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 The WAHMs get all the press, but spending more time with the kids is not the only reason for women to take the business home
By Dawn Rivers Baker
There is a popular conception of the home-based workingwoman as someone who is, first and foremost, a mother. In fact, that is why she is a home-based workingwoman. Under normal circumstances, she would be a stay-at-home mom but her economic reality is such that her income is needed for her family to keep body and soul together. Rather than sending the kids to daycare and/or an after school program and going back to work, she seeks out "business opportunities" that may range from Mary Kay distributorships to network marketing schemes with Magic Learning SystemsTM or Six Figure IncomeTM.
Supposedly, the primary characteristic of these women is that whatever they may be doing to make money is secondary and subordinate to being a mom. They do not make very much, but that is okay with them; they really only want to stay at home with the kids. Generally, these women are assumed to be high school graduates, with possibly some college, and to have job skills at around the clerical/lower management level.
This mindset has produced an entire home-based work industry that has plastered the Internet with ebooks and articles on how to bombard their fellow Netizens with "marketing" pitches to improve their sales (in other words, how to spam with impunity), and with communities through which WAHMs can swap resources, advice and support. Within those communities, they can be very defensive about their unique perspective; if you suggest to them that perhaps the PTA shouldn't look to them for volunteer work during the holiday retail sales season because they have a business to run, you may very well get your nose snapped off.
What is interesting about that very visible work-at-home industry is the fact that it is making any money at all. Even more curious is the fact that the media seems to have fallen for the hype. Statistically, it has been very well established that the WAHM phenomenon is a small and almost peripheral segment of the women-owned home-based business crowd, but you'd never know it.
According to a 1995 study by the National Foundation of Women Business Owners, the personal characteristics of the women who own home-based businesses are not much different than their office or storefront based counterparts. A little less than two-thirds of them, sixty-four percent, are married and on average they don't have many children (average number of children is 1.3) and don't have them at home (average number of children at home is 0.5). While those with children are often happy to be at home and available to them, being at home with the kids does not seem to be the principle reason why they start their home-based businesses.
They are also better educated than urban legend would have us believe. More than three quarters of them (76%) are college educated, which the NFWBO notes is slightly higher than the overall average of women business owners (and is probably a function of the fact that home-offices combined with current technology lend themselves to the needs of home-based professional service providers). Both their age distribution and their racial composition were found to be identical to their non-home based counterparts.
Perhaps the most significant trend in these findings is that basing a business in the home emerged less as a temporary measure used by a startup that is short of funds than a combined business/lifestyle decision. In 1995, home-based businesses owned by women were found to be an average of a little more than six years old. Apparently, having started their businesses at home, these women entrepreneurs intended to keep them there.
While running a business from home is not for everyone, it seems pretty clear that, for those who do it, there must a number of reasons beyond a lack of startup capital or a desire to hang out with your kids. For example, Victoria Parham is a military veteran; married to a career military man, and has "lived a life of transitioning every 2-3 years for the past 11 years." She found searching for a job every time her family moved to be a trying experience.
"In 1994, I decided that I'm tired of having to explain to interviewers the reason I've held so many jobs," she recalls. "I was tired of trying to convince an employer that I'd be with their company at least 3 years to enhance my chances of getting hired. ... So, I left my job and started a home based secretarial service, Victoria's Secretarial Services, in Hinesville, GA."
It has been a happy solution for a woman whose family is often on the move. With a web presence and a toll free telephone number, it no longer matters where her home is geographically located, she can always be available to potential customers.
Some women own businesses that go bust for one reason or another. Perhaps the business fails; perhaps it is successful enough to be sold at a profit. Either way, some of these women try going back to work for someone only to discover that going back to work for someone else after spending any time being your own boss is as difficult as moving back into mom's house after you've been on your own for a few years.
"I like being on my own," says Linda Ewen, a database designer who left her position as assistant vice-president with a prominent financial institution and has been running her home-based business, EWENIQUE, for ten years. "I start when I want, I do what I want and I stop working when I want. Besides, I like working from home. It's convenient."
And sometimes, it really is just that simple.
On the other hand, there are the less benign things about corporate life that might drive a woman out the door and send her home to start her own business -- things like sexual harassment, gender-based wage and salary disparities, the "glass ceiling," and all the other corporate office politics.
"Our company consists of eight women in three times zones, with 18 children," says Rene Siegel of HighTech Connect. "We are ALL refugees from the corporate world."
Siegel's story of is typical. A media professional who specializes in the IT industry, she was working as a marketing communications manager for a well-known Silicon Valley software company when they decided to hire a young man to do a similar job. It was bad enough when she found herself "touching up" his slipshod work, but when she found out that he was getting paid 25% more than she was, it was enough to push her right out the door. She left for maternity leave in 1996, and never returned.
And she lived happily ever after. HighTech Connect, a national network of some 600 freelance communications professionals, was born in 1997. It is one of the fastest growing companies in the San Francisco Bay Area, grossing $400,000 in its first year and now worth about $5 million.
Not that every woman who decides to go home to start her own business will expect to rack up those kind of numbers -- at least, not right at first. But it would be useless to deny that the frustration of gender inequity in the workplace, regardless of how high up the corporate ladder you climb, might be a good reason for the startling increase not just in women-owned home-based business but in the overall growth of entrepreneurialism among women in recent years.
"Most often we hear, 'I got burned out on corporate politics and the 24x7 chaos,'" notes Siegel of the women who comprise 75-80% of her network. "They specifically cite more flexibility, control, freedom, money and variety as benefits to working from home."
Also included among the benefits is a certain degree of freedom from the gender stereotypes that still prevail in the corporate hierarchy, and the way women who are smart, assertive and highly qualified professionals are still considered threatening in the old boys' club. The many indignities to which women are still subjected in high-level professional and managerial positions makes you wonder why they don't all go home and start their own businesses.
WomansNet Network head honcho Melody Wigdahl tells a story of how she once stepped on her boss's foot during a meeting of account managers. He was congratulating her for landing a major national account, but his method of expression &emdash; patting her on the head &emdash; left a lot to be desired.
"He would have shaken a man's hand - but he patted me on the head because he could!" says Wigdahl with remembered indignation. "As you can see a sore spot with me ... which explains why I have basically been self-employed since about age 28."
When contacted by WAHMPRENEUR early last year, the NFWBO reported that they had no plans to launch a follow-up study of the growth of home-based business ownership among women since 1995. That's unfortunate because this data is old, and while no one is in a position to be precise, the general consensus is that home-based business ownership has enjoyed a tremendous surge over the last five years. At the moment, the best we can expect is that the political and demographic situation will become clearer after the Census Bureau conducts its next "Characteristics of Business Owners" survey in 2002.
While we wait, the misperceptions persist. To be sure, the WAHM stereotypes are giving Internet hucksters something to do. They are also making it easier for policy-makers to ignore home-based working women. The existence of a woman-owned home-based business constituency &emdash; with its own issues, in addition to the general woman-owned small business issues &emdash; has successfully been dismissed by both politicians and economic analysts as an irrelevant phenomenon. It remains to be seen how long they can keep that up before they notice that we have emerged in force in this "new economy" and have consolidated our economic position with the quiet strength that is typical of the woman who means business.
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