Introduction

Tourism is referred to as an accelerator for national and regional development because the local community benefits from the various benefits of tourism. On the other hand, tourism, along with economic effects and consequences, causes the social, cultural and environmental conditions of local communities to undergo major changes. Therefore, it is necessary to identify the individual and social capabilities of the beneficiaries and use them to influence the process of sustainable development of tourism. The role of women in environmental and economic changes is weak due to reasons such as lack of equal educational opportunities, lack of sufficient self-confidence, and their lack of recognition in economic activities. Therefore, the United Nations has set a series of smaller goals, one of which is the effective participation of women in society and their presence in political, economic and public decision-making, in order to achieve its goals in the field of women's empowerment.

Khalkhal city is one of the cities of Ardabil province. The suburban area of this city is attracting the attention of tourists. An important question raised in this research is, what is the state of these two peri-urban areas in different aspects of tourism empowerment?



Methodology

The research questionnaire includes questions related to the perception of women's work in tourism (6 questions), women's entrepreneurship (3 questions), psychological empowerment (4 questions), social empowerment (3 questions) and the scale used to measure five-point Likert questions. 1 strongly disagree - 5 strongly agree). Smart-PLS software and confirmatory factor analysis method were used to analyze the data collected from the questionnaire and the structural model test.

Results and discussion

The results of this research showed that the positive perception of women's work in tourism has the greatest positive effect on psychological empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.968 and significance: 34.701), social empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.889). and significance t: 31.635), economic empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.823 and significance t: 25.701) and finally political empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.768 and significance t: 13.701).

In addition, the results showed that women's entrepreneurship has the greatest positive effect on psychological empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.896 and significance t: 36.968), economic empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.789 and significance t: 29.765), social empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.703 and significance t: 18.369) and political empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.646 and significance t: 9.785).

Also, psychological empowerment has a strong positive effect on the development of tourism in the Khalkhal destination (path coefficient (β): 0.968 and significance rit: 45.831) (Hypothesis 3.4 is confirmed). Then, in order, social empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.912 and significance t: 39.168), social empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.865 and significance rit: 26.147) and political empowerment (path coefficient (β): 0.809) and significant (it: 19.348) have a positive effect on the development of tourism.

Conclusion

The main purpose of this research is to investigate the perception of women's work in tourism and women's entrepreneurship. Specifically, in these two villages of Pirashehri, the perception of women's work in tourism has become very different compared to the past, and one of the reasons for this is that after the intensification of international sanctions and the emergence of some economic problems for households, cultural sensitivities for Women's work has decreased. So that in the field studies, it was found that most tourism and tourism-related businesses in this region rely on women in a special way.

Also, the results of this research show that women's activity in tourism leads to the empowerment of women socially, politically, economically, psychologically. For example, tourism by creating jobs and entrepreneurship opportunities for women. In the two studied regions, tourism has created jobs for women. In Khojin region, it is common to rent suiyet and sell dairy products to tourists, but in Andabil village, renting a villa and suiyet is more common, and women have different roles in each of them.

Also, economic empowerment gives a sense of pride towards local traditions and culture. For example, the people of Khojin and Andabil villages are proud of their history and many of them wrote various books and articles about their region. For example, we can refer to the books of Andabil: The memory of my land, the book of Andabil Castle, the book of Andabil Khalkhal's traditional short stories and stories, the book of Khojin and the Great Khojin scholars: the historical, geographical, cultural, social and economic situation of Khojin Khalkhal.

Key words

Sustainable tourism, empowerment, women, Khalkhal peripheral.