DIGITAL TECHNOLOGIES AND RURAL WOMEN'S ENTREPRENEURSHIP

Digital technologies are a great opportunity for rural women to compensate for their environment deficiencies in order to join the labor market and/ or carry out actions of entrepreneurship. However, the use made of these technologies is detached from these objectives but instead focused on social relations, searching for information, and spending time in leisure or in the acquisition of consumer goods. In the present article, it is analyzed the role played by the socializing agents who are closer to rural women from Extremadura and their influence in the process of digital inclusion for business entrepreneurship. The empirical evidence is based on a survey work made by a sample of 400 women living in municipalities of less than 2.000 inhabitants in Extremadura (Spain), to whom it is applied a Likert scale of one hundred items from which we have studied the responses of 13 of them, specifically those related to employment and entrepreneurship. Among the highlighted results we verify the hypothesis that the scarce use that rural women make of technologies for employment and entrepreneurship is linked to the limited or no support they get from the other family members and, in particular, from their partners, at least for these purposes.