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Abstract
This survey analysis of women freelance journalists is a first step toward filling a gap in the largely uncharted territory of women in the United States who leave traditional employer-based news jobs for self-employment. The findings show that female respondents were satisfied with their work hours, earnings, and ability to combine their atypical newswork jobs with raising children. However, they were no more satisfied with their work than male respondents who also worked as freelance journalists.
Notes
1. The 41 union-respondents accounted for 38 countries, and most were European (28.9 percent) and Asian (28.9 percent). In all, the IFJ has union affiliates in more than 100 countries (IFJ, nd).
2. A split-half test was performed to double check the scale's reliability. A split-half test estimates reliability as the correlation between randomly constructed “halves” of the scale and reports it as a Spearman–Brown coefficient. For the job-satisfaction scale, the coefficient was 0.893, which is well within the threshold for adequate reliability.
3. The 41 respondents to the IFJ survey represented one-fourth (25.3 percent) of the federation's 162 union-affiliates (Walters et al., Citation2006, p. 1).
4. To illustrate the point, Sheehan and Hoy (Citation1999) achieved a response rate slightly higher than that median in their test of the viability of email as a method for administering national-level surveys. Their rate was 24 percent.
5. If the 506 Mediabistro freelancers are used as the population, the sampling error rate is ± 8.73 percentage points at the 95 percent confidence level.
6. Females accounted for 73.2 percent of Banning's 473 freelance-journalist respondents. Nearly 92 percent of them held at least a bachelor's degree, and they earned an average $40,000–50,000 annually from freelancing.
7. Banning's female respondents were aged 49, on average, and 57.5 percent of them had at least one child.