Facts: A) Upwork pays well (in the US). B) There is gender parity in freelance writer pay
Interesting study recently reported in Bloomberg on the gig economy in the US based on Upwork data. Two facts that leapt out at me:
A) The average hourly rate for US freelance writers on Upwork (who did more than 100 hours in the previous 6 months) is $50 per hour. The average hourly wage in the US, as of May, was $32 per hour.
So for all those who like to kvetch about how poorly paid Upwork are, at least for US freelancers, you are wrong. On average, it's quite lucrative.
B) Generally, women are earning much less than men: 48 percent less in the gig economy as a whole. But the good news is that in the freelance writing subcategory, there is only a small gender gap of just under $3 per hour. I'm curious, why do you think this would be? My guess is that prospective clients have fewer gendered assumptions about 'what a writer looks like' than they do 'what a software engineer looks like'.
Posted Aug 2, 2022, 7:15 PM UTC
I actually do have a few thoughts.
First, I don't have much faith in Bloomberg. I would be very, very interested to know their methodology.
Oh, they took findings from another firm. How did that firm do it?
By using a scraping service to guess at someone's gender. I'm not thrilled with the idea of using this method; It doesn't control for anything.
100 hours over 6 months is nothing, and I would be very, very curious to know what those hours actually look like. Is this a case of "people who work a lot more make more, and those people tend to skew male?" or is it actually way worse?
There's a reason that gender studies is an entire field of research, and people spend years and years unpacking data to find a conclusion.
Unfortunately, due to the fact that the dataset gained by ZenBusiness doesn't actually look at that many factors, it's even more difficult to make conclusions.
I do believe there is still a lot of misogyny in the US workforce, and I would never diminish someone's personal experience. I simply think that it's really hard to analyze data that is this vague.
Very interesting observations. Great point about the 'scraping' methodology, I think it does raise a few problems. But on the specific points you make:
(1) You're right,it is guessing at gender based on appearance and name. Is this enough to skew the data at a statistical level? No idea.
(2) 100 hours is a small amount. But how is that a bad thing? Doesn't that make the sample size bigger, and isn't that a good thing for making overall generalisations?
(3) I'm not sure how your observations about gender studies as discipline, in itself, calls this study into question. Overall this survey is very damning (48 percent disparity!) and indicative of a major gender gap. So the results would broadly line up with what gender studies academics have found in countless other methodologically sound studies. There is just an interesting difference with freelance writing.
(4) Which pertinent factors do you think were left out of the dataset?
(5) This data would lend support to the idea that there is misogyny in the US workforce, and no one anywhere questioned someone's personal experience. It is simply reporting the overall trend.
But having said all that, I think you are right that there are problems in the methodology:
(1) This only scrapes public profiles. Many profiles are set to private, or the complete earnings information is not released to the public by the freelancer. So the data is skewed
(2) Many writers on Upwork don't charge hourly, and work on fixed price or retainer. I'm not sure which direction this would skew the data in, but it's not representative.
Per hours worked, I would assume that someone who works an average amount, say 30*4=120 hours a month, would make a lot more per hour than someone who works one hour a week.
If someone is treating UpWork as a full time job, they probably are in a much better position to negotiate and demand much higher prices. If someone is say, doing a few hours of work between raising kids... They probably can't demand the wages that someone else has.
This is something that comes up A LOT in the gender wage gap issue. In the United States is likely that a man is pressured into being a bread-winner, and will therefore be working, and pushing to work, a lot more. As to how much of an effect that has freelancing, it's difficult to know.
This is where I believe there is an issue with their methods. The difference between working freelance full time (40*3*6=720 hours ish) vs four hours a week ((100/6)/4=4.16) is massive. There is an entire world of experience difference between someone who writes 10 articles a month compared to someone that plucks out one every couple months. And one of those people likely values their time a lot more.
Plus, the study doesn't control for location. It'd be weird to say that all women who write code live in Kentucky but all men who write code live in San Francisco where the cost of living is 100 times higher... But we don't know that.
What all of that leads to is a fairly incomplete dataset. Yes, as you said, it does seem to suggest some correlation between gender and pay.
The sheer volume and number of conclusions made by Bloomberg and the Business whatever do not seem to be supported, though. *we don't even know how many writers vs programmers there were*
We could be comparing the wages of 5998 writers to the wages of 2 programmers. That would radically alter the conclusion of the study, since it would show fairly clearly that there isn't as large of a gap as reported elsewhere.
More than anything, this data doesn't have enough data points to make a meaningful conclusion; If we are going to say that women make less than men (something I am not arguing against) it would be useful to isolate WHY and respond accordingly. Because the set is so vague, and the method does not control for anything, we don't have a why. We simply have a "this happened" and then Bloomberg making a ton of assumptions.
All of what I said being said, anecdotally, I have noticed a lot of gatekeeping in the freelance world.
Specifically, I have seen male buddy buddy clubs that form the backbone of large networking rings that, either intentionally or not, seem to exclude women.
I imagine UpWork has largely the same issue; An old man who still thinks of women as secretaries is going to likely hire men to do jobs- who then in turn get the references, and refer other men, who get hired by more old men, etc ad naseum.
Writing may be different since it is traditionally seen as non-gendered. For every Steven King there's a JK Rowling, so to speak. And it may be that simple.
Yes, that seems right. I don't think the idea of a freelance writer is as strongly gendered as our ideas of most other professions.
Your example is amusing since it's yet another woman using initials to obfuscate her gender.
Why do you assume she's trying to obfuscate her gender when her photo is on the dustjacket?
JK is their own bag of worms, it's just an easy example of a female writer who is famous.
Sub in Suzanne Collins, Agatha Christie, Mary Shelly, Harper Lee, or just for fun, Jane Austen, if you prefer.
Make no mistake, I'm not suggesting that the biases don't exist, or that there isnt' any bigotry in publishing. It's simply that in the writing world it's much more common to find celebrated female creators.