Women at Work - Keep the Challenges of Freelancing in Check

0:01You're listening to Women at Work from Harvard Business Review. I'm Emily Caulfield. Freelancing is a lifestyle that's continuing to grow. In 2020, a third of the U.S. workforce freelanced, according to a report commissioned by the Freelancing Marketplace, Upworked. Increasingly, people in the gig economy are skilled professionals. They're freelancing full-time and are planning to do so indefinitely. Two main reasons that women choose to work freelance, freedom and control.

0:34freedom to work when they need to work, to have their work adapt around their personal lives. And they also have control over what work they take and doing work that's meaningful and interesting to them. They can command more power in the gig economy sometimes than they do in organizations. That's Breanna Kazza, a researcher who studies the lives of gig workers. Her research partner, Erin Reed, adds that plenty of other people just wind up in this lifestyle. It's not so much a choice as it's where the labor market has put them. So they might have been laid off or perhaps organizations aren't offering terrific jobs. And this is kind of where they land. To Aaron's point, early on in the pandemic, 12% of the U.S. workforce started freelancing out of necessity or for financial stability. Brianna and Aaron are trying to better understand freelancers.

1:31They're commonly shared experiences, needs, obstacles, coping mechanisms. Through their research, they've identified a variety of social and psychological stressors that freelancers are dealing with all the time. Left unmanaged, these stressors can lead to loneliness and burnout, which is why Brianna and Erin are developing resources and best practices to support independent workers. They're here to unpack the different challenges and to provide practical advice for managing them. So Erin and Brianna Could each of you tell me about a female freelancer whose work sort of embodies these commonly shared experiences among other women who are freelancing right now? Sure. I'm happy to start. One woman who we spoke with, she is a freelance graphic designer. And she said, in theory, she's living her dream job. She has total control. She has a great amount of variety because she gets to choose what work she takes and what work she doesn't take. And she's free from the politics of organizational work.

2:34Yet at the same time in reality she accepts 99% of the gigs she's offered just because she's constantly worried that the work is going to dry up. So that she has these offers today and they're not going to be there tomorrow. So she feels like even though she loves the high of being creative and the strategic challenge of putting her clients dreams together and making it all work in the end. She finds that most of her day-to-day freelance jobs are a bit mundane because she's taking work for the money and not necessarily for the opportunity to grow and to push her own professional boundaries. So she's kind of having this constant pull between okay this is a project that I'm super jazzed about and it's opportunity for me to

3:25thrive and learn and grow and you know okay I just need money right now and Christmas is coming up, holidays are coming up so I'm gonna take this job because I know that you know it'll bring in next week's income. Yeah having a lot of friends who are graphic designers like me but are working freelance it seems like there are a lot of trade-offs to be able to have that kind of a lifestyle so I can totally hear my friend's stories and what you're describing right now.

3:52Erin, what about you? Tell me about our freelance worker that you've spoken to. Sure. So I have an example from a study of journalists that I conducted. So I interviewed 130 journalists working in the United States, and many of them were working in organizations, but all had worked freelance at some point during their career. And I've been analyzing this data with Lakshmi Ramarajan and Farnaz Ghaidipur.

4:17And one person who comes to mind is a woman, I think she was about 45 when I interviewed her. And she had begun her career working for the city newspaper. She did really well there. She worked there for 10 or 12 years. She ran into some gender discrimination and also some racial discrimination along the way. So it wasn't like the greatest workplace, but she did enjoy her job. And then like so many newspapers, hers got bought out, a ton of people were laid off. She was one of them.

4:46And she had young children and thought this was a good time to try to launch a freelance career. And so when I spoke to her, she was doing interesting work that she enjoyed, but maybe not as much as she wanted to be doing. And she was interested in trying to get back into newspapers, but because there weren't very many jobs anymore, it was kind of a tall order. So it sounds like being a freelancer presents a lot of positives and some negatives, but you've both identified six different challenges that tend to take freelancers by surprise that they're not expecting when they set up their work situations in this way. Can you tell me about those six challenges? Yeah, so in some work that Erin and I have been doing with Stu Ashford, we identified these six challenges that we felt were really core to freelancers, regardless of what type of work they were doing. So we found that they faced identity challenges, career path challenges, financial.

5:43viability challenges, relational challenges, organizational challenges, and emotional challenges. And we're happy to give examples of each of these. Yeah, so let's start at the top, so identity.

5:54Yeah, so identity challenges I think are really prevalent and just like you said I don't think that freelancers are expecting it when they go into working on their own. What we found in talking to people is that they get stuck in this never-ending kind of existential loop of who am I and what do I do and this happens because they leave these organizational jobs, or they go straight into, you know, freelancing. And in doing so, they leave these organizationally defined roles, which structure our ideas about who we are, what we do, what others' expectations are of us. And, you know, for example, we had one interviewee who left her job as a women's studies professor, and she talked about, you know, when she became a freelance writer and health educational seminar speaker that she just

6:43was at a loss when people would come up to her parties and be like, so what do you do for work? Because how do you actually capture all of the different things you do in a neat label or sentence, especially when what you're doing right now is going to be different from what you're doing next week, perhaps. So what's the impact of not having a really developed identity for yourself professionally? There's a tremendous impact on workers.

7:09on a week by week level. So the amount of identity challenges they're experiencing at the beginning of the week will impact their level of motivation control. So how well they're able to make themselves focus on what they're doing in the middle of the week and their proactivity, which we know is really important for people who are working on their own.

7:31can lead to psychological and professional well-being outcomes at the end of the week. So we find that that then manifests in increased levels of emotional exhaustion at the end of the week. They are feeling less resilient, and they actually make less progress towards the goals they had at the beginning of the week. So these challenges might be invisible or silent, but they're clearly weighing on these workers as they're trying to do their work through the rest of the week.

8:00I think you could imagine that if you're working freelance, you are always explaining to people who you are and what you do. And so just that interaction with your neighbors or.

8:10your children's friends, parents, different people that you meet. You're always explaining, oh, like I'm a video producer. No, I don't really work for any company. I'm on this company on a contract right now and I'm on a contract somewhere else. You're in a society where people expect you to be working for a specific organization. And so you're kind of always explaining yourself to people. And that feeds into this feeling of an uncertain identity as well. And what about career path? Tell me about that challenge.

8:37I would say thinking back to societal expectations are expectations from when we're children are really that will move up this sort of ladder of a career. We think about careers as really hierarchical. Careers are attached to labels and pyramids in different organizations. You can imagine if you work for a bank, there's probably a document somewhere in the bank that lays out the different levels, the sort of salary expectations at the different levels. You have an idea that you'll do this job for five years and then you'll apply for a promotion to the next job.

9:10sort of offers a sense of security about the future. But if you're working freelance, that's not there, right? So you can certainly have career progression, but it needs to be defined by yourself rather than being defined according to an organizational chart that everybody around you kind of understands. So again, like identity, it really lands on you to define what your career is and where it's going to go. And that's hard to do. What about higher pay?

9:38Should people expect to just make more over time? I think that the gig economy issues of finances and viability and what you're worth are really unpredictable. And so in our conversations with freelancers of all different types, definitely they feel challenged to create.

9:58A sustainable living overtime because there are so many peaks and valleys in terms of work and the flow of work but they also don't find that their value is progressing in the same way that it would in an organization and that is definitely a challenge for many workers who come to.

10:18a gig with tenure in the field and expertise because they're not necessarily valued for that expertise and that tenure. They're bidding on a project against a lot of other people who might not have the same amount of experience and tenure and as a result oftentimes their value is lowered because they're competing for these gigs.

10:41We have this really interesting data on women working in consulting that I think we should share here while we're talking about financial viability. So we have this data gathered with Eden McCallum, which is an organization through which independent consultants can find work. And the Eden McCallum data shows that when women are employed as consultants in organizations, so like a traditional consulting organization, they tend to make about 30% less than men.

11:07But when these women work independently, so when they market themselves as independent consultants and find freelance consulting work, there's almost no gender gap and pay anymore. So among the independent consultants, we see only a 3% gender gap and pay. And so women are really doing much better. In this particular profession, they seem to be doing much better independently than working for organizations. Definitely they are getting more equity. But interestingly, they're still very worried about their financial viability. So even McKellan data says that they actually are exceeding their projections for what they wanted to earn and the amount of time they wanted to work, but yet they're still feeling like it's not enough. And so how does worrying about being paid on time and just getting by in general and being able to make enough money to support yourself, how is that affecting women on this week to week basis that you talked about?

12:01Well, I think that it all feeds into this higher level of challenge, feeling like you don't have a clear identity, feeling like you don't know where you're going in your career, and feeling like you don't even know if your job is going to be able to provide for you and your dependents now or over time. They all kind of work together to make these workers feel insecure and like they don't have a clear sense of who they are, what they do, or a legitimate standing in society. And what we find in our data is that people who have these three challenges as they feed into one another at the beginning of the work week will continue to feel demotivated, have a hard time focusing in the middle of the week and will be less likely to proactively seek out.

12:51other work and connect with clients in the middle of the week. And this all culminates in really negative outcomes for them at the end of the week. So they are feeling more emotionally exhausted. They don't feel like they're making progress towards their goals. They're feeling less resilient. They're not thriving. And so we see it as having these really important outcomes at the end of the week. So Erin and Brianna, apart from these three challenges that we just talked about, these three existential challenges, What else is there? So another important challenge that we've seen in the interviews that we've conducted and also in all of the survey data we've gathered is that people experience challenges around relationships. Again, I think a comparison is really helpful here. If you're working in an organization, right, so you work at a publishing house, for example, you have a boss, you have a couple of colleagues, maybe you have someone who works for you.

13:47There's administrative assistant who you know, there's some people who work in IT who come and save you whenever your computer dies. And you know these people in an ongoing way and some of them you like and you really gel and you go out for lunch and others, maybe you don't get along so well, but you have a really professional, mutually helpful relationship. When you work freelance, you don't have these relationships anymore, not necessarily, right? So you have to develop relationships, find ways to connect with people on an ongoing basis, find ways to feel that you belong and that you have a community without there necessarily being a group of people in a building that you go to every day. And just to add on to that, I think without that kind of deep relational infrastructure that organizations offer us, you also have more

14:35awkward encounters with people because the lines are blurred, right? So you might want to be selling your services on Facebook or advertising what you do because you need to find new work. And as a result, you know, your friends and family are seeing kind of a professional side of you and there's an awkwardness around.

14:53Are you going to be hired by a friend or family member? And then what is the nature of your relationship? And how do you maintain that? And what do you charge? And so I think that it just all becomes a little bit more blurry. And it's on the worker themselves to develop these relational boundaries, to structure these relationships, to convey expectations for one another. And it can be really difficult. Yeah. So what about people who are forming these new relationships well? How are they doing it?

15:22In the work I'm doing with Sue Ashford and Elizabeth Trin from the University of Michigan and Brittany Lambert from Indiana University, we're finding that women who are in the freelance economy have done a tremendous job.

15:37trying to create a new relational infrastructure for themselves. And sometimes what this means is that they join communities of freelancers online, virtual communities. And sometimes it means that they work really hard to preserve the connections they have and simulate a office space environment. So one of the women we spoke with who is actually a freelance editor talked about having a text chain.

16:02that she utilizes any time she's feeling frustrated at work or a client isn't paying her on time or she has to have kind of a difficult conversation with somebody. She sends it out on the text chain and she's able to get that virtual support from people who are not necessarily her coworkers but who are doing similar things to her and who she trusts is sort of similar to what you might see if you were in your coffee room in your office space. And so it's on these individuals to figure out how to create these spaces for themselves where they can connect with others. And to develop strong but flexible ties, they need to have these relationships that don't have to be constantly stead or nurtured because they're not going to have

16:46those interactions where they run into each other in the hallway or in the bathroom and so instead they have to figure out how to connect and how to not have the other person feel neglected if they're you know busy working on a different project for a period of time. So I really like this idea of these strong but flexible ties and I bet it could be awkward to kind of establish these relationships and you know take time away and go back and do you have any examples of language we can use when reconnecting with people or connecting with people who are these strong but flexible ties. Hey, me again. I think hey me again is good. Yeah, I think one thing that helps is to

17:31make sure that you are reaching out on a regular basis and connecting, whether it's sharing work or whether it's just saying, I see that you had this thing published or I see your company is doing great. How are you doing? I think anything that can maintain a baseline connection, so it's not just a, hey me again, situation. Although I think that's totally fine. I mean, I think that sometimes that's the reality of it.

17:59I remember a few years ago meeting with a woman who worked in museums. So I don't think she was a freelancer at the time, but she was so good at maintaining a huge network of relationships. And she decided that her sort of calling card, her trademark was going to be that she would buy art cards at different museums. So, you know, you go to the museum shop and you can buy like a box of cards by the artists who are featured at the museum. So she had a collection of those and she would mail them to people.

18:28and just say, like, hey, how's it going? I was at this museum. This is what's new with me. I hope you're doing well. And she said people loved receiving them. Everyone loves an art card. They'll save it. They'll stick it on the wall. It's kind of a nice little gift. And it's a way to stay connected. Nice. I love that idea. I would add on to that.

18:50That being really intentional about seeing people can be helpful. So some people I know will make a point of having coffee with two people a week. And so at the start of the week, people will say, I'll have coffee with two people this week. They send out the emails, make the appointments, and then they can feel at the end of the week that they have met some kind of a relational quota. So let's talk about this work that a freelancer has to do, not the billable work, but it's the administrative work that freelancers have to take on. So according to an Upwork report in 2020, administrative work can take up to one quarter of freelancers time. Why is that a challenge for freelancers? I think it's helpful to talk about what this administrative work is, right? It's managing your technology. It's managing your pay, managing your relationships with the bank, organizing your own

19:47taxes and payment into pension plans or social security, whatever it is. It's making sure that you have the supplies that you need. And this can suck up a lot of time. So just yesterday I had an email from a journalist who I'd been speaking to about these six challenges and he said that.

20:06The challenges really came home to him when he had some tech issues with his computer, his laptop that he works on. And to fix them, he had to make an appointment at a local computer repair shop, take his computer over to the computer repair shop, wait for it to be fixed. And this, you know, took up a huge chunk of his time. That's a whole day's work right there. Yeah, exactly. Whereas you can imagine if he was working in an organization, he probably could have called IT support. They would have come to help him in his office at some point.

20:35and maybe given him a loan or computer to work on while they fixed the computer he had. So that's just like a huge chunk of a day gone. So what is the impact of having an entire day during your week just sucked up by having to get this computer fixed? How does that affect somebody? I think that these work interruptions are hard on anybody and any type of job, but it's even bigger for those who are working independently. And one of our colleagues in her dissertation research actually studied this exact question. She was looking at negative and positive work events on freelance workers. And what she found in her research is that they actually showed clinical symptoms of anxiety and depression as a result of some of these disruptive events. So this one administrative challenge that could come up is a real emotional low for somebody's week. How does this play into

21:31the last challenge that you've talked about, the emotional highs and lows of freelance work? I think you're exactly right. Administrative challenges can definitely be a low, a low point in people's week. However, it is balanced by tremendous highs that we see in our data. I think both myself and Erin can recount times where the people we've spoken with have talked about these tremendous highs that they experience. For example, the graphic designer who I spoke about earlier, she talked about having this experience where a client kind of gave her a mess. It was like, build something for me. I have nothing on my website. We have to get this product out.

22:09figure out how to advertise this. And it was a strategic challenge for her, a creative challenge, but it all kind of came together. And she talked about it as feeling like she was flying. She also used the word of feeling this vibration, this high that kind of carried her through the rest of the week. So, you know, they definitely have these lows, these low points, but then they have these high points, which in itself is its own challenge is that they're constantly oscillating between feeling really low. Should I be doing this work? Freelancing is for the birds. I don't know why I'm putting myself through this all the time. And then also feeling like, yep, this is exactly why I'm doing this because I have created this amazing product that I couldn't have done within the bounds of an organization and a manager telling me what I could do, what I couldn't do. You asked earlier, how can people balance these emotional highs and lows? And when I think about the strategies that I saw among the people who I've interviewed,

23:04Many of them take side gigs in an unrelated field. Some of the journalists I interviewed would take a part-time job in a bookstore, which isn't clearly related to being journalism, but it's a few hours of work a week. It's a way for them to make sure that they can pay their rent, and then they are less upset by the volatility of the work. Right. So it sounds like there's a lot of challenges, but the work can be very rewarding.

23:32What other benefits are there to doing freelance work? One that many people talk about is the ability to really chart their own course and do what they love and be free of the constraints of working in organizations. If it's a woman, they don't have to deal with as much gender discrimination, right? They don't have colleagues who they feel are discriminating against them because they're pregnant.

23:56any of that kind of stuff. It doesn't happen. Does it really not happen? Maybe from clients. I do think that the question of discrimination and equity in the gig economy is largely unanswered. We have, you know, some data like Erin talked about earlier with Eden McCallum that suggests that there is more pay equity.

24:16because we don't have these social identity markers that are going into decisions about pay. I've also spoken with women who have invisible disabilities and finds that organizations are unable or unwilling to make these minor accommodations for them. And they just prefer to be in the freelance economy because they can accommodate their own needs and not have to deal with those image struggles or the emotional weight of trying to negotiate.

24:45what you need with a manager who then is looking down upon you. So I think that there is definitely a need for future research to really deeply examine these issues of discrimination and equity because, you know, we have this evidence that maybe it's better in the economy, but there's also definitely a lot of evidence from other people that people do have discrimination from clients, right? There's less legal ramifications for a client to turn you down. I have a PhD student who's trying to study the algorithms and how the algorithms might actually be biased on some of the websites that people use to hire freelancers. So, you know, who gets shown first? Is there something based on race, gender, education that

25:32you know, might account for that. In addition, we know that freelance workers are very heavily dependent on client ratings and their reputation. So we don't know the extent to which some of these social identity markers might be going into how others are viewing and rating them. So there's many ways that it could manifest, you know, some of these issues. But definitely the people who we're speaking with seem to suggest that they feel that they're getting a fair shot. So in that same Upwork report from 2020, it found that nearly half of freelancers in the US are caregivers. I didn't know this. And then three quarters of those freelancer caregivers say that freelancing actually gives them more flexibility to be available for their families. What can we learn from women who you've been tracking who are caregivers? In my data, we see that women who are freelancers seem to be more likely than men to say that they're the main caregiver for their children.

26:28And they say that they enjoy the flexibility. So they, you know, freelancing is nice because they can do the school run, all of that kind of stuff during COVID. It meant that they were available to manage homeschooling, et cetera. But then the trade-off is that because in the family, they become the main caregiver, their career becomes secondary. It becomes less important. And so they are advancing their own career less and earning less money than they might otherwise.

26:57We have data collected from independent scientists that supports exactly what Erin is saying as well, which is that the women independent scientists in our data set reported having less work about June of 2020 than the men. So less works particularly in starting stages, which suggests that the pandemic.

27:20had really affected the women more than men. Interestingly though, despite having these kind of objective outcomes of lowered work, we found no differences in women and men's perception of work challenges. So those six challenges that we just discussed, they were relatively equal. So whether this indicates that women are just more acclimated to their work being challenging or managing these burdens, we're not quite sure. But we found it really interesting that there was this gap between the objective reality that there actually had less work available to them. And so they are probably struggling on a professional level and then their psychological experience of their work as being challenging. So we're hearing about these trade-offs that women have to make who are caregivers and freelancers.

28:07Do you have any advice for what they can do to sort of combat this or improve their career situations rather than just having to suffer the consequences of this unfair situation that they find themselves in? Speaking broadly, knowing a lot about gender and work family, I think it is really important for women who are freelancers and caregivers to be very clear about what their goals are.

28:35Is it that their goal is to work 10 hours a week until their children are in school and then they will work 30 hours a week? That's fine if that is what their goal is. Is it in fact their goal to work 10 hours a week forever? That's fine too. But I think having real clarity on what their goals are is an important first step. And then the second thing is that we know that the person who is considered the secondary earner in the household is also considered less important and has less power in all kinds of important family decisions. You know, in our society, money is really important, right? Like we live in a capitalist society and so the importance of money filters down to the household level and tends to

29:20identify some people as more important than others based on what they earn. And so I would really counsel women to be aware of that bias, which creeps into most families, and make sure that in their relationship, even if they're earning less and working less right now, that as a couple, their work is viewed as as important as the person who's bringing in most of the money.

29:43And I think structuring your work life to support that is really important. So having a routine that your partner respects around, this is my work time. So just because I'm working at home on Zoom or, you know, I don't have to go into the office, I don't have a manager doesn't mean that I'm not doing real work that has value. And I would say also finding ways to pay for childcare a common.

30:05problem that happens in families is that families will account for childcare by subtracting it from the woman's salary. So people will say, well, it's not really worth Emily going back to work because daycare is so expensive. But really childcare can have benefits for children and it also enables both partners to work. So I think it's important not to sort of fall into that mental trap of assigning childcare only to the woman's salary and finding a way to say that, you know, the childcare is really important.

30:34you know, even if this person is not making more at this point in time, it's really important to the couple for the woman to continue advancing in her career. And child care is essential to that. I think one bright spot in our findings is that there's all these challenges, but freelancers as a whole are remarkably resilient.

30:53a lot of this has to do with the relational resources that they're able to build. The routines and practices they have of fostering these strong and flexible relationships. What we've started to do is test how we can create these virtual incidental ties for people so they can connect with one another. We have workers who are in three different conditions. What we're doing at this point is we're tracking how these different conditions will impact them throughout the rest of their day and the rest of their work week. So what is their focus like? What is their psychological state like? How are they doing in terms of their work? Are they getting it done? Are they satisfied with the work that they're doing? And at the end of the week.

31:39looking back how are they feeling in terms of their stress levels, in terms of their sleeping habits and so on. That's such a cool project. That's so awesome. I know I want to be a part of this. You should. We're running these things all of the time. And is it people doing all different types of work? Yeah. And in one of these conditions, we actually bring workers together in a virtual co-working space where they work on their own work independently but together. So we call it working alone together.

32:05And they do this via Zoom. They're simply tasked with doing their work in a structured way over the course of an hour. There's kind of this five-minute warm-up. Put your goals into chat. And then we say, OK, let's get started. Leave your cameras on. Turn your microphones off. We have a moderator in every session who keeps time.

32:24So they keep the time for 25 minutes, and then there's a break. And sometimes people really connect during the break and want to talk to one another. And they'll say, I see your goal was X. What software program do you use to make that happen? And so there's this sharing of information and resources and tests that happen as well. And then there's the second session. And then it's.

32:48You know, goodbye. Sometimes people want to stay in the room and hang out afterwards, but other times they just get on with their workday. our listeners who are freelancers participate in this? We would love that. We have a landing page for people to indicate their interests in participating. You know, the whole goal of this project is to try to find ways that we can equip workers with the ability to manage their own resilience. And, you know, we're really hopeful that this might be a way that they can do that, because if they've learned this practice, it's easy to kind of continue it with your own community. Yep. We'll post the URL in our show notes. Sure. That would be great.

33:24We do have a website, Erin and I do, that kind of captures all of our research. It's called www.thegigworklife.com. And it has links to our research and also resources for the public or just freelancers, anyone who is generally interested in this way of working. Lovely. And there will be research opportunities put up on there as well as like chances for people who are freelancers to share their stories with us. So we make sure that we're researching things that are relevant and important to them. Awesome. I hope some of our listeners, like, jump in on this. That would be so cool. Erin and Brianna, thank you so much for sharing your awesome research with us. Thank you so much for having us. It was a real treat. Yes, I really enjoyed it. That's our show. I'm Emily Caulfield. My co-host are Amy Bernstein and Amy Gallo. They'll be back with me for our season finale episode.

34:20Women At Work's editorial and production team is Amanda Cursey, Maureen Hoek, Rob Eckart, Erica Truxler, Tina Toby Mack, and Eleni Mattha. Rob and Maure compose the theme music. Thanks for listening.