I Thought My Year of Yes Would Lead to More Paid Work. How Wrong I Was.
Organizations only truly value what they pay for. The rest they dispose of easily and forget. Don’t let that be you.
Last year—2024—was the year I worked a lot and got paid too little. It turned out to be a major test-crash-and-learn year for me, with significant financial consequences.
In all, I took on 45 separate pieces of work, including presentations, webinars, conferences, seminars, workshops, articles, guest essays and reports. But out of those 45 projects, just 27% were paid, and only 7% paid well.
I’m an award-winning researcher, writer and consultant focused on equality and society. I have over 25 years of experience, two Master's degrees, and, if you add them up, well over 10,000 hours of leading research functions, advising companies, writing and presenting.
The nature of my work means I make most of my income through consulting, writing reports and articles or research-based projects. Because I’m an independent consultant (along with my husband, I count just six people on my team) it means I need to do a lot of hustling, pitching ideas, doing the circuit, making myself visible. And sometimes, often in fact, it means I’ll have to accept unpaid assignments—assignments that are delivered on the assumption that they’ll be repaid with connections, networking and the hard-to-measure visibility. Or so the logic goes.
At the start of 2024, driven by desire to be purposeful, I decided to accept all offers I received—both paid and unpaid. But by the end of the year, I was flat out frustrated with how things had gone. Let me explain: What I had not fully grasped at the start of the year but certainly realized by the end was that by agreeing to deliver unpaid engagements my labor and that of many other experts, especially women, was feeding the private and non-for-profit sectors—for free. My unpaid efforts were also fueling a global corporate event market whose value is forecast to reach a staggering $1.2 trillion by 2032, growing at a compound annual growth rate of 10.5%.
In a world torn apart by conflict, division and moral bankruptcy, I had become so determined to be an expert who offered solutions to make the world a better place, that when I was invited to deliver unpaid talks on causes about which I felt passionate, I kept saying yes. And then there was the equation I had established in my mind: that public exposure equals stronger personal brand, which in turn equals higher profitability. How wrong I was.
'An Exclusive Opportunity'
The penny finally dropped when, in late 2024, I received a LinkedIn message from a senior executive at a leading international charity, operating in over 100 countries with a budget of over £100 million (around $130 million), which was working with a well-known global consultancy, whose revenue is in the billions, to design the charity’s audience strategy.
I was invited, as an audience insights expert, to an all-day idea-generation workshop in London. In exchange for six-and-a-half hours of my time, my creativity and over two decades of accumulated knowledge, the charity offered “an exclusive opportunity to collaborate and engage with other insight specialists from across various sectors.”
This blatantly lopsided and unfair value exchange left me indignant. So did the tone of the invitation—clearly designed to appeal to my benevolence and professional pride; as if to say, ‘what a great difference your input could make.’
Was it just me, I wondered. I wasn’t convinced, so I did one of the things I do best and gathered some data.
In December, I posted a poll on LinkedIn asking my 9,000+ followers whether what was happening to me was happening to them. Of the 82 professionals who responded to the poll, 87% said they received requests that felt exploitative “a lot” or “sometimes.”
Furthermore, the findings exposed a gender dimension, with women much more likely to be asked to give away their expertise for free. A full 79% of those who reported receiving such requests “a lot” were women (vs. 21% men) while 60% of those who reported receiving them “rarely” were men (vs. 40% women).
The existing expertise grab seems to home in on two specific traits: a benevolent nature and/or shaky self-confidence. Both are more likely to be exhibited by women. Women are more likely to volunteer (58% vs. 52%) and donate (72% vs. 62%) than men, and exhibit less confidence. With women generally paid less than their male counterparts and more accustomed to unpaid labor, they are already pre-conditioned socially and economically to agree to do things for free.
Levels of Unfairness
In my experience, “unpaid” requests follow various levels of unfairness. The best-case unfair scenario tends to be an offer for an unpaid engagement in exchange for networking and some form of exposure, perhaps a mention on social media, and branding in the materials, with travel costs occasionally covered. Worse are the offers for an engagement in exchange for nothing (not even a mention on social media; yes you read that correctly); while the very worst “offers” include the outrageous (but all too common) ‘invitation’ to pay a participation fee to be a speaker at an event.
Only last week I was invited to speak at a conference on a “topic of my choice” in exchange for a $1,299 speaker registration fee. The “speaker package” included, first and foremost, lunch and refreshments, accommodation, a program of the event, one to one with a speaker of my choice, access to WhatsApp and LinkedIn group of global speakers, “certificate of participation,” access to the conference’s video recording, “abstract publication in souvenir” (whatever that means).
Claudia Vaccarone, an inclusion strategy and communications advisor, and a former inclusion strategy manager at Netflix, stopped speaking for free because “visibility does not pay the bills.” Moreover, since her work generated value, she reasoned, it should not be given away gratis. “I do a few pro bono gigs a year but when it comes to conferences and corporates I learned to debunk the budget early on in the conversation. Years ago I was on the other side, recruiting women thought leaders for corporate events with little budget and selling them the “great exposure” frill. That was before I understood that it contributed to the oppression of women.”
Another person in my network, a speaker and executive coach with 30+ years’ experience, at the end of last year received an invitation to speak at an upcoming conference focused on empowering women from all walks of life. She too was asked to pay for her voice to be heard. Visibility came at a substantive cost of $1,299. When my contact pushed back on the fee, she was told that the business was “self-funding,” and unable to cover expenses and collecting “minimal charges for speaker amenities.” In an act of generosity, they offered a $200 discount “if the registration fee was a concern.” Oh, how we laughed bitterly at that one!
Return on Investment?
Of course there are occasions when working for free makes sense and is the right thing to do. And there might be occasions when an organization working on a cause close to your heart really doesn’t have the budget to pay. In that case you might want to ask for other specifics instead such as social media mentions before and after the event, or your name included in the brochure, an agreement to subscribe to your newsletter or to promote your website, or a simple offer to connect you to two or three contacts who may benefit from your paid work.
Still, an analysis of my engagements from 2024 revealed that not one of my unpaid gigs led to a paid one, though some paid engagements did. High exposure did not translate into higher profile, much less high profitability, but to proliferating offers for other unpaid engagements instead. Personally, I was left feeling less worthy due to an “exchange” that took so much out of me and gave me so little in return.
And the fact is, I’m tired. And I’m tired of a system that exploits me and so many of my peers. Yes, there are worse things in the world, but that doesn’t make this right. And just because a powerful company or nonprofit can get away with asking people to do things for free, it doesn’t mean it should.
It took me years to appreciate that by giving my knowledge and skills for free I enabled these exploitative models to grow. But the truth is, organizations only truly value what they pay for. The rest they dispose of easily and forget. Don’t let that be you.
Josie Cox
Patrice Peck
Ruchi Kumar
