Being your own boss, but on your own time
The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) says that women own about 28% of the more than 23 million non-farm businesses in the nation — and if you add in another 2.7 million firms that are co-owned equally by women and men, the figure jumps to about 34%.
Last year, the SBA’s Office of Advocacy published a report titled “Self-Employed Women and Time Use,” authored by university business economists Tami Gurley-Calvez, Katherine Harper and Amelia Biehl. Drawing from data on a group of earlier studies, and adding in a new Time Use survey where participants kept a daily diary to chronicle their work, leisure and sleep periods, the results of this study are interesting. Having been in the salaried world and in the self-employed world, and comparing my work hours, I am still trying to figure out whether I fall into their “average”:
Several patterns are clear from the time-use data. On average, women spent less time on work and work-related activities than men, and self-employed women spent less time on work than wage-and-salary women. Self-employed women spent the most time in primary and secondary (defined as having a second parent home, but occupied with work or other activity) child care activities….
These time-use patterns are consistent with the hypothesis that women are more likely to choose self-employment because of family or other off-the-job concerns. Time spent on off-the-job activities such as volunteering, exercising and traveling, differ by gender, but there do not appear to be significant differences in this variable between wage-and-salary and self-employed women….
On average, the self-employed spend less time in work activities than wage-and-salary workers, and women spend less time in work activities than men. Wage-and-salary women spent about 7.3 hours (30 percent of their time) in work activities, compared with 8.2 hours (34 percent) for men. The difference was larger for the self-employed, where women spent about 6.2 hours (26 percent) on work activities, compared with 7.6 hours (32 percent) for men. There were also marked differences in time usage across industry groups, indicating that there might be significant differences in lifestyle
and career factors that motivate self-employment in each industry. For example, self-employed women and men in financial services spent between 1 and 1.4 fewer hours a day on work activities than their wage-and-salary counterparts.
The team broke out a few different categories when calculating the percentage of time devoted to “off-the-job” activities, including “household activities” (note, this is different than child-rearing, where self-employed women with children spent more time doing so than men or their female wage-and-salary counterparts):
Self-employed women spent about 2.8 hours per day on household activities, followed by wage-and-salary women, who spent about 2.3 hours, and men, who spent just under 2 hours. This translates into self-employed women spending about 3.5 more hours in household activities per week than wage-and-salary employed women and 6 more hours than men.
The point of the research was to see how women, by education, race, marital status and financial level, fit into the overall current picture of self-employed Americans. You can download a PDF of the entire report and its findings here, but the authors’ results summary suggests a few areas where the SBA can focus attention on helping women work for themselves:
The results suggest several areas where policy could be used to address the chronically lower rates of self-employment among women. First, the time-use evidence indicates that women, and particularly self-employed women, allocate more time to care activities and household production. Programs that enhance work-life balance or facilitate secondary child care opportunities (where a parent works from the same location as the child, but is not responsible for primary child care) would likely make self-employment more attractive for women. Further, policies to offset racial disparities in self-employment and increase human capital through the accumulation of education would serve to encourage greater numbers of women to seek self-employment.
So does your work-play-sleep schedule match with their findings? Did you start your business to achieve more financial success than you had in your previous work life, or for more flexibility with your kids and/or your social life? Are you working a 40-hour week? Do your work and leisure activities blur?
And in the end, does it matter if you’re doing what you love to do?
Tags: Biehl, business, gender, Gurley-Calvez, Harper, office of advocacy, salaried, SBA, self-employed, women
