agriculture Article Agribusiness as an Attractive Place to Work— A Gender Perspective Magdalena Kozera-Kowalska 1 and Jaroslaw Uglis 2, *   Citation: Kozera-Kowalska, M.; Uglis, J. Agribusiness as an Attractive Place to Work—A Gender Perspective. Agriculture 2021, 11, 202. https://doi.org/10.3390/ agriculture11030202 Academic Editor: Piotr Prus Received: 5 February 2021 Accepted: 25 February 2021 Published: 1 March 2021 Publisher’s Note: MDPI stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. Copyright: © 2021 by the authors. Licensee MDPI, Basel, Switzerland. This article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ 4.0/). 1 Department of Law and Enterprise Management in Agribusiness, Pozna ´ n University of Life Sciences, 28 Wojska Polskiego, 60-637 Pozna´ n, Poland; magdalena.kozera@up.poznan.pl 2 Laboratory of Rural Tourism, Pozna´ n University of Life Sciences, 28 Wojska Polskiego, 60-637 Pozna´ n, Poland * Correspondence: jaroslaw.uglis@up.poznan.pl Abstract: Agribusiness is both a complex social process and a market structure, consisting of many independent economic entities that generate demand for labour in the sector. The role of people whose activity is directly or indirectly related to the production of food products, the acquisition of resources, and the processing and production of ready food was considered. The way gender affects people’s decision to work in this sector and university graduates’ perception of agribusiness being an ideal job were also analysed. A total of 485 students, from four fields of study, from the Pozna´ n University of Life Sciences were surveyed between 2016 and 2019. In the case of undergraduate students, it was determined that while they perceive that working in agribusiness is an interesting career stage, they are also convinced that they could easily find a job outside of this sector. Additionally, from a gender perspective, men and women view working in agribusiness differently. Women see it as an opportunity for self-development and building good social relations as well as acting for the benefit of the environment. For men, job-related prestige and economic benefits are much more important. Men were found to have higher aspirations for pursuing their own businesses, whereas women were more likely to pursue further education. The attitudes towards working in agribusiness represented by the respondents are a good predictor of meeting its knowledge needs. Keywords: agribusiness; agriculture; gender perspective of work; ideal job; Generation Z view of work 1. Introduction Agribusiness is a complex and diverse sub-system of the national economy, which in- cludes entities handling production, processing and distribution of food and its derivatives as well as other related services. It integrates independent, economically-separate entities that work together to jointly make the national food economy more competitive [1]. At the same time, agribusiness is a complex social process involving people whose activities are directly or indirectly related to the production of food products, obtaining and processing resources, and the production of ready food. From a yet another perspective, agribusiness is a complex structure consisting of many independent labour-demand-generating economic entities, whose activities are intertwined and complementary [2–4]. Such entities employ nearly 44 million Europeans, half of whom work in agriculture itself [5]. Providing both resources for processing for ready food products for direct consumption, agriculture is one of the leading components of this system. Due to the continuing efforts to adapt this sector to the requirements of sustainable development, there is an increasing demand for knowledge in it, both in regard to technologies and skilled workers [6–8]. However, by no means does this indicate that the demand for labour in this sector can be easily met. Despite the well-developed specialised agriculture and agribusiness education at the secondary and tertiary education system levels, relatively few people are interested in working in this sector [4]. This is related to such things as the well-established stereotype Agriculture 2021, 11, 202. https://doi.org/10.3390/agriculture11030202 https://www.mdpi.com/journal/agriculture