By Dennis Thompson HealthDay Reporter

TUESDAY, June 3, 2025 (HealthDay News) — Being your own boss might seem potentially stressful, but self-employed women appear to have better heart health than those toiling for a company, a new study says.

Women working for themselves had lower rates of obesity, physical inactivity, poor diet and sleeplessness, researchers reported recently in the journal BMC Public Health.

These results indicate that the work environment could play a role in the risk factors that can increase risk of heart attack and stroke, researchers said.

“There is a relationship between self-employment and heart disease risk factors and this relationship seems to be stronger in women relative to men,” said lead researcher Dr. Kimberly Narain, an assistant professor-in-residence at the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA.

“It is imperative to increase our understanding of how the work environment gets under our skin so we can come up with ways to ensure that everyone has access to a healthy work environment,” Narain added in a news release.

Prior studies have shown links between a person’s type of employment and their heart disease risk, researchers said in background notes.

For example, executives tend to be healthier than clerks or administrative workers, researchers said, and high-stress jobs with less autonomy have been linked to high blood pressure and heart disease.

For this study, researchers analyzed data from 19,400 working adults who participated in the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey between 1999 and 2018. The survey included a physical exam along with questions related to participants’ employment and lifestyle.

Results show that self-employment was beneficial for heart risk factors among both white women and women of color.

Self-employed white women had an obesity rate that was 7.4 percentage points lower, researchers found. Their physical inactivity rates were 7 percentage points lower, and rates of poor sleep duration were 9.4 percentage points lower.

Women of color had similar benefits in poor diet (6.7 percentage points lower), physical inactivity (7.3 percentage points), and poor sleep duration (8.1 percentage points), results show.

“It is unrealistic to expect that all women will become self-employed; however, it may be worth considering how some of the positive features of self-employment such as increased autonomy and flexibility may be imported into the wage-employment context,” researchers wrote in the conclusion of their study.

For example, flex-time policies could help women’s health by providing them some autonomy and control over their work schedule, researchers said.

White men had some benefits from self-employment – a 6.5 percentage point decline in poor diet and a 5.7 percentage point decline in high blood pressure – but researchers did not find the same benefits among self-employed men of color.

This might be because men of color face more challenges in starting their own business, including high entry barriers, lower financial capitol and less access to mentors who could provide crucial advice.

More information

The Cleveland Clinic has more on the health effects of overwork.

SOURCES: UCLA, news release, May 29, 2025; BMC Public Health, May 30, 2025