Empowering Women through Entrepreneurship: An Empirical Investigation

Abstract

The empowerment of women is a very important element of sustainable economic growth in any nation. A woman is said to be empowered, if her access to the different constituents of development, viz., health, education, earnings, opportunities, rights, freedom, social recognition, political participation and ability to protest are improved. Women’s participation in entrepreneurial activities may play powerful role in their empowerment. Increase in women’s income level through participation in entrepreneurial activities may leads to better economic security and they get a space in their household decision making process and thus in the society. The present study thus makes an attempt to find out the interrelation between women’s entrepreneurship development and their empowerment with reference to two districts of West Bengal. The study hypothesizes that entrepreneurship enables women empowerment. For the construction of women empowerment indices fuzzy set theory has been used. The study observes that self entrepreneurship has positive and significant effect on women’s mobility, economic security, participation in household decisions, contribution in household expenses, ability to protest and thus in overall women empowerment, but it has not that kind of effect on women’s relative freedom and political and legal awareness. The study concludes that entrepreneurship induces financial aspect of empowerment whereas the social aspect of empowerment is still in dark irrespective of an effect of self entrepreneurship.