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Compared to self-employed men, self-employed women have more education but considerably lower earnings, generating differences in the returns to education by gender. This paper finds evidence that men typically benefit from a complementary relationship between education and earnings. However, women are heterogenous in their returns to education. Women who self-employ in traditionally female occupations do not benefit from this complementary relationship, and women who self-employ in traditionally male occupations earn returns that are more similar to the male experience.

Self-employment offers numerous benefits to both the economy and individual. Anecdotal evidence indicates that self-employment creates jobs, keeps individuals in the labor force longer, and gives workers a more flexible work arrangement and the independence to be their own boss. Accordingly, it is no surprise that Blanchflower and Oswald (1998) find that self-employed workers have higher levels of both job and life satisfaction than wage and salary workers. There has been an increase over time in workers choosing to self-employ, particularly among women. Devine (1994) uses data from the Current Population Survey (CPS) March Supplement and finds the female self-employment rate increased from 4.1% in 1975 to 6.7% in 1990. Using the same data and calculation method, this paper estimates the female self-employment rate in 2009 at 8.3%,1 indicating the rate has doubled since 1975.2 What might generate this trend? The current literature that examines female self-employment focuses on the gender differences in the determinants of self-employment. Like men, women who self-employ are more likely to be older, white, and have more education than their wage and salary counterparts. In contrast, however, family factors such as being married and having young children play a much larger role for women than men. Many women utilize self-employment as a means for joint production – the ability to combine labor market and household production. One determinant that has been overlooked in the current literature on self-employed women is education and particularly the returns to education. Previous literature notes that regardless of gender, the self-employed have higher average levels of education than their wage and salary counterparts, but no research investigates the returns to these high levels of education for women. From an individual point of view, analyzing the return to education provides a measure of the financial payoff that an individual receives from investing time and money into her education. From a macroeconomic point of view, studying the returns to education provides a guide for educational policy. Many business schools have expanded their offering of courses, majors, minors, and student organizations in the field of entrepreneurship as the more traditional business course offerings had not previously provided an option for students interested in self-employment. In addition, some schools are starting to reach out to women specifically by offering women's entrepreneurial resource centers, as well as courses and minors that coincide with professional training in the most common occupations of self-employed women. Still, there is a lot that economists and other social scientists do not know about the role of education in self-employment, and especially among women. Given the lack of research on the returns to education for self-employed women, this paper attempts to fill in the gap by comparing the returns to education for self-employed men and women. Its purpose is to examine whether the returns to education differ by gender, across the earnings distribution, and by occupational class. It analyzes how the heterogeneity of self-employed women differentially affects their returns to education, and attempts to explain why particular occupations for women can actually result in payoffs that are more similar to the returns to education for men. This paper is organized as follows. First, a brief review of the self-employment literature provides a background of the research that estimates the returns to human capital, as well as the literature that analyzes the differences in the characteristics of men and women. The data are then defined and examined for descriptive statistics and results are presented on the gender differences in the returns to education for self-employed workers. Finally, the results of the paper are summarized and recommendations for future work are made.

The self-employment rate has been increasing in the past few decades, especially among women. A better understanding of the female entrepreneur is necessary in an effort to increase the number of entrepreneurs contributing to the economy. Consequently, economists have focused on how the determinants of self-employment differ by gender, as well as the large earnings gap. Little attention, however, has been given to examining the relationship between education and earnings of the self-employed, who compared to wage and salary sector workers have higher average levels of both. This paper analyzes this relationship, paying particular attention to gender differences and the heterogeneity of self-employed women. On average, self-employed women invest in more education than self-employed men, but their hourly earnings differ greatly, amounting to a 70% median wage gap. The purpose of this paper is to investigate why self-employed women invest in education, when they earn less in self-employment. It examines the returns to education by gender, across the earnings distribution, and by occupational class. The findings suggest that while men are mostly alike in their returns to education, there is heterogeneity in self-employed women that may explain the differences in their returns in education. This paper conjectures that women fall into one of two categories when they self-employ.19 Some women have both low and constant or falling returns to education across the earnings distribution, which are characteristics of the worker being a secondary income earner. Self-employment allows these women a flexible working arrangement to more easily combine household work with labor market work. This pattern is most evident of blue collar workers, and may explain the over-education of many self-employed women. Other women seem to be more career-oriented as they benefit from both high and increasing returns to education conditional on the earnings distribution. Their occupations are more indicative of complementarities between education and earnings, where education either enhances their productivity, and/or education matters more. This pattern is present with white collar women, and especially with the 18% of women that self-employ in occupations commonly and dominantly employed by men. In summary, the effect of education is relatively small when women self-employ in blue collar occupations, and relatively large when women self-employ in white collar or ‘commonly male’ occupations. The main implication of this finding is that heterogeneity is an important issue that should be considered when comparing men and women in self-employment. Furthermore, it implies that some self-employed workers may be overeducated. Additional investment in education is not always financially beneficial, especially if the worker intends on employing in traditional blue collar or ‘commonly female’ occupations. Of course, workers do not have perfect foresight in their career paths and may not consider self-employment until after their investment in education. In addition, prior to their investment, they are likely to be uncertain of their future household or income-earning responsibilities. This paper could be extended in various ways. First, it could correct for any selection bias that might occur from workers selecting into self-employment versus wage and salary work. While most of the literature finds insignificant or contradictory selection bias, it may still be worthwhile to consider this extension. Second, it could incorporate the additional comparison of wage and salary workers to examine whether this heterogeneity in women is constant across employment sectors, or whether the flexible nature of self-employment is what determines these differences in the returns to education for women. Third, the paper would benefit from the use of panel data in order to better understand how the effects prior to self-employment affect the relationship between education and earnings. Finally, this research could be combined with the recent job satisfaction literature that examines education and occupation as determinants of job satisfaction. It might be interesting to determine whether there is any evidence of heterogeneity in job satisfaction for self-employed women given their occupational choice.