Role of capital market investment in women's decision making empowerment

There are a variety of understandings of the term empowerment due to its widespread usage. If empowerment is looked upon in terms of ability to make choices: to be disempowered therefore, implies to be denied choice. Thus, there could be statistical swells indicating improvements in indicators of gender equality, but unless the intervening process involved women as agents of that change, one cannot term it as ‘empowerment’. The present paper tries to focus on the measurement of decisional empowerment of women through capital market investment. For this study we largely draw data from the primary survey conducted among female investors in the Madurai District, Tamil Nadu. A sample of women who have invested in capital markets was selected for the study to understand the role of investment in capital markets on areas of decision making empowerment. The study is able to identify the decisional aspects in which women have become empowered.