Know Your Worth with Becca Gurney
What happens when one woman looks around her field and notices the leaders are mostly men? If that woman is Becca Gurney, she starts her own design studio, and creates a place that chooses to hire women, pay them fairly, and find clients ready to do the same.
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Becca is a Washington, DC-based graphic designer, art director, and founder of Design Choice. She’s built an agency focused on social justice issues that’s vocal about fair pay and offering work those who are often overlooked in the field — women and people of color.
The hardest part is knowing what you’re worth and then sticking to it. I do a lot of research to understand what my worth should be and a lot of that research involves knowing what men who are doing what I’m doing are charging.
We chat about:
- How Becca makes a conscious choice to look for new women and/or people of color to work with on projects, instead of hiring the same people over and over — and why you should, too
- The truth behind being asked to work for peanuts all the time — even when you’re the founder of a design studio — and the importance of turning down work that doesn’t value you and your expertise
- How to build a supportive network when you’re just starting out as a freelancer
- Why keeping politics out of business isn’t required — and can actually help guide your work to new places
- How to figure out what your male peers are making so you can be sure you’re being paid what your work is really worth
Links:
- Design Choice, Becca’s design studio
- She Freelances, a new site for finding freelancers for hire in the DC-area (and if you are a freelancer in DC, add yourself!)
Plus:
- The conference organizer who complained about speakers asking to be paid for their work and got ratioed on LinkedIn for having such a Bad. Take.
- Why Eva PenzeyMoog deserves all the stars — and cash — for her talk on designing against domestic violence
- Why it’s important for us to share what we make, how we ask for it, and which conferences treat speakers best.
- Why Karine Jean-Pierre is the woman we all need in our corner.
☞ And there’s always a full transcript.
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