Investigating and Analyzing Urban Tourism in Development of Women’s Entrepreneurship (Case Study: Ilam City)

Promoting entrepreneurial activities of women can be an effective incentive for economic growth and development and for improving their quality of life. Because of undesired conditions, women have not yet benefitted from various potentials for entrepreneurship. One of the desirable contexts for improving women’s entrepreneurship is to focus on the tourism industry in various regions. Women play a key important role in promoting tourism and even some of the major hotels of the world are currently managed by successful women. With a minimum amount of risk and by understanding their strong internal talents and gifts, women can start working in local and tourism contexts. Therefore, the current study aims to evaluate and analyze the role that urban tourism can play in promoting women’s entrepreneurship in Ilam City using a descriptive analytical method. The statistical population of the current study includes all the 15 to 29-year-old women of Ilam City. Based on Cochran’s formula, 384 women were selected as the sample of the study and a standard questionnaire was distributed among them using a random sampling method. The questionnaire was the standardized safety questionnaire of Qeshlagh et al., whose validity and reliability (an alpha coefficient of 0.898) have already been confirmed. In order to analyze the obtained data, simple linear regression test was utilized. The results obtained from analyzing the research hypotheses show that urban tourism is an effective and important factor in promoting women’s entrepreneurship in Ilam City. Moreover, urban tourism is an effective and important factor in increasing risk taking, creativity and innovativeness, and self-esteem, and in reducing passiveness among women of Ilam City.