I Started Freelancing to Combat Sexual Harassment and Pay Inequality

When I moved from Atlanta to New York at 23-years-old with a dream of becoming a commercial video editor (I’m now a freelance writer and social media consultant), I had one over-sized suitcase, two worried parents, and nearly no long-term plans or money. I also had no figurative or literal direction and could barely make sense of a map.

All I knew at that time was how to find the bus from the airport to embark on a long, sweaty journey to a youth hostel that I would call home for two weeks before getting robbed of nearly my last $100 by a roommate and going to live with a friend in Connecticut.

I had no job, almost no friends, and was quickly riddled with regret. It was the kind of hollow, never ending regret that keeps you up at night wondering how to find the thread back to the exact moment you made that decision and stop it from ever happening.

It was a few weeks later after slogging around my new city, eating $.50 donuts, $.25 pieces of fruit, and $1 pizza slices when my toes started bleeding from all the walking I was doing. Ripped clean from my comfort zone and leaving a bloody stump of anxiety behind, I was walking straight into businesses to ask if they had openings and smiled as professionally as possible behind the grip of terror I felt consuming me. The subway system also completely overwhelmed me, and on my meager budget it simply felt too expensive to pay for a Metro card. So I walked all over town for hours each day believing I would somehow land a lucrative video editing gig with a pathetic reel and resume to match.

Oh, yeah. And I also had indigestion from all the crappy food I was consuming, was homesick, felt like I had made the biggest single mistake of my life and hated everything in my path. The immediate sense of self-loathing that washed over me was palpable.

The Phone Call

One of my brothers called me a few weeks into my misguided and awkward pilgrimage around the city where I stumbled around with a paper resume clutched in hand and doctored my oozing toes. He informed me I better get my shit together and find a job already, and that I could not afford to wait for some elusive and unrealistic video editing job right off the bat. Never one for being polite, he bluntly told me what I was doing was not based in reality.

In other words, I couldn’t live with my friend and her parents indefinitely, nor could I expect my own parents to be a last resort safety net that I knew wouldn’t let me fall. I had to get a “for real” job.

With a lethal cocktail of sobering reality and determination in hand, I immediately opened up the Village Voice and saw an ad for a receptionist at a post production facility. I had tons of temping experience at Turner Broadcasting in Atlanta and worked on my resume until I made me look phenomenal.

The only upside to being an in-house temp was I had worked for all the CEOs and COOs and Presidents of every Turner brand. Although it helped me land future work, the experience also came with being told I looked good in a skirt, called sweetie, and a female executive refused to approve the overtime hours I had already worked because it would mess up their budget.

Not Worth an Extra $5.48 a Day

I landed the receptionist job that week and they offered me a paltry $23,000 a year. My heart sank. I was expecting to land a $50,000 a year job when I got here just a few weeks ago. And now I was facing a financial crisis.

I responded that I needed to at least make $25,000, thinking that extra $2,000 wouldn’t be a big deal to them. I remember the manager, a woman I’ll call M, telling me I shouldn’t ask for more and in fact should just quietly take the job that was offered me in the first place. Later that week, a female assistant editor told me she would never had asked for more and would have been terrified to miss out on the job.

This confused me. Why wasn’t my time worth an extra $2,000 over the course of an entire year? It was a measly $5.48 a day before taking out any taxes. It just didn’t make sense to me. It felt like everything in this city was against me, and even fighting for coffee money was going to be a never-ending, uphill battle. But I was afraid of simply surviving or making enough to pay rent, and that $2,000 seemed like a lifeline to make it barely manageable.

Ignoring the manager’s protest, the owner of the company approved the $25,000 salary. But once I got settled in an apartment, I realized I only had $300 left in my budget after paying bills. This was also before I ate anything.

I would have starved if I had not been fed multiple times a day at my job in exchange for the late hours I put in. I also worked as much overtime as they would let me to make extra money and took snacks and juices home on the weekends and ate their left overs for dinner to make it work.

I was proud of myself for at least asking for that extra $2,000. Despite having a small voice in a big city, I did my best to use it no matter how unsafe and uncertain and unstable it felt.

Amplification is hard. Making your voice heard and trying to get people to take notice and respond to it and see you is difficult. It feels like clinging to a buoy in a raging ocean, trying to yell to onlookers over the crashing waves while simultaneously not getting eaten by sharks. All while keeping your bathing suit from ripping away in the undercurrent and fighting to find your voice and be taken seriously while half-naked and vulnerable.

However, I knew succumbing and ignoring that hard place was not an option. I sure as hell had not moved to New York to work as a receptionist for $25,000 a year. I could do that back home in Atlanta and I had left friends behind and hurt my family by making the choice to go. Even if it felt insurmountable, I had to find my voice in order to move forward to make a real and meaningful life in the city.

After about six weeks of feeling totally miserable working the front desk and convincing myself this was my life now, an assistant editor got fired and the owner of the company moved me up to apprentice video editor. There was no raise or promise of one. In fact, when I brought it up to my superiors, I got an exasperated eye roll for even suggesting it and was treated like a pushy, naive, novice who didn’t deserve better.

But the person who was the most incredulous about my expectation for a raise to match the work I was doing was the office manager, M, the same woman who told me to keep quiet and just take the job without demanding a meager bump.

A Line in the Sand

While M made a point to tell me repeatedly I didn’t deserve a raise and reprimanded me when I went directly to my boss for it some months later (and got it), a senior editor I’ll call R was happy to torment me in other ways.

At one point, R was set to work on a music video with a famous musician. I made the mistake of mentioning I found this musician attractive, and R turned to me and asked if I was planning to perform a sexual act on this person when he came into the office. The company’s owner, a 30-something-year-old with a family, was standing there when it happened. He turned bright red and demanded R apologize to me.

R flatly refused.

On another occasion, R said I was in my rightful place when vacuuming the carpet after a painting crew left it a mess with paint chips. He also frequently asked about the assistant’s love lives, made sexual jokes, and berated the staff.

It did not occur to me that using my voice loudly and with conviction was an option in these situations. I didn’t recognize that this same voice I used to ask for more money was the same one I could use to protest the treatment in the office. And quite honestly when I look back, I know that absolutely nothing would have happened if I tried. There would have been no apology and on the remote chance there was one, it would have been delivered with indignance and an, “I’m sorry you were offended” back-handed kind of way.

Instead, I frequently fantasized if I should sue this company in order to:

1. Get R to stop make vulgar comments to the female staff.
2. Make enough money to actually eat a meal outside of work. But I had no money to speak of to think about a lawyer and a voice too small to be heard.

And so I stayed.

Inappropriate and abusive comments intensified around the office until it was an echo in our ears. The female staff was harassed and refused raises even after promotions. A woman was fired for minor infractions because R didn’t like them. All of the horrible behavior felt normalized and because I didn’t work directly with R on projects, I mostly hid from the uncomfortable reality of my workplace.

That is until I was eventually assigned to work directly with R as his assistant. He immediately launched into what I can only describe as a campaign of degradation. He would scream and curse at me to get out of his edit suite for things I can’t quite recall, and then come and scorn me for “hiding.”

I could handle the sexual innuendos in a boys club. And I could deal with low pay and scorn for wanting more. But for some reason I just couldn’t deal with the verbal abuse. Perhaps it was my inability to deal with vulnerability and a swelling feeling in my chest that threatened tears whenever R came near that I just decided I couldn’t do it anymore.

A Time to Amplify

But I did try to resolve the problem first. I really tried, even though I doubted much of anything would change.

I went to the owner of the company with my grievances in hopes that I could perhaps be assigned to a new editor. He was sympathetic but told me that the senior editors were tough and that’s just the way it was. I told him the other editors were hard to work with at times, but that R was flat-out abusive. He absorbed this information in stunned silence and said no one had told him that before. But he also told me that R brought in the clients and the money and wouldn’t be firing him. R would stay. And his snickering, dripping, abusive, misogynistic dribble would also stay and prevail.

Where was HR? Nowhere. This was a small, family-run company with roughly 10 employees. There was no HR or recourse to my boss’ decision.

So I put in my 2-weeks notice with no job lined up, although I was optimistic that there was a steady stream of work in New York for commercial assistant video editors. Those positions also came with a hearty daily rate plus overtime pay. In theory, I could earn more in a week freelancing than I could in a month at my job.

R was not pleased with my decision to quit on him just a few weeks into my tenure as his assistant, and he frequently told me I would amount to nothing and was not good at my job nor ready to make this leap. In hindsight, I can see that it humiliated him that I was quitting because of him. The staff also openly teased him about this fact up until the moment of my departure.

It felt like a minefield while trying to navigate those last few weeks of work, but I also knew that he wasn’t all wrong. And it wasn’t a quiet, whispering acknowledgment in my soul that he was telling the truth, but the kind of blunt honesty that was readily accessible and right there on the surface to be plucked and scrutinized.

Not Ready to Leap

R was correct. I really didn’t have the refined skills and work experience to make that leap that soon into my career, not to mention I had just weathered the emotional firestorm that was living in New York during 9/11. My life felt like a long, protracted journey down Madison Ave. with an anvil on my chest as my anxiety swallowed up my capacity to breathe.

But I knew I was smart and could learn as I went. It had to work because I felt like I was out of options.

It wasn’t easy to jump before I was ready, and at the time doing it alone with no real financial safety net or “my person” in my corner was terrifying. But it also made it all the more simple. I knew that I could hustle my way through odd jobs like paid focus groups and passing out flyers on street corners to make ends meet and keep it going. However, doing that with people who lean on you and trust you to make sound financial decisions isn’t as easy.

I found freelance work easily, although R was right. I really wasn’t ready and I nearly crashed and burned many times that first year with near misses like bringing blank audio files at sound sessions and missed footage while digitizing dailies. I tried to be flexible and like-able and not ask for much so I would be hired again, but was also bullied by clients and sometimes harassed. I was also ordered to work around the clock, sometimes through the night and into the next day until the project was done.

But I felt emboldened. And it wasn’t just the pay and overtime I was quickly racking up and replenishing my bank account.

As a freelancer, I could simply leave if things went south or the staff proved toxic. I could just decline their offer to book me again and go to the next freelance gig or work on my writing career. Soon my resume was peppered with my epic journey from Madison Avenue to Soho and Rockefeller Center and back again.

Because that’s the beauty of freelancing. The more you work with high-end corporate and commercial clients, the better your body of work looks on your resume. No one would know if I left these gigs left because of industry fatigue or a misogynistic staff or simply because the gig was over. It would just sprinkle a new credential onto my resume like gold and open new doors.

As a freelancer, I also had the power to earn the same dollars as my male counterparts or decline their offer and move onto someone else. However, it didn’t happen at first, but it wasn’t because of an expectation to meekly accept what I was given without questioning it.

Asking for What I Was Worth

I didn’t get paid enough because my voice faltered and I did not speak up and amplify my worth. I didn’t even bother to ask.

In fact, I continuously low-balled myself and repeatedly asked clients for the bare bottom of my pay scale. I hid within myself when I uttered my rate out loud for fear they would disagree with its value and see me as incompetent. Instead, I hoped they would somehow appreciate that I was cheaper than other freelancers.

Asking for more felt like they would expect more and more from me until my every move was scrutinized and I wanted to quietly fade into the darkness of the machine room.

Eventually, a female colleague who asked me my day rate responded in shocked bewilderment. I found myself embarrassed at the exchange and realized what I was doing to myself. It wasn’t about the money. I suddenly realized with great clarity that she could see right into me and knew the worth I placed on myself.

My friend instructed me to raise my rate by at least a $100 a day and not apologize or justify it.

Around the same time, another female assistant editor declined to exchange contact information with me so we could refer each other for jobs. I asked why, as most freelancers I knew in the industry traded info and recommended each other for jobs all the time. She said she didn’t want to miss out on future work and there were few female assistants that might steal her thunder. She specifically stated she only exchanged her information with men.

I was stunned.

It was the kind of stark, rolling realization that resonated through my mind for weeks of wondering who was keeping who down. Was it the men in the industry, or my fellow female colleagues? Or both?

To not refer me as a matter of job protection and fear missing out on future work I could mostly understand, but I was taken aback by her open desire to be the only female assistant on the top of client’s minds. In reality, my career exploded when I started referring others for work and vice versa, and I wondered why she rejected the community us assistant editors had worked so hard to build. I wanted my fellow female editors to succeed.

So I decided that she would not dictate my success, and neither would anyone else. I simultaneously upped my game on referring every female assistant I knew when extra work came my way as a way to support my fellow colleagues, and also raised my rate by $100 a day. Through a referral from a colleague, I soon booked two consecutive year-long freelance stints with a female video editor who became a close friend. She now has Oscar nominations under her belt and I was never happier working as a video editor than with her.

And R? I ended up at an industry party at my old workplace, and he waxed poetic about how he always said I should learn just enough to make the jump into freelance and knew I would do well. He sang my praises in front of his girlfriend and smiled.

Yes, it was gross and left me wanting to take a shower. But I was almost grateful to him (almost) for forcing me to make that decision in my life that put me on the path to career independence and the know-how to market my services that would stay with me indefinitely. I knew from an early stage in life that I and I alone was in control of my career.

Amplifying my voice and demanding more changed everything and made both an immediate and tangible impact in my life.

Suddenly I had thousands of extra dollars in my bank account for doing the exact same amount of work and I inherently felt more valued. It was not lost on me that it was because I had taken a small step to speak my worth.

In just two years, I went from having a scant $300 left over in my account every month to thousands. I also had more peace of mind and satisfaction knowing I could pick and choose better and better projects, travel more, upgrade my mouse-infested New York City apartment, and live my life on my own terms.

Freelancing isn’t a perfect, catch-all solution. There is still rampant wage discrimination and large pay gaps between genders depending on your industry, as well as harassment to deal with. In some circles, it’s also not uncommon to hear the advice to just “pretend you’re a white male” in order to earn more.

There are clearly still problems in freelance that continue to fester and require intervention. As a grown woman with children, I’ve been referred to as “girls” by a popular growth hacker I once freelanced for (who I’m confident never called the men he worked with “boys”), I’ve been hit on, and I’ve been called “bitchy” for raising issues about the work conditions and getting paid promptly. Freelancing is not a cure all or the proven path to validation to be taken seriously.

But freelancing can offer a viable and tenable lifeline when you’re already dissatisfied with work on many levels and are searching for a way to empower yourself. The freedom, flexibility, and measure of control freelancing affords is also a welcomed departure from sitting around in an office and going through the motions on someone else’s agenda.

You can raise the bar higher for yourself. You can raise your freelance rates tomorrow, you can refuse to work with clients who suck the lifeblood and dignity from you, and you can put a stop to working relationships that aim to degrade you.

But it all comes back to amplifying your voice. You can only take back your power and own your self-worth by shouting it loudly with confidence and conviction regardless of the roaring ocean of sharks below.

It’s not too late to start. Your rules for your life and career and money are the only ones worth following, and no one else is going to figure it out for you and guide the way. It’s time to amplify your worth and demand to be valued until the whole world stops to hear it.