OnDeck, a financial company offering loans and lines of credit to small businesses, has recently released a new report tracking gender pay disparities in freelance work throughout the United States.
For their study, the authors analyzed the hourly rates of nearly 9,100 U.S.-based freelancers featured on Upwork, a digital platform for freelancers to connect with clients. The freelancers included in the study worked in 11 different industry categories: legal, accounting and consulting, data science and analytics, engineering and architecture, sales and marketing, information technology and development, translation, design and creativity, customer service, and administrative support.
Overall, the average hourly rate of women freelancers was $59.70, compared to $75.44 for their male counterparts. This equates to women freelancers earning just 79 cents for every $1 earned by male freelancers. However, the pay gap in freelancing varies significantly depending on industry categories.
The category with the largest gender pay gap among freelancers was the legal field, with men and women’s hourly wages averaging $144.78 and $68.19, respectively. More specifically, the single largest pay gap was found among freelancers who offer legal writing services, with men and women’s hourly wages averaging $181.25 and $73.88, respectively. The categories of accounting and consulting, data science and analytics, and engineering and architecture had the next largest pay gaps favoring men.
In contrast, women were found to earn slightly more than men, on average, in the fields of design and creativity, customer service, and administrative support. There were some specific freelancing jobs in which women averaged notably higher hourly wages than their male counterparts: brand strategy ($150.42 vs. $114.42), videography ($121.67 vs. $74.25), and database development ($160.00 vs $87.45).
Freelance gender pay gaps also vary among the states. Wyoming has the largest pay gap between men and women freelancers, with men averaging $55.89 more per hour than women. Delaware is the only state in which women freelancers earn more than their male peers, averaging $13.83 more per hour.
The report offers several recommendations for women freelancers when they are determining their pricing rates. They encourage women to research what other freelancers in their fields are offering, think about costs to provide their services, use objective measures of their experience when comparing to other freelancers, continually update rates as they gain experience, be transparent and flexible with compensation, and use variable rates aligned with workload.