I Didn’t Choose the Digital Nomad Life: The Digital Nomad Life Chose Me

How Digital Nomadism & Remote Work Builds Opportunity for Women

I didn’t set out to be a digital nomad. In fact, when necessity became the mother of invention, there wasn’t a word for it yet. Facebook was in it’s infancy. Connective and community building technology hadn’t yet birthed the tools that would provide the foundation stones for remote work. Skype was a thing, kind of, but holding a video call from North Africa to anywhere else was sketchy business indeed. Not the kind of service one would rely on for a “real job.” No one I knew was working remotely.

And yet, when one wakes in a tent on the top of the highest sea cliff in Italy on an October morning in 2008 to find that the markets have crashed and one’s stock has magically sunk below the waterline overnight, well, like I said, necessity is the mother of invention.

I don’t get the kind of credit someone who spends two years setting up to make the leap from traditional to remote work does. I didn’t “do it right” and I had the benefit of a partner (also drowning in the wake of the financial crash and swimming hard to break the surface).

I didn’t sit back, weigh my options as a woman, a mother, and a traveler with a tidy pros and cons list. I wasn’t proactive or particularly intentional in my first forays into remote work. I simply took stock of my skill set and started reaching out in every direction to start building a client base. My husband did the same. It took time. Eventually we figured things out, without the benefit of online courses, masters groups, or books about how many hours we should work. We simply kept at it until we felt comfortable in our process and had grown our businesses past the point of our original income and were satisfied with having “enough.”

Define “Enough”

“Enough” for me is only partially about money. The thing I’m most interested in is a life lived on my terms, with a healthy work-life integration that results in a life I love enough that I don’t constantly feel like I need a vacation.

In the interests of full disclosure moving forward, for me, that means:

• Working about 20–25 hours a week in a focused and intentional way
• Working those hours when I want to (I choose to wake very early and knock out my work before noon most days)
• Making more money than the average man in my age bracket
• While creating flexibility to allow room for the things that matter most in life

Including:

• World schooling two teenage boys
• Creating space for two kidults that come and go
• Building community
• Cooking for the soul, not just nutrition
• Long walks
• Afternoons of yoga or aerial silks
• Sunset drinks by the water with friends and family
• Tea with my mom when she stops by unannounced
• And enough travel to keep life interesting

Also, I need to be able to work from just about anywhere. That’s a big deal, and that’s what makes me a digital nomad.

Women as Digital Nomads

This spring Tortuga launched a survey digging into the self reported data around digital nomadism. We’ll be talking a lot about what we’ve learned in the coming weeks. But upon a very cursory look at the data surrounding women a few interesting things emerge.

• Only 37% of respondents were female
• There is still a wage gap between men and women as digital nomads
• 57% of digital nomad women are making more than the average income for their age bracket and gender as compared to the Bureau of Labor statistics numbers
• 46% of digital nomad women are working more than 40 hours a week

As a longterm digital nomad and a woman unpacking this is fascinating. The percentage gender split isn’t a surprise, but I think we’ll find it closing (keep reading).

Digital Nomadism & Developing Financial Opportunity for Women

That the wage gap still exists is unfortunate but not a surprise. This is a multifaceted problem and it would be an oversimplification to put it down to equal work for equal pay. My friend Taylor writes about this in her piece on the compromises around flexible hours and salary tradeoffs that many women are forced to make. However, that over half of the women who identify as digital nomads are making more than the average income for an American woman of the same age in the traditional workforce is encouraging.

That there is financial opportunity in the digital nomad arena for women is something I’ve known, personally and anecdotally, for some time. I’m excited to see the numbers bearing that out.

While just a hunch, but I have a suspicion that part of this is that the jobs available within the remote work sphere tend to be in progressive industries and companies where there are just more opportunities (and more equal ones) available to women, period.

As the workforce, in general, moves away from a “one long career” mindset and the reality of regular reinvention and career shift becomes normalized, gaps in resumes due to childbirth and care, eldercare, or community responsibilities (which have traditionally fallen to women), are less noticed and less of a liability than they have been in the past. Skill sets that have been honed through otherwise than traditional educational means are also gaining traction and employers in the digital realm seem to be leaning towards performance based metrics and efficiency over a more traditional “ass in the chair” measurement of whether a person is working.

That shift is favorable to women, allowing us to leverage our wide, while perhaps not traditionally developed, skill set in our own time, in our own way, adding a great deal of value to the companies they work with. I belong to a beautiful diverse community of women who make good money on their own terms, through remote work. Some are digital nomads, some are location based.

There may be even greater opportunity for women working remotely, whether or not they choose to travel. This piece on how remote work can save small towns, by my friend Fred, breaks that down.

Women in Full Time Remote Work

That 46% of digital nomad women are working more than 40 hours a week surprised me. Most of the women I know cite work-life balance as a primary reason for choosing to work remotely. We want more control of our time and many of us believe that our best work can actually be done in less time; the Pareto Principle in action. And yet almost half of us are still working 40 hours a week or more in income generating occupations.

One explanation might me the shift away from a 4 Hour Work Week mentality entering digital nomadism, and towards the construction of a serious career. Are women viewing remote work as a way to build a serious career, something they want to put full time effort into over the long haul, instead of a stop gap while they have a baby, or as short break to allow for a semi-paid sabbatical? If so, this is a good thing, from my perspective. Work isn’t a bad thing, in fact it can be as much fun as recreation when you’re building your own stuff or love what you’re doing.

Five Thoughts on Remote Work for Women

Assess the Benefits, Whether You Travel or Not

You don’t have to be a digital nomad to benefit from remote work. The term digital nomad assumes a good deal of travel, and for very many of us, that’s important. But there is an assumption that if one identifies as a digital nomad she’s always on the road. This isn’t true. Many of us are remote workers with part time travel as a priority.

Travel is not required, you don’t even have to own a passport to reap the benefits of remote work as a woman.

Working remotely allows you to:

• Live and work anywhere, even if that’s in the same town you grew up in
• Set your own hours, even around a baby’s sleep schedule
• Name your own price, and raise it at will; value your work highly
• Take a yoga class at two in the afternoon, work on your MBA, learn to fly, or code
• Accommodate the schedules of your kids, parter, parents, and community without sacrificing your paycheck
• Travel if you want to, stay home if you want to, go to an office if you want to
• Control your own destiny; stop asking people for permission to live your life

Think Big Picture

Yes, the ability to work remotely for six months after you have a baby is great, and generous of your company, compared to a six week maternity leave. But is that the best you can do?

If you can work remotely for six months, do you really need to return to the office at all? If you can work that six months at home, could you, perhaps, work it from Thailand?

What are your long term career goals? Is there a way to meet those with greater control over your life through remote work? In some industries, jobs are necessarily location and office based, but technology is loosening those requirements in others.

Become the Mistress of Productivity

The Pareto Principle is a real thing. Get your head around that and think hard about your 80–20 split and leverage the shit out of what you learn. If you’re working 40 hours a week and apply that principle then the best of your work is happening in 8 of those hours.

• Which 8?
• When are you most productive?
• Where are you most productive?
• Which tools facilitate efficiency and productivity?
• Track stuff and take notes
• Set goals
• Take breaks, real ones

Step Back

Every now and then, quit doing the next damned thing and step back to assess what it is that you actually want to be doing. In work. In life. In the balance. How’s that going? Adjust course as necessary.

F*ck That Wage Gap

I don’t know about you, but this part of being female seriously pisses me off. And I’m in the educated and white segment of the female population that is at the top of the heap in regards to that gap and living from a point of very deep privilege. This is one arena where I see real possibility for women, and particularly women of minority populations, to level the playing field. As with every other damned thing where patriarchy is concerned, it’s an uphill battle, but in this case, it’s one where the tools and rules of the game can be leveraged to our advantage.

Value yourself: And I’m not talking about loving your curves here, I’m talking about valuing your brain, your experience, your ability, and valuing the privilege of your presence. That is to say: Charge more for being in the room, virtually or physically. Take no shit on this point, ladies.

Build your own empire: Yes it’s harder. Yes it’s worth it. Work on building multiple income streams. Weed out the people and companies who perpetuate the patriarchy. Seek out and intentionally build forward with people and companies who are actively cultivating equality and diversity. You don’t fit into a box, your career doesn’t need to either.

Here’s What I Know:

Men might still be ahead in almost everything, but women are catching up. One way technology is working in our favor is in creating greater potential around flexible work, location independence, and longer term career building.

For women, especially women in caregiving roles, remote work provides an opportunity build an independent career that is hedged against downsizing, or economic downturn, allows for freedom of movement and the realities of the rest of life, as well as properly, equally, valuing her contribution in the labor market.

I didn’t plot my way carefully into this kind of career at the beginning. I just leveraged every tool I could lay my hands on when the shit hit the fan. That I ended up on the cutting edge of what would become a movement was a happy accident. In retrospect, that crash of 2008 was one of the best things that could have happened to me. It forced creativity and determination down avenues I might not have walked without a kick through the door.

I didn’t choose the digital nomad life, the digital nomad life chose me.

Originally published in On Your Terms.