Asian Basic and Applied Research Journal

Women constitute a substantial share of the global workforce in capture fisheries and aquaculture, yet their contributions remain unevenly recorded, weakly protected and rarely decisive in sectoral decision-making. Two decades of scholarship have moved the field from advocacy for recognition towards quantified estimates of participation, structural analysis of constraint and evaluation of interventions intended to expand women's agency. The evidence produced along that trajectory is uneven in design, geographically concentrated and conceptually fragmented, and the resulting picture of what empowerment means in fisheries, and of what actually shifts it, remains contested. This critical narrative review examines the peer-reviewed and authoritative institutional literature published between 2010 and mid-2026 on women's roles in fisheries and aquaculture, the structural conditions that constrain them, and the interventions and governance reforms proposed to address those conditions. Literature was identified through Crossref Metadata Search, Europe PMC, Semantic Scholar, the Directory of Open Access Journals and targeted institutional repositories, supplemented by backward and forward citation searching, with every retained source verified against its Digital Object Identifier or official landing page. Four findings emerge. Global participation estimates have improved but rest on modelling assumptions and administrative categories that continue to under-record gleaning, post-harvest labour and unpaid household work. Structural constraints operate primarily through control over assets, income and decision-making rather than through exclusion from participation as such. Policy commitments to gender equality are widespread but are systematically narrowed during translation into sectoral instruments and organisational practice. Intervention evidence is dominated by small, short-term, single-site studies with few counterfactuals, so claims about effectiveness remain weakly supported. Confidence is strongest for descriptive characterisation of gendered divisions of labour and weakest for causal claims about intervention impact. Priorities include harmonised gender-disaggregated data systems, longitudinal and comparative intervention evaluation, and explicit attention to relational and intersectional dimensions of empowerment.