“82% of women who earn over 100,000 dollars per year do it through a home-based business.” 

Friends returned from a network marketing conference, and they shared this ideal statistic. I love how sexy it sounds, and believable. I imagine corporate boardrooms, and I’ve seen a few, where the attendees are dominated by men. Women, while rising in the ranks, are still outnumbered. I don’t need a statistic to back up what I had perceived. 

As a mother, I found working the traditional 9-5 job very stressful. Not only was the job stressful with shifting management and culture, but the simple going to work and going home, with dropping off the kiddo and picking him up, added in ordinate amounts of stress. I know many moms who work crappy part-time jobs or defer to the home-based business to bring in extra money for their family or for themselves, one reason is to avoid all that stress! That is, a crappy part-time job is better than the commute, and fighting to have to be home for your kids.

So, when I was told this statistic a few months ago, I just believed it. Of course 80%+ of all those making six figures would be in a home based business. It just made logical sense. 

Except, there is one problem. I can’t recreate the statistic. I found a LinkedIn blog post (I am not calling it an article as an article suggests an editorial review) that sourced a quack “doctor” as the source. Near the end of the post, the author had many sources, but none tied directly to the statistic referenced. She did mention the Direct Selling Association and the Census.

So, I checked out both. 

Both have an amazing array of posters, statistics, and information collected. But, I could not pair down the occupations on the Census website to list “direct sales”, “home based”, or even “network marketing”. The closest I got was finding the sector choice between employed by other and self-employed. The interesting statistic here is that women outpace men in self-employment, by 200% with 1.4 million women claiming this sector. I also found that in 2016, Just over 6.6 million women made over 100,000 per year. Though, nothing tied the two together. 

I am ranting on this statistic because I am sad that the event organizer didn’t ask his attendees to fact-check their speeches. I am sad that my friends didn’t fact check it before sharing it with me. I’m sad it took me so long to fact check it! In an age of fake news and disillusionment, we owe it to ourselves to be vigilant in our constructive thinking. 

I will end with a toast to all the self-employed women out there keeping it real, doing their own thing, making their dreams come true. And, if they are a mother or mentor on top of that, cheers to modeling behavior for the next generation of people. 

Resources

• The Blog Post: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/did-you-know-82-women-who-make-over-100k-year-through-nicole-bella/
• A Breakdown of Census Data in fun tables, this is where I got the self-employed statistic: https://statisticalatlas.com/United-States/Sectors
• American Fact Finder: https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml
• American Community Survey: https://www.census.gov/acs/www/data/data-tables-and-tools/data-profiles/2016/
• Current Population Survey: https://www.census.gov/cps/data/cpstablecreator.html
• Direct Selling Association Research Overview: https://www.dsa.org/statistics-insights