A study on the effects of women's participation in the economic and social decision makings in rural areas case study: Chiar - Yamchi of Zanjan district

Utilization of women labor force, and in particular rural women should be in line with raising their social status and dignity in management and decision makings. Rural women’s participation in different and varied economic activities, especially agriculture, is of great significance. In addition, women's expectations have increased considerably due to development of rural communities.The present research tries to clarify the effective factors acting upon women's participation and decision making processes. In order to verify the research hypothesis and confirm the meaningfulness of the relationship between the dependant and independent variable, statistical and correlation tests are applied. The study not only analyses women's participation, decision making, expectations and the relationships between them, but also considers some familial and individual factors influencing economic decision making and participation. Thus, the present paper is both descriptive and correlative. The research instruments include questionnaire, interview and overt (non-participatory) observation, and based on Cronbachs Alpha the validity of the questionnaire is estimated at 78%. The sampling is carried out using systematic and probability method. Our sample consists of 256 rural women and the questionnaires distributed among 5 villages namely- Chiar, Amin Abad, Esfejin, Yengejeh and Yamchi located in Zanjanroud (central zanjan). The SPSS software is used to analyze the data. The results show that the more their education improves, the higher their expectations in the decision-making field rises. The results, also, indicate that the greater the economic participation of the rural women is, the more significant is their decision-making level and vice versa. Based upon the findings, there is no meaningful relationship between the economic involvement of the rural women, their expectations and their participation in the decision-making processes.