Women Empowerment through Entrepreneurship Development

Abstract The present study aims to find the overall impact of entrepreneurship development on women’s status and the extent to which an entrepreneur is empowered. The study was conducted in Vaishali district of Bihar. The ex post facto research design was used for the study. A total of 100 women entrepreneurs were randomly selected for the purpose from 4 out of the 16 blocks in the district. A survey schedule was developed for the collection of data, based on pre-testing. For measuring the extent of women’s empowerment a set of three indicators—”level of mobility”, “decision-making power”, and “awareness and capacity building” consisting of different sub indicators was constructed. The data was analyzed statistically for frequency, percentage, correlation coefficient and multiple regressions. The findings revealed that there is a substantial improvement in overall status of women in the family. The empowerment index score for the indicator “level of mobility”, of the majority of the respondents was in the medium to high category. The study concluded that as much as 64% of the respondents exhibited their extent of empowerment in medium category.