The Myth of Self-Employment as Freedom for Mid-Life Women

Mid-Life Career ChangeFeeling Stuck & Career ConfusionCapacity Burnout & Sustainability

8 Jan

Why so many women turn to it - and why it doesn’t automatically fix what’s broken

Introduction

For many women in mid-life, self-employment begins to look like an escape hatch.

After years of navigating rigid workplaces, gendered expectations, pay inequity, and inflexible schedules, the promise of autonomy can feel irresistible. No boss. No performance theatrics. No pretending your life fits neatly around a 9–5 designed for and by someone else.

Self-employment is often framed as freedom for women - but the reality is far more complex.

This article is for women considering self-employment as a response to burnout, misalignment, or systemic exhaustion, and who want an honest conversation before making the leap.

Why So Many Mid-Life Women Consider Self-Employment

In Australia, women are increasingly turning to self-employment and small business as a way to make work fit their lives.

Around one-third of Australian small businesses are now owned or led by women, and female business ownership has grown significantly over the past two decades. This growth reflects women using their skills, experience, and adaptability to create alternatives where traditional employment no longer works for them.

For many women I work with, the pull toward self-employment is not about ambition or hustle. It is about survival, sustainability, and dignity. I also know from surveying women for my white paper that self-employment comes with its own set of challenges. It’s not to say you shouldn’t consider it, but it does tell me there is a bigger conversation that must be had to make the decision intelligently and safely.

Women are often seeking:

flexibility around caregiving and health
autonomy over time and energy
relief from gendered bias and pay inequity
work that fits life, rather than consuming it

Self-employment is frequently a response to systemic inflexibility, not a desire for endless productivity.

This reflects how traditional career models were never designed for women’s lives.

The Reality Behind the Flexibility Promise

While self-employment is often sold as freedom, the lived reality for many women looks different.

Australian data shows that a significant proportion of self-employed women work part-time, far more than the general workforce. This reflects how unpaid labour, caregiving, and capacity constraints shape women’s working lives - even when they run their own businesses.

Women are often tricked into thinking the flexibility will solve some of their issues and help juggling the demands on them, but flexibility often comes at a cost:

income insecurity
blurred boundaries between work and rest
lack of sick leave, superannuation, or safety nets
pressure to be constantly available

Without conscious design, women often recreate the same overload in self-employment - just without the protections of employment.

I hear stories often from women I work with who jumped into a sole trader situation without the right processes in place and have found themselves worse off than before and seeking my help to break back into the paid employment market. They’ve spent their weekends running around to markets selling their wares, or online spruiking on social media services they hope they can sell only to find themselves more exhausted than ever.

Some do well, but many fall flat trying to be the resilient woman the world told them they should be. And when that fails women blame themselves even more. And they shouldn’t.

The good news is that with counselling and careful consideration they are able to re-build sustainable careers in both paid and self-employed sectors.

The Funding Myth: ‘If I’m Good Enough, I’ll Get Backed’

One of the most damaging myths around self-employment is the belief that effort and merit determine success.

In reality, access to funding is deeply gendered.

Despite the growth of women-led businesses, women-led enterprises in Australia receive less than 1% of venture capital and start-up funding, highlighting a stark and persistent funding gap.

This matters because:

under-capitalisation limits growth
women are forced to self-fund or stay small
financial risk is carried privately rather than structurally

Surveys of Australian women business owners consistently show that access to finance is one of the biggest barriers to starting and growing a business, regardless of capability or performance.

When women struggle financially in self-employment, it is often treated as a personal failure rather than a predictable outcome of unequal access to capital.

How Gendered Conditioning Follows Women Into Business

Self-employment does not automatically undo decades of social conditioning.

Many women bring the same patterns into business that harmed them in workplaces:

undercharging
over-delivering
difficulty saying no
tying worth to productivity
absorbing emotional labour from clients

Self-employment does not remove gendered expectations - it often internalises them.

Without reflection, women can find themselves working longer hours, earning less, and carrying even more responsibility - now without organisational cover.

Why Self-Employment Still Makes Sense (Sometimes)

None of this means self-employment is a bad choice. For some women, self-employment is part of a broader mid-life career change.

For some women, it can be genuinely supportive - when it is intentionally designed around capacity, values, and boundaries rather than escape.

Self-employment works best when:

income expectations are realistic
boundaries are explicit and enforced
health and capacity are prioritised
financial literacy and support are in place
the decision is made consciously, not reactively

Freedom in self-employment comes from structure - not from the absence of it.

Questions Worth Asking Before You Leap

Instead of asking:

Can I make this work?

Try asking:

What am I trying to escape?
What am I hoping this will give me?
What would sustainability actually look like for me?
What patterns do I not want to recreate?
How will I protect my capacity if this succeeds?

These questions often reveal whether self-employment is a genuine fit - or a signal that something else needs attention first.

How Career Counselling Supports These Decisions

Career counselling provides a space to examine self-employment without romanticising or pathologising it.

This work can help women:

understand the real drivers behind the desire for self-employment
separate values from desperation
design work that honours health and capacity
assess financial, emotional, and relational realities
decide whether change needs to be vocational, structural, or internal

Sometimes the answer is self-employment. Sometimes it’s renegotiation, boundary change, or a different role entirely.

What matters is that the decision is made with clarity, not exhaustion.

A Final Reflection

Self-employment is not a cure for broken systems.

It can be a powerful choice - but only when it is chosen, not clung to as a last resort.

If you’re considering self-employment in mid-life, you deserve more than glossy success stories and hustle rhetoric. You deserve an honest assessment of what will actually support you.

If you want support exploring this decision without rushing or romanticising it, a Soul Strategy Call can help you think through your next best steps with care.