In the early days of this blog, we spent an afternoon with members of the Talented Ladies Club, reporting on how they were helping working mums to find their feet in the freelance world. As we filmed the video below, the founders Hannah Martin and Kary Fisher shared experiences in what they refer to as ‘the reality of a post-baby career’, explaining how they’d been shocked and dismayed by a miserly mess of ‘redundancy, discrimination and a loss of opportunities’.
The more they explored it, the more it appeared to be made up of ‘talented ladies… struggling to make their careers work after becoming mums, just like us.’
Scroll forward two years and we find ourselves thinking back to that inspiring afternoon. Freelancing as a working mum is back in the news thanks to a new report published in conjunction with IPSE concerning maternity pay for this part of the workforce. According to the Women and Work Annual Report, female freelancers are currently losing out when it comes to maternity allowance.
As things currently stand, freelance mums-to-be do not qualify for Statutory Maternity Pay (SMP), but some may be eligible to receive an official Maternity Allowance providing they were working for at least 26 weeks of the 66 weeks leading up to the birth of their child, earning more than £30 per week. The Women and Work All Party Parliamentary Group is calling for an enhancement to the first six weeks of the Maternity Allowance, until it equals the SMP.
The hope, of course, is that improvements such as these will lead to a higher proportion of mums-to-be and stay-at-home-mums will choose freelancing as a career option. As Hannah Martin and Kary Fisher pointed out, the situation for this community is bordering on the obscene. Many women in this position are effectively being forced out of work due to a lack of flexibility. While every employee in the UK has the statutory right to request flexible working hours after 26 weeks of employment, their employers are rarely aware of this, and flexibility is often frowned upon.
According to the report, there are currently 2.6 million mums out of work in the UK, and 68% of those with children under 18 years of age have said they would return to work if flexibility around childcare was made available. The stats also show that one in five working mums have requested such flexibility and subsequently been forced out of work.
“There are 2.6 million mums out of work in the UK, and 68% of those with children under 18 say they would return to work if flexible childcare was available”
Freelancing and self-employment in the UK is at its highest since the government began keeping records on the subject in the mid-1970s. 4.79 million people class themselves as self-employed today, and 1.91 million see themselves as freelancers. Of the initial figure, only 32% are women, and twice as many men start their own business in this country.
Both IPSE and the Women and the World All Party Parliamentary Group are keen to see these figures increase, and hope that an increase in benefits combined with a raise in entrepreneurial know-how (it is thought that only 1% of UK freelancers received information about self-employment in school) will have the required result.
For more information on Hannah Martin and Kary Fisher, head to www.talentedladiesclub.com. If you’re new to freelancing and hope to find out more about the ins and outs of setting up your own business, get in touch with My Accountant Friend and we’ll do what we can to make life easier for you.
