumer education, household finances, and marketing. By contrast, the teaching of domestic science in Africa is mostly focused on sewing, embriodery, recipes, and basic hygiene/nutrition. Coupled with this is the notion that there is better communication between members of the-same sex than between members of the opposite sex. Sometimes these notions are strongly stated in terms of tradition or cultural constraints and operationalized so