Modernization and Attitude Change: Comparing and Analyzing the Attitudes of Urban and Rural Women toward Jobs (Case Study: Isfahan Province)

Among development theories, perhaps the theory of modernization can be considered the most sociological one. The main presumption of modernization theory is that changes in material conditions lead to changes in attitudes, values, and lifestyles. One of these material processes is “Urbanization”. The main question of the present study is whether in line with modernization theory, living in a city that has a higher level of socio-economic development than a rural one, has it been a factor that makes women more willing to work or not? In fact, the purpose of this study was to identify the differences between urban and rural women in Isfahan province in their tendency to work in different types of jobs.The main method of conducting this research has been survey, using multi-stage sampling. In the first stage, among the twenty cities of Isfahan province, three cities of Isfahan, Shahreza and Semirom were selected with high, medium and low levels of development. In the second stage, individuals were selected and studied based on two variables of age group and residential area by quota sampling method. The total sample size is 1815, of which 1017 are urban and 798 are rural. In the present study, the tendency of women to 29 jobs in three categories: "Traditional jobs", "Traditional jobs in the new form" and "Modern jobs" was studied. The findings show that although rural women in general are more willing to be employed in a variety of jobs than urban women, this difference in tendency is not significant for most modern jobs. The main finding of the present study is that in the current situation of Iran,modernization and socio-economic development, rather than affecting the level of women's willingness to work, affect the type of their tendency to work in a variety of jobs. Urbanization causes women to be less inclined to work in traditional jobs and to avoid jobs associated with traditional feminine roles.