Production Decision Making Pattern of Gender in Tribal Farming Community of Assam

Abstract

The increasing trend of feminization in agriculture catalyzes the women folk to bear the entire responsibility of farming.As decision making is an essential ingredient in any productive activity, women should be given equal opportunity like men to take part in it. The study tries to portray the picture of gender’s production decision making pattern along with its impact factors on tribal farm women. A total of 320 respondents consisting of equal number of men and women farmers of a household were selected using multi stage random sampling technique. Personal interview technique was followed to collect the responses and relevant statistical tools were employed. The fi ndings indicated that there are signifi cant diff erences between men and women in the decision making pattern of all the productive activities in agriculture. Majority (40.63%) of the women had low followed by medium (36.25%) decision making power while a large number of men belonged to high (49.32%) level of decision making with a mean score of 54.03 and 113.25 respectively. Out of seven impact factors of decision making pattern on tribal farm women, it was found that personality status, family, social, economic, political, health status exhibited a positive signifi cant relationship at 1% level of probability while education showed positive correlation at 5% level. The coeffi cient of multiple determination (R2) value (0.619) suggested that the independent variables jointly contributed 61.90 percent towards variation in better production decision making power