Gender and age are the two main reasons why a career may stay stuck. Too old, too young, too much, too less. Companies are working like a soccer team where they all want to be “enough alike” to play but “enough complementary” to win. Two main reasons why the society might never change unless we change our perspectives.
We don’t need to be in this precise soccer team to make a career and nothing may stop us from following our own path, having a gender, or an unconventional age. “I might not play soccer, but I might be able to play the piano, basketball or write beautiful stories. Does my talent excludes me, really?”
Most the time, what excludes people is themselves, the perception they have of themselves in a world that is not made for them but if they would look in the mirror with a different profile, they might find indeed that they have talent. Maybe not being in a working team, but they do perfectly well working alone.
Those “lonely people” quite qualify to be self-employed but do they have the nerves for it? Being self-employed creates both freedom and insecurity. It’s a risk for the individuals and for their families. Women having children are more likely to give up on their career to find security in a job and where the dreams go, so does also the growing hopes… maybe in the bin or below a large pile of bills.
Self-employed people can get along being lonely when they meet a large quantity of people for their jobs, but all jobs are not so social. Some jobs require confinement, silence, and a reclusive environment, but it becomes like a game addiction, where the social link is broken.
At some point, this kind of professional loneliness becomes everybody’s problem because it breaks the link between the individuals where Facebook and Twitter become the new way of connecting. When the connection lacks of bones, everybody shall wonder “what’s up, what is going on?“
At The Pink Jackalope, we have asked the question many times and we don’t have any quick answer, but we have developed this dream website and tools to reconnect those in the society who ended up self-employed while looking for a job. They worked a gig to pay one bill, then another gig from word of mouth. They don’t know how it happened, it’s not even a real choice, but they became self-employed under the circumstance not being employed.
At The Pink Jackalope, we create the environment to break the loneliness and create a team of people who happen to share the same experience of being self-employed by facts, but not because they were willing to. We also provide the tools and the competencies to break the glass ceiling, train, graduate, evaluate, and bring a team together, either at work or in sports and social activities.
People who are employed in a company are more likely to participate in social activities while people who are self-employed are isolated in a frame where social connections are more a hazard. A hazard for themselves. A hazard for their kids. A hazard getting old and falling deeper into exclusion. About 15 years ago, elderlies felt loneliness after retirement. Nowadays, young people feel loneliness as soon as they graduate and struggle to pay their loans. They are not retired, but they are not fully employed either and while they desperately jump on gigs, they spend the rest of their lives looking for that job that they know, they will never have.
There is in the society a kind of discrimination that incidentally take some good souls apart and rather than feel sorry, we, at The Pink Jackalope, we built our tools to create a team where there is no glass ceiling. Where discrimination is not even a risk. We are committed to develop careers and good spirit to grow projects better and bring success on the table, because we at The Pink Jackalope, we believe that we can.
