Zinnov reported that 55 percent of online freelancers are women. MBO Partners says a similar percentage (53 percent) of all American independent workers are also women, which amounts to 8.5 million women across the country working on their own. Compare that to women’s 47.6 percent participation rate in the traditional workforce and you may start to wonder if the gig-focused future of work isn’t a better match for the needs of women.

Several experts and female independent work veterans have speculated that the greater flexibility of independent work might be more suited to the desires of women and take advantage of their ability to weave together communities of collaborators and their generally lower attraction to high-status, long-hours,  battle-up-the-ladder-type career paths.

Drawing on their Independence Workforce Index, MBO Partners’ numbers supports this idea that independent work tends to suit women and that flexibility plays a central role in this. 77 percent of women independents are satisfied or highly satisfied with their mode of working, according to the consultancy, and 74 percent plan to remain independent. When asked why they plan to remain independent, 65 percent cited flexibility, 64 percent said control over their own schedule and 59 percent noted the enjoyment they get from being their own boss.

Not every woman is independent by choice, however. And MBO admits that the recent recession and spotty recovery are forcing some women to get creative about their career trajectories. “As the country continues to struggle with economic recovery, women have forged a viable third path that empowers them with even greater control and freedom over their lives and careers. It also gives them a new definition of work-life success,” Gene Zaino, CEO of MBO Partners, said, putting a positive spin on the less happy face of women forced into independent work for a statement accompanying the data.

The relative gains of women over men in the workplace have been much discussed in the last few years (exhibit A: the term “mancession”) – is the rise of independent work one more factor making work more female friendly?

Image courtesy of Flickr user tibchris.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

It’s a question we posed to Fabio Rosati, CEO of Elance, when we spoke to him a few weeks back. In a nutshell, he said that the categories used by the BLS don’t fully capture new, more flexible ways of working. “I believe that the trend of increased flexibility in the workforce is substantial and is significant,” he said, suggesting several ways the statistics might not fully reflect that trend, including labeling solopreneurs as small business employees and missing all those that work flexibly through staffing firms. “If you look at the number of individuals that have been hired by staffing firms and then in turn placed as temporary workers with clients of the staffing firms, that number is increasing significantly. The BLS numbers don’t tell the full story,” he said, pointing as well to the increase in the number of folks telling the BLS they work part-time for non-economic reasons as more evidence of an increasing incidence of flexible working.

Rosati may have a point that the BLS criteria are more rigid than the current reality of the job market, but there may also be another explanation at work – an increasing number of “stealth freelancers.” When GroupTalent, a site that matches top-tier design and development talent with projects in need of extra hands, sifted through its data recently they discovered something that CEO Manny Medina found startling. More and more workers selling their services on the site also have full-time gigs.

66 percent of freelancers, it turns out, hold full-time jobs. That’s a 50 percent jump from when the site launched in November. Speaking to these freelancers, Medina found they constitute a “dark pool” of talent, which doesn’t advertise but can be quietly recruited through sites like his or through personal referrals for the right sort of challenging projects.

The site screens freelancers by examining a candidate’s portfolio and then conducting a short interview. “At the very beginning it was 50/50 people who were doing full-time freelancing and people who were in startups. What we started seeing is a lot more of those who were coming in to our site were those who had full-time jobs. A lot of these people don’t want it to be known that they’re freelancing,” Medina explained in an interview.

“There’s not enough talent to go around and on top of that there’s a quality signaling problem. Employers are so desperate looking for developers right now that they’re willing to take someone on a part-time basis,” Medina said, explaining the increase in stealth freelancers from the perspective of employers. From the perspective of the worker, you might think that a full-time job plus high-octane freelance projects sounds like a stressful drag you’d only take on if you needed the money, but Medina has found that most of the stealth freelancers on his site seem pleased with the arrangement.

“We’ve been interviewing some and some of them do it for fun. If you work for a company, you get antsy. They like the challenge of building something new. They get that start-up rush again. Most of these people work on projects anyway on weekends, it’s just nice to get paid,” Medina said. He noted that any talk of motivation was partially speculation, but gave as an example a guy who works at Gilt, has his own startup on the side and rents out about five hours a week on GroupTalent. “We’ve only been in business for three months, but people return,” Medina said to illustrate that freelancers didn’t seem motivated only by short-term economic need (though of course extra cash flow is great for those with startups) but viewed this stealth freelancing as a long-term work style.

“You see a lot of articles talking about the freelancing world and in reality you’re not counting those that would be willing to freelance on the side. I think that the real number of freelancers is a metric that hasn’t been really accounted for,” says Medina, concluding, “we’re firm believers that the world will move to freelance.” Perhaps it’s moving that way slightly faster than official statistics indicate.

Do you agree that official employment statistics don’t fully reflect that shift towards the so-called gig economy or is the ‘everyone will be a freelancer story’ overblown?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Kenny Holston 21. 

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro

PeoplePerHour competitor Freelancer.co.uk has released its own findings from a survey of 12,000 businesses that used the service. The company found UK businesses increased their spending on freelancers by 134 percent this year, hiring talent from around the world. The company chalks this impressive growth up to the intense economic pressures British small businesses are under.

With a global workforce of more than three million highly skilled but affordable freelancers, it is little wonder that Britain’s small businesses have started outsourcing their work to secure and boost the bottom line. They are increasingly taking advantage of freelancers offering a range of skills to support their businesses. Without them bankruptcy rates in the UK could be much higher,” said Saif Bonar, Freelancer.co.uk UK Manager, adding, “with Government support and lending from banks coming up short, small businesses have realized if they don’t outsource they won’t survive.”

In an email accompanying the release, a Freelancer.co.uk spokesperson also noted that the steep rise in the use of freelancers reflects larger shifts in the labor market as well as short-term stress on budgets, and pointed to the work of London Business School professor Lynda Gratton, which describes these changes, including a greater reliance by businesses on independent talent. We’ve covered her ideas, including tips to “futureproof” your career here on GigaOM before.

Where will the shift toward more freelance work be quickest – Europe, the US or somewhere else?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Iker Merodio.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

Whether Zaino’s estimate of exactly when freelancers and independent professionals will outnumber regular employees proves correct, the general trend toward a rise in the number of independent workers is hard to deny. Online platforms connecting these pros to contract-based work are flourishing, and media chatter about the so-called “gig economy” is growing steadily louder. But is what is true in America also true abroad? Are other countries experiencing the same rise in the percentage of workers going independent?

A new piece of evidence suggests that freelancers are a growing part of the economy in the U.K. as well, at least when it comes to the small-business sector. Online labor platform PeoplePerHour.com recently polled 1,300 British small businesses about their use of freelance talent. The survey found:

• Eighty percent of responding businesses said freelancing had become more common in the UK small-business community over the past year.
• Thirty-two percent of respondents had started using freelancers for the first time in the past six months.
• Forty-one percent of respondents planned to increase freelance hiring over the next 12 months, compared with 16 percent who plan to hire more in-house staff.
• Thirty-three percent reported they now use freelancers on a weekly basis.

The release accompanying the survey also points out that the trend has been good for PeoplePerHour specifically, with total registered users doubling from 120,000 to more than 240,000 over the past year.

The technology changes that are enabling businesses in the U.S. to take advantage of independent workers are just as present in the U.K., as are strong economic pressures on businesses to cut costs and maintain agility, so the findings are hardly surprising. Nonetheless, the survey is interesting as a confirmation that these trends are affecting workers and organizations across the Atlantic as well.

Image courtesy of Flickr user C.G.P.Grey

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• Opportunities Abound as the “Rules of Work” are Broken
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics

“While coworking spaces might come pretty close to the ideal working space, at times they can also be spaces where some of the worst characteristics of a capitalist economy are being reproduced — just like in an ordinary workspace,” she writes. Independent work may solve many problems, but it doesn’t get rid of asymmetric relationships between those handing out work and those completing it, she states. What does she mean by this?

If there is a big difference between the partners in a work relationship, sometimes the stronger party gets all the advantages and benefits, while the weaker party has to bear the full risk and disadvantages.

Usually the strong partner is someone who is established and well connected. Often these people or companies are very good at communicating and selling, they act mainly as project managers, while contracting out the actual development or design work to other people. The subcontractors in turn are often newcomers who don’t have a big network, who are rather inexperienced and not as good at selling themselves and their work. Usually these people are happy that someone subcontracts them work and they don’t have to spend time on acquisition, communicating and networking. The relationship between the main contractor and the subcontractor can be win-win situation, but rather often it is not.

The result of this unequal balance of power, Pohler claims, can be impossible deadlines, insane hours, failure to pay for revisions to a project and extremely long lag times before payment for subcontractors. And coworking spaces, she feels, may be inadvertently making the problem worse. “It is easy to find young, skilled and motivated people as subcontractors, and it is easy to build relationships on the assumption that everyone is more or less the same and equal,” she writes.

Pohler may diagnose the problem in her article, but when it comes to solutions, she simply advocates for greater discussion of the issue and more openness in the community.

Is that an adequate solution, or do you think independent workers need to do more to protect themselves?

Image courtesy of Flickr user JD Hancock.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast

According to two new surveys, not quite. Americans may be far less optimistic than they were in other, cheerier historical periods, but this recent evidence suggests they are starting to cope with the challenges.

Adecco recently polled 1,014 Americans for its annual Workplace Insights survey, asking them for their outlook on everything from their jobs to the coming presidential election. The results show a shift in U.S. workers’ views on career instability in general and temporary and contract work in particular. Adecco reports:

• Temporary jobs are more favorably viewed today than in the past. Nearly two-thirds (63 percent) of Americans say they view temporary jobs more positively than they did last year. That might be a result of a huge majority (86 percent) of Americans believing a temporary job is a good career option for people looking to gain valuable work experience.
• Americans are also more likely to work in different fields than they were in 2011. Sixty-eight percent of Americans would be more willing to take a job in a field outside of their degree or study today than they would have been last year.
• Women may be more flexible when it comes to finding a job than men. Seventy-two percent of women would be more willing today to take a job outside of their field of study compared to 64 percent of men.

Of course, these results are hardly proof of some definitive move towards contentment with gig-based careers. As Consumerist points out, it’s not that respondents are happy with a future of piecemeal work; it’s that they’re hoping (perhaps out of desperation) these sorts of jobs will  lead to an old-style full-time position:

Americans are growing more amenable to taking temporary employment, changing their viewpoint from the glass-half-empty opinion of ‘it’s a job without permanence’ to ‘it’s a job that may lead to something permanent one day.’

But even if workers aren’t thrilled with bouncing between jobs, there’s other evidence they’re starting to come to terms with a less stable future of work. The American Psychological Association regularly asks Americans if they’re feeling stressed, and perhaps surprisingly given the lack of cheerful news, they’re increasingly answering no. The Financial Times reports:

Although 22 per cent of Americans described themselves as “very stressed”, this figure was slightly down on the previous year, when it was 24 per cent – and well below 2007, when it was 32 per cent. Indeed, the measured levels of stress have been dropping steadily over the past five years since the APA started its survey. In 2007, for example, the mean stress level was 6.2 per cent, whereas this year it was “only” 5.2 per cent.

“After five long years of financial turmoil, Americans might – just possibly – be getting used to shocks,” speculates the paper, continuing, “five years of watching ‘black swan’ type events, bad government policies and bizarre economic twists might have made shocks less unsettling. People are slowly adapting to a more unstable world.”

While these are only crumbs of data that certainly do not prove Americans have completely and happily adjusted to new career and economic realities, they do suggest we can’t and won’t look backward forever. Among the understandable fear of change and pining for more stable times, it’s easy to imagine we’ll never get our heads around new realities. These studies at least suggest it’s possible.

Do you think Americans are starting to give up the dream of returning to older realities and starting to figure out how to deal with the future of work?

Image courtesy of Flickr user Juan M. Gatica.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

But recently ,Canadian current affairs magazine Maclean’s offered another possible contributing factor, one that gets a lot of consideration here on WebWorkerDaily. “Could the rise of independent work be partly to blame for the rise of inequality?” the article asks in an article entitled “The End of the Job.”

The rise of the contract worker may also be having a more wide-scale impact than previously realized. A growing gap between rich and poor in countries like Canada has been blamed, in part, on a growing number of poor quality jobs. There’s also mounting evidence to suggest that the rise of the throwaway worker has made recent recessions more painful and longer-lasting. Temp jobs? More like a temporary economy.

“It all amounts to a sea change in corporate attitudes about what constitutes a job in the first place,” concludes the article, noting the death of the job-security-for-loyalty model of previous decades. This move toward more independent and contract work is not only another contributing cause of inequality, but also of the general economic doldrums:

The concern is that all of this impermanence risks creating an economy built not on bedrock, but shifting sand….  Companies see contract employment as the answer to uncertain times, but [professor at the School of Labor Studies at McMaster University Wayne] Lewchuk says it may be a case of the medicine being worse than the disease. People who don’t earn as much money spend less, which isn’t good for the economy. “If people stop buying, then companies stop producing and lay off more workers,” he says. “You get yourself into a quicker and deeper hole. Meanwhile, on the other side of a recession, when you start bringing people back, you’re doing it at lower wages and they don’t have the kind of purchasing oomph necessary to get the economic engine started again.”

Of course, the need for companies to grow leaner, including by utilizing more independent workers, is driven by larger economic forces like globalization and better, cheaper technology, so it’s difficult to argue that independent work itself is the root cause of the problem. Pretty clearly it’s an effect rather than a driver of change. But Maclean’s contention that independent work may be a piece of a destructive cycle that’s both increasing inequality and holding back growth seems worth considering.

How much is the rise of independent work contributing to increased inequality? To economic stagnation?

Image courtesy of Flickr user _PaulS_.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• How HR can make the case for workforce analytics
• Startup growth and the new recruiting ecosystem

At the start of each new year, jobs site CareerBuilder polls several thousand HR pros and hiring managers about their outlook for the year ahead when it comes to hiring contract and temporary workers. And just like the last three years, the survey this year found a steady uptick in the number of businesses planning on hiring contract staff, with 36 percent responding they will hire such workers in 2012. That’s up from:

• 34 percent for 2011
• 30 percent for 2010
• 28 percent for 2009

Certainly plenty of these temp positions may be traditional seasonal workers taken on to deal with the summer rush at a resort or as short-term fillers when an employee is out on maternity leave, for instance. But the steady rise in the number of contract employees firms plan to take on does support the argument that lean economic times are opening more and more business’s eyes to the advantages of agile hiring practices.

“Employers are relying on temporary and contract workers to support leaner staffs,” commented Eric Gilpin, president of CareerBuilder’s staffing and recruiting group in the release accompanying the survey. But he also noted that many firms plan to move contract workers to full-time roles if and when the economy picks up.

Do you foresee most employers reverting back to full-staff when the economy finally picks up?

Image courtesy of Flickr user troubalex.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

Cronin decided there must be a better way to match businesses in need of professional services with those able to help and ExpertBids was born. An online labor platform that aims to connect small- and medium-sized businesses looking for help with accountants, lawyers and consultants hoping to build independent practices, Chicago-based ExpertBids launched in November 2010.

A standard post on the site is free for companies (though a premium post which guarantees three bids within a week costs $50), while professionals pay small amounts to bid for work depending on the size of the project’s budget – larger projects have slightly higher fees. Quotes can be either a flat fee or hourly rate and the once the parties agree to a price, monitoring and billing for the work is entirely their responsibility. The site now has over 10,000 users, about 80 percent of which are US-based experts looking to sell their services and 20 percent are businesses hoping to hire.

Of course, ExpertBids is far from the only labor platform out there, with space leaders Elance and oDesk, reporting impressive growth. But Cronin feels his little site serves a need the big boys don’t by focusing specifically on professional services. “Some legal needs, you need to be able to go into the lawyer’s office and discuss with them, so we focus a little more on location than some of the other platforms,” Cronin says. But even in this relatively specialized niche, Cronin has company — oddly named Shpoonkle restricts itself to lawyers but aims to do basically the same thing.

Cronin acknowledges that there are hurdles for his fledgling business to overcome, including trust issues when clients are shopping for higher-end services. “For some people that’s their first hesitation with using the site,” Cronin concedes, but he notes, “the alternative is that you go through your phone book and you make a bunch of calls and you have less information.” ExpertBids also verifies the identity of the professionals who use it, checking bar numbers or CPA license numbers, as well as encouraging users to do their own research through relevant professional associations.

Perhaps a more troublesome objection is that sites like ExpertBids drive prices down for professionals. Cronin notes that pros on his site can’t see competing offers to discourage a race to the bottom. “We’re telling the experts to give whatever price makes sense for them, and if it’s not good for them then they shouldn’t be bidding that amount,” he says, though he also understands that, “if I was a professional, I would not like how cost conscious some of these companies are, but that’s a reality.”

Cronin sees the online labor platform model not as undermining professionals economically, but as empowering small operators to reach larger markets and give huge firms a run for their money.

Over the years, the legal industry and especially big firms just started to get so fat, inefficient and expensive, so there’s really an opportunity for solo and small firm lawyers to undercut these people without the high overhead of these humungous firms who have offices in all the downtown areas. If you can cut your overhead as a small firm, you’re going to be able to lower your prices significantly and still make a very decent profit.

Rather than view ExpertBids and the like as only a tool for businesses to drive down costs, Cronin paints a picture of platforms like his as arming professional David’s to take on complacent Goliaths. If he’s right, we should be seeing more of them popping up.

Do you think we’ll be seeing more niche online labor platforms as other industries embrace the model?

Image courtesy of ExpertBids.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Examining the rise of crowd labor platforms in 2012
• Defining work in the digital age: an analysis by GigaOM Pro
• Report: High-Impact Collaboration in the Enterprise

He said this new era is forcing employees, employers and the government to confront a new reality as solo workers become the norm.

“These individuals — whether crowd-sourced or providing tactical solutions or finding their first project on a marketplace or providing strategic advice to client — these are the pioneers of the next era,” Zaino said at GigaOM’s Net:Work conference.

He said contrary to popular belief, most of the current independent workers (55 percent) choose this route instead of being forced into temporary work. And he said 80 percent of these workers claim they don’t want to go back. And 28 million traditionally employed workers said they want to go independent in the next two years. That might be because 50 percent of traditional workers say they are unhappy with their work situations.

Many independents are not average workers at least in their own eyes. Seven out of ten say they are experts in their field and have advanced skills and education. Zain said companies are turning to these workers not as a low-cost solution but as hired guns who can come in and fix specific problems.

There are still a lot of challenges ahead as this new era takes shape. Employers need to find ways to dole out more work to these independents. And they need to rethink how they look at work, as more of discrete projects to be assigned. And employees need to get used to habit of scrapping for new jobs and dealing without health care and other safety net provisions. Zaino said the government also has to figure out how to deal with a shift in independent workers when it comes to tax income and how to categorize these employees.

There’s still a lot that needs to happen, but this will be the new norm as technology unshackles workers and gives them the opportunity to work from anywhere and be open to jobs from all kinds of employers.

“We’re pretty confident this is new way of work; this independent way of work is here to stay,” Zaino said.

Photo by Pinar Ozger.

Related research and analysis from GigaOM Pro:
Subscriber content. Sign up for a free trial.

• Personal tools lead to practical business
• Millennials in the enterprise, part 1: strategies for supporting the new digital workforce
• A 2011 NewNet Forecast