In recent years, the rise in female self-employment has spiked. With the prospect of being your own boss and striking a better work-life balance, more and more women are seeking opportunities to work for themselves.
Here at AppJobs, we’ve analysed OCED data to reveal which countries are driving female self-employment, as well as the gender pay gap for the self-employed in each country. To support these findings we also surveyed 1,000 people in the UK to find out their opinions on being your own boss and working for yourself.
The results revealed that Turkey is reported to have the highest number of self-employed females with 34.6%, followed by Mexico (31.9%) and Greece (28.4%). The survey found that 35.3% of people agree that people are happier being self-employed and interestingly, it also revealed that in the UK 13.7% of men aspire to be self-employed compared to 9.1% of females.
In addition, the survey results revealed that 27.7% of participants agree that it is easier to be self-employed as a male. These findings could be a reflection on those countries with a lower percentage of self-employed females such as Lithuania, Finland, and Israel.
We also set out to reveal some of the reasons that put individuals off becoming self-employed and found that 31.2% feared that they wouldn’t find enough work, whilst 31.1% feared they would run out of money or go bankrupt. Fewer individuals were concerned about the future, as only 13.7% expressed worry about retirement plans.
The gender pay gap is defined by the average difference between hourly wages for men and women, and whilst an increasing amount of attention is being brought to this subject to address this disparity, more needs to be done, particularly for self-employed females.
The gender pay gap between self-employed men and women is far larger than the gap between men and women that are employees, the results below highlight the improvements that have been made, but show there is still a long way to go for a number of countries.
Estonia sits as the only country where self-employed women earn more than men (by 16%). Denmark, Luxembourg, and Sweden are all leading the way in reducing the self-employment gender wage gap to 10% and under, whilst the pay gap in the UK remains much larger at 33% and the U.S. at 56%.
How much more work needs to be done in your country to improve the self-employed gender wage gap?.
To see more research around female workers in developing countries, please click here.
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