Women’s participation in socio-economic activities is very crucial for their improvement in level of living as well as their empowerment, which leads to the development of the society, region and nation also. The participation of women from different society, more remarkably from the very backward sections of the society including the Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe community is very worth mentioning for assessing the level of women empowerment. The present study has tried to focus on the level of women’s participation in various socio-economic activities among fifty-four blocks in undivided Medinipur district of the state of West Bengal, with comparison to the national, state-level and district-level scenario. The study is based on selected thirteen variables collected from Census of India 2011. Women’s Participation Index were prepared by aggregation of the relative score of all the selected thirteen indicators using Z score techniques for Schedule Caste, Schedule Tribe and all women categories to analyse the level of women participation. The study observed that the women from Schedule Caste and Schedule Tribe communities were mainly engaged in primary activities including cultivators and agricultural labourers, while very slight improvement is observed in their increasing participation in secondary, tertiary and quaternary activities.

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Keywords: Women’s Participation, Women Empowerment, Block Level Disparity, Women’s Participation Index.