Why Female Grant Writers Struggle with Pricing & Rates

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 Kennedy

A 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 primarily female.

I like being in an industry surrounded by women, however it also makes me a little hesitant when freelancer grant writers (or grant writers looking for a job) are seeing what other freelance grant writing consultants charge to get a baseline of what they should charge.

Why does this make me nervous?

Well, let’s go ahead and break down why I think looking at the marketplace might not be serving you when the field is dominated by female consultants.

No disrespect. Hear me out.

I will honestly point the finger at myself several years ago. Yes, that was me. I was not charging enough for my grant writing services. And if I felt that way, many other female grant writers are also suffering from systemic gender wage discrimination (described below), so are also pricing too low.

The problem with this, is that if many women are pricing low to write grants, and if we look at one another to see what the standard rate should be, that rate will be low. Then we all look at it and it looks normal and becomes the sucky industry standard.

And after doing some research on salary rates and female consultant pricing and a lot of personal development, I had some major epiphanies and a fantastic mindset change.

There are still very REAL systemic issues with gender gap pay

In the face of sexism, many women struggle to see the true value of our work and end up charging less because we don’t think we deserve more. In our guts we know we deserve it, but society has told us that we don’t deserve more than a man.

Society has told us that our priorities are having babies, cooking meals, cleaning up, and taking care of others. Now, I am fine with most of those things (except cooking and cleaning. Aargh).

I loved having my baby, volunteering for nonprofits, and spending time with family. There is nothing wrong with that. But it kind of leaves out all the other fun stuff I know I excel in. Like writing grants, securing millions of dollars for nonprofits, and earning an abundant income so I can enjoy life on my terms.

As Rachel Rodger states in her amazing book, We Should All Be Millionaires,

“Money isn’t everything, but it can solve a whole lot of problems – your own, your family’s, and the world’s.”

Here’s the thing. Women only got the right to vote 100 years ago in the United States. What?! Yep, for centuri...