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Why Female Grant Writers Struggle with Pricing & Rates
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Now that is a fully loaded statement. But worth the heavily weighed explanation.
I have been going back and forth with other grant writers on this question of
“Do grant writers get paid less because most are female?”and even down to
“Are grant writer rates high enough?”Moreover, nearly every single female grant writer I know struggles with how to do her pricing and come up with rates that feel good.
In this article, I am going to break down some of the gender-specific on the grant writing industry. Some of these may surprise you because you have been living the life, thinking you only need to Google “Grant Writer Salary” and the Internet will get some ideal number that you can just throw onto your freelance grant writing website or in that grant writer salary description.
Here’s the thing. The most deafening question I get from my grant writing students is,
“How much should I charge for my grant writing skills?”I am not going to give you a magic number in this article of what you should charge, but I think we first need to understand why we keep peering out into the information universe for this question instead of tuning inward.
Side note: Check out related articles on how to make decisions and understand what your value is as a freelance grant writer.
What I am going to share with you in this article should wake you up a bit and hopefully will ripple some change across this female-dominant landscape.
“If you are self-employed…you write your own paycheck. But the amount on the paycheck is pre-ordained long before it is actually inked. It begins with your price strategy. And that is preceded by your belief system about price.” ~ Dan KennedyA conversation that recently came up with Rachel Waterman, an amazing female grant writer, was a simple conversation about the grant writing pricing world, and it ended up being a type of conversation reminiscent of, “Is it the egg before the chicken or chicken before the egg?”
We were discussing that since grant writing is a heavily female-dominated industry could this be one contributing fact to why grant writer salaries are low and why freelance grant writer consultants get paid nominal wages compared to other money-related consultancies?
Well, this made me want to dive into this topic further and see what is going on with the pay rates for freelance grant writers.
Freelance Grant Writers Are Mostly Women
Yes, indeed, Rachel and are I correct in that grant writers (and freelance grant writers) are a mostly women. According to Zippia, 65.7% of employed grant writers in the United States in 2021 are women.
This is a whole lot. Now this statistic does reference employed grant writers vs. freelance grant writers, but chances are it’s about the same percent that transfer from employed grant writer into freelancing.
It might even be higher as students in my Freelance Grant Writing Master Course and Grant Professional Mentorship are prim