Empowerment Status of Rural Women at Dumki Upazila of Patuakhali District in Bangladesh

The study was conducted to determine the status of empowerment of rural women and also to explore relationships among their 13 selected characteristics. The study was conducted at Dumki Upazila of Patuakhali district selected purposively Multi-stage random sampling procedure was follow to conduct the research. Firstly among the 5 unions of Dumki upazila, one union was selected randomly. This union was Srirampur union. Srirampur union consists of 4 villages and women of all four villages constituted the sample population of the study. Thus the number stood at 8280 from the four selected villages as the sample population. Thus the sample size was 110 which was taken randomly. Data were collected by the researcher herself with the help of pretested interview schedule during 10th April to 12th May, 2017. The overall empowerment status scores of the rural women ranged from 39 to 121. It revealed that rural women had a medium level of empowerment as 48.18 percent of them belong to medium category of empowerment. This was followed by 27.27 percent appearing in high category of women empowerment. This was also noticed that 23.55 percent of the respondents fell in low category of empowerment. It was interesting to note that none of the respondents belonged to no empowerment category. Coefficient of correlation showed that out of 13 selected characteristics of the rural women, eight variables viz, education. husband's education, family education, family farm size, annual income, occupation, personal income, personal savings, had positive significant relationships with empowerment. On the other hand, two variables viz. age and marital age had negative significant relationships with empowerment. Among the six dimensions of the empowerment rural women had highest empowerment in cultural dimension while they lag behind most in political empowerment.