Work At Home An Option For Women

Statistically, according to The National Network for Women's Employment, one in four women decides to stay home after the birth of her first child.

It's no surprise that American families are feeling the squeeze of inflation and are looking for ways to increase their shrinking budgets. The U.S. Labor Department released new figures in January that showed that the cost of basic goods has increased almost across the board, with food prices up 4.8 percent, gasoline up 8.2 percent, and heating oil up 7.4 percent. With prices on basic necessities rising, going back to work is an option that's being put on the table in households across the country.

Fortunately, some new industries have sprung up recently that allow more women to stay at home to care for their families, and to work in professional positions, too.

Telecommuting is being called the quiet revolution in the workplace. And it's opening doors to women who thought their employment choices were limited to unemployed, underemployed, or full-time career.

According to Gartner Dataquest, a leading information technology research and advisory company, more than 12 million employees worked from home in 2007, and that number is expected to continue to grow -- especially among women. Several factors have merged to create a perfect storm of conditions for a growing at-home workforce: more business is being conducted via the Internet; businesses have found they can grow without taking on additional overhead costs for office space and equipment; a technology-savvy workforce is accustomed to working in places other than a traditional office; and advances in technology have made it possible for people to share information, no matter where they are.

The new home-based work opportunities are not limited to what has commonly been seen as mom-based work, such as Mary Kay, Tupperware, or children's toy sales. An entire industry of home-based customer service has risen out of the demand for people to answer calls, take orders and field customer questions on the Internet. These are professional positions, based in virtual offices. This is good news for moms.

Three companies -- Alpine Access, Arise, and LiveOps -- are some of the fastest-growing, as reported by ABC News. They offer home-based customer service work for a host of industries, such as catalog retailers, financial service institutions, airlines and more. Pay ranges from $8 to $20 per hour, with 20 to 25 hours of work per week, average.

Women with specialized skills -- such as nursing, languages, word processing, computer programming, or education -- can find home-based work as Web consultants, phone-based triage nurses, foreign-language translators, transcriptionists, computer technology assistants or tutors. Some say that by 2010, there could be as many as 300,000 home-based agents working in the United States. All you have to do is search the Internet with keywords such as freelance, translator, job boards, virtual assistant, or transcription to start locating these job prospects.

Diane Lang is a "fresh voice" columnist for the Daily Record.