This article presents the progress of a major research whose objective is to analyze the relationships between the participation of women in rural areas in associative economic and productive initiatives and their potential empowerment processes in intercultural contexts. Specifically, this work explores the processes of subordination awareness, transformation of gender roles and the construction of their positioning as social actors by participants of economic and productive associations from La Araucania Region. Following the constructionist Grounded Theory perspective, ten notes of participant observations and a workshop of discussion were implemented with women associated with each other to develop this kind of enterprises. The conclusions show the empowerment of women in rural areas as a process in which they can go through multiple and paradoxical moments, both empowerment and disempowerment, which coexist, occur after one another or overlap.