Can women be par with men in cooperatives leadership? An empirical assessment

Successful functioning of any cooperative society is vested with the leadership quality of the people who are involving in it. The contribution of women as a leader in the cooperatives is also inevitable for the successful functioning of cooperatives. Women play a vital role in the community by taking care of all social activities and the organizations as well, besides shouldering responsibility in homestead affairs. However, they do not enjoy the fruits of their labor and suffer from political, economical, social and cultural marginalization. Keeping the above in view, the main focus of this paper is to assess the effectiveness of women leaders in selected primary cooperatives located in Hawassa City, Ethiopia.

Out of 167 primary cooperatives functioning in Hawassa, ten cooperatives are having both men and women leaders. Hence they were identified purposively and 8 sample respondents including both men and women from each cooperative have been selected randomly for the purpose of assessing the effectiveness of the women leaders. In addition to this, three women leaders from each selected cooperatives also been selected randomly to assess the factors influencing the effectiveness of women leadership. Thus the total sample size is 110. The collected data was compiled and analysed by using descriptive statistics such as mean, percentages and other appropriate tools and presented in tables, graphs and discussed legibly for easy understanding. In addition to this, Binary Logistic Regression model was also applied to identify the factors affecting the effectiveness of women leadership in the sample cooperatives.

The study finding shows that women leaders found in the sample cooperatives possess six leadership positions and majority of them were found as secretaries and cashiers. They are also found to be more effective in the positions compared to men leaders in their performance. The important factors such as knowledge on cooperative principles, leadership experience, increasing women participation, additional employment, position in leadership, educational status and supportive by-laws were found to be highly significant which determine the effectiveness of women leadership in selected cooperatives. Further, sample cooperatives have contributed significantly in bringing women to hold leadership position by framing by-laws, participating them in decision making and other efforts help them to come forward and to take different leadership position and thus become effective.