Flexibility is great and all, but the Freelancers Union found that the biggest motivator for going freelance was making more money. The Bureau of Labor Statistics found in 2013 that, all other things being equal, female freelancers outearned male freelancers by $10 per week. This suggests that women who were undervalued in more traditional workplaces—because of sex, race, parental status, age, gender, sexual orientation, looks, social connections, and hierarchies, or any of the other factors that give men the workplace advantage—earn more when they ditch the boss and take their chances in the freelance sector.
That said, the factors that persistently disadvantage women and non-cis men economically don’t disappear: being responsible for more caregiving work and more domestic labor, the physical demands of pregnancy and infant care, and the higher prices businesses often charge women for the same services. Feminine socialization plays a role, too: It can be very difficult to play hardball, say no to unreasonable requests, and charge what you’re really worth.
For many women, though, it’s the intangible benefits that make freelancing worthwhile. Working outside a traditional office setting can mean freedom from a host of gendered restrictions: no pantyhose, no high heels, no extra-tight uniforms or dry-cleaning bills. For those who work alone, there’s much less emotional labor—faking smiles, making small talk, soothing others’ feelings—and more freedom to drop difficult or abusive clients. Indeed, the power of consent, of saying no to the projects that smell like trouble and the clients you hate, is perhaps the single greatest advantage to freelance employment—contingent though it is upon an abundance of work.
The turn toward a freelance economy isn’t a solution for sexism; it won’t end the pay gap or discrimination in the workplace, and it can’t take the place of real, systemic changes to labor law, healthcare, childcare, and the way we view gender. For that, we need mass movements for social change and an intersectional feminism that incorporates struggles around race, class, disability, and more. In the short-term context of an economy in which employers have abandoned any pretense of caring for workers’ needs as human beings, though, freelancing is serving as a stopgap measure created this by necessity—one that, from contract to contract and tax season to tax season, we’re figuring out as we go.
