Mensa, Nicole2023-03-312023-03-312022-12Mensa_cornell_0058_11590http://dissertations.umi.com/cornell:11590https://hdl.handle.net/1813/11303563 pagesThis paper explores the relationship between empowerment and a woman's employment type. The research is based on a field survey data of 795 women in the Northern Region of Ghana. The paper seeks to evaluate two things. Firstly, it examines the effect of empowerment on a woman's decision to enter the Shea butter industry in Ghana. Are more empowered women working in shea butter production? Or can evidence be found which shows that women who are more empowered choose to work in certain industries? Secondly, the paper also examines empowerment among different employment types within the shea butter industry. It seeks to understand how shea butter cooperatives might benefit women, and whether women who are more empowered will choose to work in shea butter cooperatives rather than choose to be shea butter entrepreneurs. This study uses an empowerment index to calculate the level of empowerment among each group. It then employs a logit and multinomial logit model to evaluate the relationship between empowerment and employment. The results show that women in shea butter cooperatives are the least empowered, followed by shea entrepreneurs and then entrepreneurs, who are the most empowered. The level of empowerment for each group is very close and quite low. When I evaluate how the empowerment categories impact employment, we find only a few empowerment categories to be significant. This means that only two or three empowerment statistics influenced a woman's employment decision. Thus, making it difficult to conclude that empowerment has any effect on employment choice.endissertation or thesishttps://doi.org/10.7298/e0db-xh50