Self-employment has risen significantly over the past two decades. The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragile nature of work for many people in the UK – and the self-employed workforce is no exception. In this report, we bring to the fore some of the shared challenges faced by self-employed people, especially women, in the pursuit of improved working lives that are more autonomous and accommodating. Policy interventions aimed at improving the conditions of self-employed work tend to be reductive and fail to address wider social factors which impact on self-employed workers. For example, the narrative around stamping out bogus forms of self-employment often fails to recognise the power structures within working life, or the wider social and economic factors which contribute to exploitative work practices. We explore the experience of working life in a more expansive way, drawing upon social and cultural experiences as well as material factors.

To draw out this distinction, in Section 1 we provide an overview of the state of self-employment today in terms of the demographic make-up of this changing workforce. From this, in Section 2, we draw on the experiences of women in self-employment in particular. Our analysis examines self-employed life in the round: rather than isolate the self-employed worker from the social world they exist in, we explore factors which interact with this such as security, autonomy, identity, and mental health. In Sections 3 and 4 we consider how these issues could be addressed through policy and good practice, laying out principles for “good self-employment” and highlighting examples of self-organised solutions set up by self-employed communities that might hold lessons for policymakers.