Linear regression?

SINCE June 2004 the Freelance has been collecting information on rates paid to women and to men. After 18 months, what do we find?

Depressingly, rates have been fairly flat for everyone. Women are indeed reporting slightly lower rates than men, but over this short period they appear to be catching up in wordage rates.

The graph of word rates for magazines is one of the better ones. The "linear regression" lines are a spreadsheet program's fancy way of saying "I did my best to find a straight line that represents the trend in these figures".

The samples are not large, they depend entirely on self-reporting, and for a host of other reasons these graphs need to be taken with a very large pinch of salt. So we're presenting images, not average numbers, which could mislead.

Nevertheless, for what they're worth, here they are:

We cannot present similar comparisons for areas of work like photography or broadcasting, because the work is too varied. If, however, all photographers would like to visit www.londonfreelance.org/rates/submit.php and tell us what they were last paid for a stock picture reproduced as one quarter of an A4 page in a middle-ranking magazine, then we'd be getting somewhere with comparisons.

We have also excluded rates reported in Euro, for the same reason that there aren't enough, and there aren't enough to bother working out what exchange rate should apply.

© Mike Holderness