Empoderamiento y emprendimiento femenino, una comparación rural y urbana, Cantón Latacunga, Provincia de Cotopaxi

Resumen:La investigación pretendió determinar la influencia del emprendimiento sobre el empoderamiento de las mujeres en el Cantón Latacunga, identificando diferencias en el comportamiento en las zonas rurales y urbanas; para ello se aplicó un instrumento estructurado en tres secciones: características demográficas y socioeconómicas, empoderamiento y emprendimiento. Mediante la estimación de un modelo de mínimos cuadrados generalizados se determinó que la experiencia emprendedora y el perfil emprendedor son significativos en la explicación del empoderamiento para la totalidad de la muestra y para la zona urbana, no así para la zona rural. Abstract:This research focused on determining the possible influence of entrepreneurship on women's empowerment in Canton Latacunga, identifying differences between behavior in rural and urban zones; to this purpose, an instrument was applied to a sample of 384 women, of whom 151 reside in rural parishes and 233 in urban parishes. The instrument was structured in three sections, the first relating to demographic and socio-economic characteristics, the second to the approaches proposed for estimating the level of empowerment and the third to family and personal entrepreneurship, the reasons behind it and the reactions that made it possible to measure the entrepreneurial profile of the women. A comparison was made by contrasting hypotheses of differences in means or proportions, as the case may be, as a first approximation to the identification of a possible relationship between empowerment and entrepreneurship, to then estimate a model of generalized least squares; The result is that the entrepreneurial experience and the entrepreneurial profile are significant in explaining empowerment for the entire sample and for the urban area, but not for the rural area. In this case, entrepreneurial initiatives could be considered a source of income for the household, without significant improvements in decision-making, independence or the social and family value of women, due to the cultural characteristics of the Ecuadorian Andes.