Forget the nine to five. Forget the regular wage, the difficult boss, the desk job and the daily commute, and say hello to a new way of working. By 2020 over half of us will be freelance, and if current trends continue an increasingly large proportion of those freelancers will be women.
Traditionally the freelance market has been dominated by men, but women are now poised to overtake. While the number of male freelancers has increased by 11% since the financial crash, the number of women ditching the day job has risen by over triple this – up more than a third since 2008. Between 2008 and 2011 women accounted for an unprecedented eight out of ten of the new self-employed.
Before you hand in your notice and waltz off into the self-employment sunset, let’s stop for a minute to consider a different reality – a reality in which you have no security, few employment rights, no guarantee that you’ll be paid at all, let alone on time – because this is the reality for an increasingly large number of female freelancers today.
My first job after leaving university was freelancing with a small marketing agency in West London. I had to provide my own laptop and learn how to invoice (the administrative bane of any freelancer’s life) but at the time I was just pleased to be in employment.
After a few years though, I still couldn’t afford to move out of my Dad’s house, and without the stability of a fixed role or any employment rights I didn’t feel in a position to ask for more money. So, I applied for and was offered a new, permanent job.
Within hours of telling my old company they had counter-offered me a position on the payroll at almost double my previous salary. I felt pretty chuffed. That’s until an older and wiser colleague burst my bubble and pointed out that my bosses had been paying way below what they thought I was worth for all this time and had saved a packet in national insurance contributions too. Meanwhile I had no job security, no pension, and I had to buy my own office equipment.
Before you bring out the violins I should disclose that five years on I'm self-employed again, and things are very different. My latest decision to go freelance was mine and mine alone. And whilst – contrary to the belief of many of my mates – I really don’t spend my days watching First Dates, I do have it pretty good. I'm fortunate enough to have lovely clients who pay on time and treat me like I’m part of their team, and I’m able to work on projects I enjoy and I’m passionate about.
You could say that I'm on a freelance high.
But I've not forgotten my freelance lows, and I know plenty more 20-something women who have experienced an even darker side of self-employment – one that rarely gets much airtime.
Take my friend for instance. Let’s call her Claire*. Claire is a former print designer. She has a Masters in textiles. Until recently she was working in the fashion industry, freelancing for a small design house which sold her prints in London and New York to buyers ranging from Primark to Ralph Lauren. And yet Claire was earning just £50 a day for eight hours or more labour. That’s £6.25 an hour – below the minimum wage. Many of Claire’s colleagues were earning even less at £40 per day, equivalent to just £5 per hour.
'I felt worthless and insecure,' Claire remembers. 'As a single woman aged 26 I was borrowing money from my Mum to pay my rent, sneaking vodka into the pub just so that I could have a drink with friends and buying clothes from charity shops. But I’d worked towards this for so long – I spent the best part of 10 years studying and doing internships – so I was blindsided because it had been my dream for so long.'
Sadly, Claire’s story isn’t unique. Those in self-employment actually earn less, on average, than other workers – in 2012-13 the median annual income for freelancers was around £11,000. But even worse, figures suggest that the gender pay gap between male and female freelancers may be as high as 40%. For those of us who write for a living, advice online suggests that if you ‘pretend you’re a white male’ you’ll earn up to triple what you get paid as a woman. So back to the Victorian era then, when Mary Ann Evans had to pen her novels under the name of George Eliot just to get a break.
And, in many cases self-employment isn’t a choice – freelancers like Claire working in industries such as fashion or media often have no other option if they want to fulfil their career ambitions and do something they love. This can also be normalised by a feeling that everyone else is in the same boat – when I first started freelancing all my colleagues were freelance too, so I thought nothing of it. Claire was in a similar situation: 'Because there are all these other people putting up with it around you, you think it’s normal,' she told me. 'There were eight of us in total – all women in our 20s (except for our male boss) and all working under the same conditions'.
The scariest thing of all is that Claire and her colleagues were flying below the radar, with no voice and no support network. 'We all had to leave the building when someone came to inspect from HMRC,' she shared.
Claire also told me how a friend of hers worked at a leading high street fashion label as one of many freelance designers. 'They got someone in to cover for her while she was on holiday, then decided that the woman covering was better and the job was gone when she got back'.
Can you imagine that happening to someone who was on the payroll? No. There would be a national outcry, the company would be sanctioned and the boss hung out to dry like Philip Green and his handling of the BHS pension crisis. And yet in the world of freelance this type of behaviour is tolerated because of an absence of employer representation and rights in the workplace.
The uncertainty of long-term employment is one issue – but frequently cash flow is another.
Sarah Akwisombe is an interior decor blogger who quit her job to pursue her passion. Until recently she was supplementing her income with freelance copywriting and social media management work. This time last year Sarah posted on a Facebook group she started for female freelancers to share their experiences. She wrote:
'I feel a bit sick... I just fired one of my highest paying clients. They repeatedly weren't paying on time and I had to stick by my values and believe that I could attract a better client. Probably one of the hardest decisions I've had to make workwise as losing that regular income puts my family in a seriously risky position but I have to believe that it's for the right reasons and that it will work out. Has anyone ever had to do similar? Might puke in my mouth in a minute...'
Sarah isn’t alone – I’ve heard countless similar stories from freelance friends – the Facebook group Sarah set up is full of them, with freelancers even having to take their clients to the small claims court to try and get paid the money they are owed.
Another issue for female freelancers who don’t benefit from internal HR departments can be sexual harassment. Another friend, let’s call her Lucy, ran into trouble when working on a documentary series for national TV. ‘My boss became increasingly difficult’ she tells me, ‘to the point where we were once on a shoot in the rural countryside, he got drunk and started making incredibly inappropriate sexual comments.’ Things got worse when they returned back the office she says, ‘he was clearly embarrassed about how he’d behaved so he just started to freeze me out. I wasn’t invited to meetings, I was excluded from conversations which I should have been involved in and only ever asked to go and get coffees or book taxis.’ If Lucy had been a member of staff she would have been protected by an internal complaints system, ‘I thought about reporting him’ she tells me, ‘but I didn’t want to jeopardise my relationship with the company.’
So what is government doing to protect freelancers like Sarah, Claire and Lucy? Well, in April of last year our now former Prime Minister David Cameron gave a speech about self-employment. Dubbing the Conservatives the party of 'grafters, roofers, retailers and plumbers' he committed to looking into how the government can do more to help the self-employed. Over a year on and we’re still yet to see any definitive action.
Meanwhile the future for a growing number of freelance women in their 20s and early 30s is looking increasingly unstable. They are, for the most part, off the radar; stuck between a legal gap and a desire to do well at what they want to do; between a rock and a hard place.
I did a straw poll of my freelance friends and not a single one had a pension. What’s more, with it becoming harder and harder for our generation to get on the property ladder (if you’re a 20-something freelancer trying to get a mortgage on your own you can pretty much forget about it) the growing numbers of self-employed Gen Y are left without assets, with no means of supporting themselves if they get sick and no hope of retirement when they get old. And – although it might sound scary even saying this out loud – for those of us who might be thinking about children in the not too distant future, state maternity pay is a scant £139.58 a week. Many freelance Mums don’t feel financially able to take any maternity leave at all as a result.
But hey – plenty of us are in this kind of situation whether we’re self-employed or not. The future of employment rights becomes uncertain, zero hours’ contracts proliferate, and the unions – designed to represent working people – seem to grow less and less relevant to large swathes of our transient workforce. So given the choice between stability or following our passion, between guaranteed cash flow or being in control of when we work and for how long, freelancing wins hands down. Plus, despite the difficulties, it’s likely to be the future for many of us whether we like it or not.
That doesn’t mean that we have to take it lying down; things can and should change for the rising numbers of female freelancers. We should go into self-employment with our eyes open, but we should also speak up for ourselves and make our voices heard. If my first freelancing experience has taught me anything it’s that we need to ask when we don’t think we’re getting enough.
It’s time to shape the future of freelancing and own this new way of working, rather than letting work own us.
*names have been changed
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.