Is Self-Employment Liberating or Marginalizing? The Case of Women Consultants in the Fitness and Sport Industry
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Women are responsible for large growth rates in self-employment in many industrialized countries, yet little is known about how they interpret or experience the work they do. In the literature, two competing images of self-employment for women have emerged. With the liberation perspective, self-employment is associated with self-fulfillment, autonomy and control, substantial financial rewards, and increased flexibility in balancing work and family demands. In contrast, the marginality perspective portrays self-employment as a low paying, unstable form of home-based work that combines incompatible work and domestic roles while marginalizing women's work in the economy. The purpose of this study was to examine the work experiences of women consultants in the fitness and sport industry based on the liberation and marginality perspectives of self-employment. Observations of home-based work sites, interviews, and validation focus groups were conducted with 13 women who were currently working or had previously worked as fitness and sport consultants. The results revealed that social context, stages of business development, the personal situations of the women, gender relations and body image issues, and the nature of the work itself influenced whether the women described their experiences as liberating or marginalizing.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".