This is what I just told my next door neighbor, a very sweet woman who’s also at home during the day, keeping house and cooking up a storm. She just called to see if I’m OK because she “hasn’t seen me or Buddy [my four-legged office manager] outside in a few days.”
Granted it was raining cats and office managers yesterday, and then I had my writing group meeting in the evening. But the real reason she hasn’t seen me is that I have five short articles due to a client between now and Monday and I’ve been glued to my monitor.
This far from the first time my neighbor and I have had this conversation. And it’s nice to know that I have the freelancer’s equivalent of a guardian angel next door. Not only will she call 911 if I do wind up in a twitching heap on the floor (no doubt from a deadline overdose), she reminds me every so often that I need to step away from the desk.
October 19th, 2006
In honor of National Business Women’s Week (the third week of October, as in October 16 through 20), I offer up these fascinating stats from recent reports by the U.S. Small Business Administration and the Center for Women’s Business Research:
- In 2005, small businesses accounted for a whopping 99.7 percent of all the nation’s “employer businesses” (you know, businesses with paid staff).
- Said small businesses employed 57.4 million Americans — in other words, a staggering 50.6 percent of non-farm workers in the private sector.
- Women owners of larger businesses are just as likely as their male counterparts to have a long-term strategy for selling, handing down, or closing their business.
- While female and male business owners are equally motivated to sell their empires, women are much more likely to take into account how the sale will impact their employees.
- Women business owners are nearly twice as likely as male business owners to plan to pass their business on to a daughter or daughters (37% vs. 19%).
You, too, can do your part to support businesswomen and small business owners everywhere. Rather than buy from Starbucks or rent from Blockbuster this week, check out that indie coffee stand down the street that you’ve never tried and/or your local mom-and-pop video rental shop. Encourage your company to assemble a crackerjack team of independent contractors (aka freelancers), rather than hiring the usual behemoth creative agencies (unless of course, those agencies farm their work out to freelancers and treat them with love). And so on and so forth.
October 19th, 2006
Contrary to popular belief, working moms (and dads) spend more time with their kids than their 1960s counterparts, according to a New York Times report this week. How do they do it? By letting the house go and letting dad pick up some of the slack.
I quote:
The researchers found, to their surprise, that married and single parents spent more time teaching, playing with and caring for their children than parents did 40 years ago.
For married mothers, the time spent on child care activities increased to an average of 12.9 hours a week in 2000, from 10.6 hours in 1965. For married fathers, the time spent on child care more than doubled, to 6.5 hours a week, from 2.6 hours. Single mothers reported spending 11.8 hours a week on child care, up from 7.5 hours in 1965.
“As the hours of paid work went up for mothers, their hours of housework declined,” said Bianchi. “It was almost a one-for-one trade.”
Fathers have picked up some of the slack. Married fathers are spending more time on housework: an average of 9.7 hours a week in 2000, up from 4.4 hours in 1965. That increase was more than offset by the decline in time devoted to housework by married mothers: 19.4 hours a week in 2000, down from 34.5 hours in 1965.
Right on! And take that, Religious Right! Thanks to Broadsheet for tipping me off to this report.
October 19th, 2006
