Freelancing and self-employment may be the only career route that allows women to break through the ‘glass ceiling’ by winning senior jobs traditionally done by men.
This month, the Equality and Human Rights Commission said females actually faced a ‘concrete ceiling,’ as fewer had top legal and media jobs on a full-time basis than a year ago.
Business groups also complained that the number of women permanently employed to run the UK’s top 100 companies could still be counted on a single hand.
But a new report on the freelance workforce has found 30 per cent consists of women, working as managers, senior officials, associate professionals and technologists.
The PCG, the study’s authors, said the “higher incidence” of women in such senior roles was “interesting,” given women’s under-representation in them as employees.
Based on the same count of ‘freelancers’ – “self-employed workers and director of limited companies without employees”, there are 2.3m males and around 1m females.
When those who are not ‘genuinely in business on their own account’, and therefore at risk from IR35, are subtracted, the freelance count falls to 1.4m, of whom 62% are male.
Despite the significant drop, the figure indicates the number of people choosing to work as genuine freelancers has risen 14 per cent since 1998, the year Labour came to power.
Perhaps more remarkable than the boom in freelancing – often called the ‘third way’ of working as its practitioners are neither employers nor employees, is its marked gender divide.
In the PCG’s report, based on official labour statistics, it says 93 per cent of ‘skilled trade’ freelancers are male, while 90 per cent of ‘personal service’ freelancers are female.
In other words, all but seven per cent of freelancers working as builders, plumbers, roofers, carpenters, glaziers, heating engineers and bricklayers, among other similar roles, are male.
And all but 10 per cent of freelancers working as ambulance staff, dental nurses, childminders, residential wardens, veterinary assistants and educational aides are female.
Management, IT, engineering and broadcasting tend to be male-dominated, while translation services, proof-reading and book publishing appear to be female-dominated.
“Estimates of the size of the freelance workforce vary with the definition of freelance status adopted and the data sources used to derive them,” the PCG noted in its report.
“Estimates should be treated with caution in so far as they rely on data sources that have been created for other purposes and are known to be subject to error.
“But, given the absence of a data source specifically created to answer the questions addressed in this report, estimates have to be assembled as best they can from available sources.”
Using the broader definition of ‘freelancer,’ one-person businesses generated an estimated £222billion in sales during 2006, or approximately 8 per cent of private sector turnover.
The report adds that, based on estimates from the Recruitment and Employment Confederation, the temporary and contract recruitment market was worth £23billion in 2007.
And while many freelancers use recruiters to source work, the REC’s findings have shown that just two per cent of staff who use agencies consider themselves freelance.
Sep 26, 2008
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