New research using Understanding Society data has found that people who are self-employed for longer have higher life satisfaction – but that these results come from women rather than men.
The research set out to test two theories:
- that self-employment would be positively associated with life satisfaction, but that life satisfaction would fall over time
- that longer periods of self-employment would have a stronger positive effect on the life satisfaction of men than of women
It found support for the first hypothesis, but the paper says “the results regarding hypothesis 2 were rather surprising”. The researchers – Nicholas Litsardopoulos and Chris Hand from Kingston Business School, and George Saridakis from Kent Business School – tested the effects for the overall sample, and then for women and men separately. These separate results showed that the effects of self-employment in the overall sample actually came from women.
“Men who spend more time in self-employment”, they write, “do not differ statistically from men who spend more time in wage-employment.” They had taken into account factors such as age, education, marital status, and number of children.
The research is useful, because policy-makers and governments are increasingly interested in the kinds of employment that positively affect well-being and prosperity. The paper says, “The decision to become self-employed or wage-employed has an impact on careers and lives, as well as on national economic growth and development. Self-employment has been consistently associated with non-financial benefits such as flexibility, autonomy and independence, commonly used to explain the higher satisfaction with work and life of the self-employed compared to the wage-earners.”
This paper, though, suggests the effects vary considerably by gender.
Employment
