Self-employed gender pay gap is £51 per day, research finds

Self-employed women in the UK earn £51 less per day than men on average (£336.87 vs £387.98), new research shows.

This means that the average self-employed woman working full time could be £12,266 worse off per year compared to a self-employed man.

IPSE, the self-employed association that commissioned the research, said that this is an improvement on findings from 2020, which found self-employed women earned £65 per day less than men.

The findings are based on a nationally representative survey of self-employed people in the UK by YouGov on behalf of IPSE.

The gender pay gap in self-employment has come under greater scrutiny as the number of women running their own businesses continues to rise.

There are an estimated 1.64 million women working as sole traders and freelancers in the UK, up 34% since 2015.

Vicks Rodwell, IPSE’s Managing Director, said: “Some progress has clearly been made on the pay gap in self-employment, but it’s still coming at a huge cost for self-employed women. 

“Our research shows that self-employed women are far more likely than men to say that they struggle to save money due to not earning enough. When they’re more than £12,000 per year worse off on average, it’s easy to see why.

“Women know it’s not as simple as ‘just charging more’; where a man is seen as confident for negotiating their rates up, a woman can be seen as difficult or pushy. It’s important that we continue to challenge these biases and remove the barriers self-employed women face when advocating for themselves in business.”

Jane Curtis, a freelancer and money advice coach, said: “Women's relationship with money is shaped long before they ever thought about what work they'd be doing. We're socialised to be helpful, to put others' needs first, to feel uncomfortable taking up financial space. So this isn't just a case of upping our prices to close the gap. There's a lot of conditioning and internal factors at play too.”