Why more women are self-employed now
By Emily Peck, Author of Axios Markets
Published on Sept 2nd, 2022 - Source
More women are self-employed now than prior to the pandemic — particularly Black and Hispanic women and those without bachelor's degrees, finds a new analysis from the Center for Economic and Policy Research.
Why it matters: The likely explanation here is not simply an explosion of entrepreneurship, but also a reaction to the childcare worker shortage. Mothers are scrambling to care for children at home and still earn money.
"A lack of access to childcare has made many women seek more flexible work arrangements in order to oversee their kids," write the authors of the piece.
And those with less education have a harder time finding jobs that allow for remote work.
By the numbers: Overall, in the first half of 2022, self-employment levels were up .4 percentage points — about 600,000 people — as compared to the period before the pandemic that the authors examined.
Drilling down, the share of employed women who report being self-employed rose by .7 percentage points to 8.2 percent. That's slightly more than twice the increase men reported.
Black women saw even bigger gains. The share of Black women who said they were self-employed in 2022 rose more than 1 percentage point, from 4.1% pre-pandemic to 5.2%. Hispanic women saw a similar increase. (For white women the number ticked up by .6 percentage points.)
Zoom out: There aren't enough people working in the childcare sector to meet demand. Employment levels are 8.4% lower than where they were in February 2020 — while overall employment in the private sector has recovered.
That means centers that look after very young children don't have enough staff and serve fewer families, write the authors of a new report released by the Center for American Progress (CAP) Friday morning.
"Every state has stories about programs having to slash capacity and even close permanently because they simply can't staff up. The reason is simple: programs cannot offer competitive compensation," says Elliot Haspel, an early-childhood policy expert and the author of "Crawling Behind: America's Childcare Crisis and How to Fix It."
"The child care industry was sick before the pandemic, now it's dying. It's a failed market, it's in a death spiral," Haspel says.
The bottom line: Despite this, there hasn't been a mass dropout by young mothers from the workforce, notes CAP associate director Rose Khattar.
The tight labor market and the rise in remote work allows some parents the flexibility to do, essentially, two jobs.
Source: Axios
