Abstract
The objective of this paper is to investigate gender equality of participation in decision making in rural communities. A questionnaire survey was conducted to husbands and wives of agricultural organizational members, in A city Tochigi prefecture. The survey items included i) the actual conditions of participation in organizational activity, ii) the experiences of assumption of posts of rural organizations and committees. A binominal logit model is applied to investigate determinant factors of husbands and wives assumption of posts of rural organizations and committees. The dataset for the model consists of 131. The explanatory variables are sales, farm types (rice farms, or horticulture farms), family attribute, age, days of farm-work, off-farm work, and regional characteristics. The dependent variable is experiences of assumption of posts, categorized into 7 groups. As a result of their analysis, there are differences between husbands and wives on participation in decision making in rural communities. Husbands participate in agricultural organizational activities (meeting of productive cooperation, irrigation association, and so on); on the other hand wives participate in women's organizational activities (food processing and sales in agricultural festival). A lot of Male's agricultural committees had been elected from many part-time farm household areas. In case male and female are old, and their partner work off-farm work, male and female had been assumption of posts of agricultural committees. Male's agricultural committee had been elected, even if their days of farm-work are short.
