THE DIMENSIONS OF THE ECONOMIC EMPOWERMENT OF RURAL WOMEN IN SOME VILLAGES AT KAFR EL-SHEIKH GOVERNORAT

This research was conducted in order to identify the dimensions of theeconomic empowerment of rural women as a main objective, this goal hasbeen achieved through three sub-objectives: the first was identifying thedimensions of the economic empowerment of rural women regarding: genderequality, income development & rationalization of expenditure skills andeconomic insecurity, and the second was to identify the relative importance ofthe dimensions of economic empowerment, and the third was to determinethe differences between the two categories of the respondents regarding eachdimensions according to some nominal independent variables.To achieve these goals three districts from Kafr El-Sheikh governorate, andone village from each district has been selected randomly: el-morabeen (Kafr
El-Sheikh), Kafr magar (Desouk), and Abshan (Bella) with a total sampleamounted by 270 respondents. Data were collected by using questionnairethrough personal interview after conducting pre-test, and some statistical
methods were used such as frequencies, and the arithmetic mean and(t-test)to analyze the data. The most important results were as follows :The relative importance of the three dimensions of the economic
empowerment of respondents arranged according to the weightedmean as follows: income development & rationalization ofexpenditure skills in the first, followed by the gender equality, insecond and finally economic security .
·The level of Income development & the rationalization of expenditure,and economic security has been ranged between a high and medium, while it was ranged between medium and high for the genderequality
There were significant differences between respondents regardingeconomic security and the total of three-dimensional whencategorized according to: the adequacy of family income,unemployment among the family members , the existence of incomegeneratingactivities, the work status of the respondents, and thefamily independency on the salary of the husband alone.There were significant differences between respondents regarding:income development and rationalization of expenditure skill whencategorized according to: the adequacy of income, the existence ofincome-generating activities, the family independency on the salary ofthe husband alone and finally the existence of individuals under theage of working family 
There were significant differences between respondents in the degreeof gender equality when categorized according to how the familydepending on the salary of the wife only.