Economix Blog: On Working for Yourself, for More Flexible Hours

CATHERINE RAMPELL

Dollars to doughnuts.

I’ve gotten a lot of e-mails in response to my article about how middle-class mothers balance work and family, raising many interesting and important issues: What about the challenges for working fathers? What about single parents who don’t have much of a support network? Are companies demanding more from childless employees to accommodate employees with children? Should men be encouraged to be more active co-parents so it’s not so challenging for women to remain in the work force?

There’s only so much I could squeeze into one article about a complicated topic, but I’ll address some of these issues in blog posts and follow-up articles.(I’d also direct readers to some of our past coverage of these topics, as linked above and covered on the Motherlode blog.)

One interesting point that came up repeatedly was the attraction of self-employment, which some readers mentioned in Facebook comments and on the article itself. For example, a reader named Suzanne in New Jersey writes:

I am a lawyer. After many years of working for others, a few years I went to work for myself. My kids are teens now, but I have probably tried every permutation to juggle family and job demands. I had a live-in nanny, a live-out nanny, used an after school program. I have worked full-time and part-time for others. Not only do I have a demanding job, but both my husband and I commute over an hour to work each day. That being said, besides full-time care, we have been dependent on carpools and friends to get our kids to their after school activities. Now that my high school aged child is driving, it is definitely easier as she is able to drive the younger one. The flexibility of working for myself, however, drove the decision to do so. If I want to leave the office early so that I can watch my kids’ sports games, I can. I may have to make up the time somewhere else, but I feel like I control things, not someone else.

This resonated with some of the interviews I did while reporting for my article.

I spoke with a lot of middle-class working mothers around the country about the challenges in managing their work and family responsibilities before deciding to focus on the desire for flexible hours or remote work (and on Sara Uttech of Fall River, Wis., as someone who ultimately received more flexible hours). Several of these women made a deliberate decision to work for themselves to have more control over their schedules, like Jordan Sellergren, who does freelance graphic design and marketing in Iowa City. Another mother I spoke with, Leah Dugan, was working at a telehealth start-up in Chicago, where she helped manage a call center. She said her dream job was to become a freelance yoga instructor, partly because of the flexible hours she said she believed such a career would allow her.

What’s surprising, then, is the gulf between such sentiments and the actual self-employment data. As of 2009, 7.9 percent of women were self-employed (including incorporated and unincorporated self-employed workers) compared with about 13.7 percent of men.

One drawback of self-employment, of course, is that it’s more difficult to get health insurance, and there is evidence that women, particularly mothers of younger children, have a strong preference for receiving such benefits. According to Paul Fronstin’s analysis of survey data he wrote up for the Employee Benefit Research Institute, women were more likely than men (78 percent to 61 percent) to report that health benefits were very important when choosing a job. With the creation of the insurance exchanges next year under the Affordable Care Act, perhaps we’ll see more women deciding to work for themselves.

As an aside, other career paths that have been described to me as particularly family-friendly include certain medical specialties (which of course require a long and expensive upfront investment) and computer programming. Computer programming could be conducive to more flexible, family-friendly scheduling partly because of the nature of the work itself, and partly because many companies have such a hard time finding highly skilled programmers that such workers have more bargaining power.

But as you probably know, there are relatively few women in computer programming or related fields: Women represent just 22.5 percent of computer programmers and 25.6 percent of workers in all computer and mathematical occupations (which includes Web developers, information security analysts, etc.). Presumably there are other forces at work discouraging women from going into these fields, but that’s a topic for another day.

Article source: http://economix.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/09/on-working-for-yourself-for-more-flexible-hours/?partner=rss&emc=rss