This article is reproduced with permission from "Side Code Story (ID:tech-kk)"
Zhang Qianyu, Zhao Yuchao, Sun Ping
The full text is more than 4300 words, and it takes about 9 minutes to read
Losing the advantage of appearance and age also loses the opportunity to get a decent job. And such a group of "forgotten" people are faced with families that are "old and old, and small", and careers that may have stagnated. For middle-aged women who are not well educated, it becomes extremely difficult to spend effort to make a living.
Side code stories
In the past two years, you may have seen female riders in delivery clothes on the street, or maybe they have knocked on your door and handed you a takeaway. Yes, female delivery workers have become more common – according to a survey by Sun Ping's team at the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences, there were 9.06% of female riders in Beijing in 2020, and by 2021, that number has grown to 16.21%. As the epidemic continues, the number of female riders has been increasing.
In such an industry where men dominate absolutely, female riders are a vague and less vocal group. Maybe you'll see them on the streets, their long hair exposed under their helmets in the midst of a torrent of takeaways. But few people know about their lives: Where do they come from? Why run takeaway? How do they work as women?
Three years ago, Sun Ping's team from the Institute of Journalism and Communication of the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences began to pay attention to female riders, interviewing 32 female riders from different regions and their husbands to learn about their lives.
In the interviews, it was found that the female riders were in a similar state of life – none of them were too young (average age 37). Halfway through life, they face difficulties and wobbles in marriage, childcare, and careers. Many times, because of the loss of their careers and families, they put on takeaway clothes, rode on electric vehicles, and began a hard life of making a living from it.
After starting this job, what awaits them is not only the suppression of systematic discipline and masculinity, but also the uncertainty brought about by the collision of gender identity and labor identity. Many times, they have to make a difficult choice of one or the other.
▌ Soft "Sister A Feng" and hard "Women's Singles King"
At the end of 2020, we met two female delivery workers with very different styles at a takeaway site.
Ah Fengjie, who is in her early 40s, is the representative of "femininity", when we met her, she wore a T-shirt and Harlan pants, and a pair of high-top shoes, the rider's uniform, she did not like to wear.
When I met, I knew that Sister Ah Feng was the kind of person who valued beauty very seriously. Every morning before going out, she spends an hour dressing up. In the summer, she will also pay attention to sun protection, run lists outside, and every two hours, she will find a public bathroom to make up for sun protection. Instead of smearing it on, she would even take the makeup remover, remove the original sunscreen first, and then apply the new one. Because of this, she has a well-maintained white face.
▲ The story of the female rider who is taking orders
And Sister Ah Feng's colleague Chen Dajie is completely her opposite - Sister Chen is a well-known female singles king, she and Sister Ah Feng are similar in age, but dark skin, short hair, do not like to apply sunscreen. Sister Chen is not good at words, the shell of the electric vehicle has been smashed many times over the years, and a thick layer of tape has been pasted. Sister Ah Feng said that Sister Chen "is a man, not like a woman."
For most female workers, joining the male-led "takeaway army" is a completely different labor experience and gender experience. Sister Ah Feng and Sister Chen represent two different types of women, how to integrate into this job, they have adopted different strategies.
In order to get used to the working environment of food delivery as soon as possible, Sister Chen erased her gender temperament. At work, she behaves like a male rider, and is sometimes even more "brave". The station manager said that Sister Chen had a "wise saying" - "if you can't die, you can do it." Almost every month, she is the "single king" of more than 100 people on the site.
Contrary to Sister Chen, Sister Ah Feng took advantage of her female advantages - in the face of high-intensity work, she often admitted that women were physically weak, and took this opportunity to ask for help, "Big brother, can you take the handle?" "Handsome man, help your sister take it with you!" She would often put such words on her lips. Sometimes, this approach also works: some merchants see Sister Ah Feng smiling, soft and weak, sympathetic, and will give her a meal in advance.
▲ Female rider talking to a colleague side-code story
Sister Ah Feng and Sister Chen are different, and their concept of life. The title of "Women's Singles King" was bitterly produced by Sister Chen. Every day, she worked from 7 a.m. to 12 p.m., a full 17 hours. A semi-basement of more than 20 square meters in Wangjing, Beijing, is the foothold of Chen Dajie's family of three. She and her husband are both southerners, and the reason for coming to Beijing is simple, to earn money. "As long as you can bear hardships, I think the effort and income are directly proportional." In the peak season, Sister Chen's income can exceed 10,000, in addition to the basic living expenses of the family, the rest of the money is all into the account and saved. Sister Chen rarely buys new clothes and does not use skin care products. She wants to deliver takeaway for another four or five years, complete the accumulation of wealth, return to her hometown to buy a house, and do some small business.
For Sister Ah Feng, the happiness of the present is more important than the illusory future. She likes to brush mascara, put on lipstick, buy jewelry, and drink eight or nine bottles of ice Coke a day in the summer. She was also addicted to shopping, and the courier box in front of the door was never broken.
Her working state depends on mood. For example, one afternoon in March, she was beaten badly, "The mood was immediately not good, I didn't send it in the afternoon, I went to Starbucks and drank more than a hundred pieces of coffee." She spent four thousand a month on food and drink, mocking herself as "moonlight." She hadn't yet decided how long she was going to do the takeaway, "As long as you can still do it, keep doing it." ”
▲ The female rider who took the order was a side code story
Sister A Feng's lifestyle is contagious. A male colleague of the site, after getting acquainted with Sister Ah Feng, slid out of the top ten of the site, and he began to "wake up" from the life of only running a single and sleeping, and began to divide some time gaps for movies, social interaction and relaxation. In his early thirties, he had never seen a movie, and after coming into contact with Sister Ah Feng, he gradually opened a door called "life".
Sister Ah Feng, who is close to life and has a very feminine temperament, and Chen Dajie, a female singles king who goes straight to "Qian Cheng", seem to stand at both ends of the fork in the road, representing two completely different lifestyles. However, as women, they will encounter similar contradictions and dilemmas because of gender. For example, when they are menstruating, they are embarrassed to say - because "[the station] is all men." Leave with the webmaster will not be passed, they will be required to run the minimum amount of orders no matter what.
Near the menstrual period, female riders are faced with a dilemma of identity choices, and they do not know whether to be a rider or a woman. Of the 32 female riders interviewed, only three would have a day or half-day break during their menstrual period. In order to "relegate", the female rider chose to continue running singles. Rain and snow days and menstrual periods are more like a pair of wrongdoers, in the face of the surge in single volume, they are anxious, anxious, and confused.
▲ A female rider shoots her mobile phone interface in the snow and wind, and the side code story
Bathrooms and late-night long-distance orders are also two major "enemies" of female riders. "Men, casually solve it by the tree that avoids people; unlike women, trouble, it is fine within the fifth ring, there are many toilets, if it is a suburban list dozens of kilometers away, the search (toilet) on the map cannot be searched." The problem of the urban space layout of the bathroom also appeared in Lu Nan's previous articles about female riders. Many times, the gendered design of urban space is mostly manifested in the pattern of white-collar, artistic and elite, and the problems of a few, low-level and gendered are rarely fortunate to be paid attention to.
Another time, Sister Ah Feng was sent to a deserted cemetery to deliver orders, and she had to go with fear. The cemetery was deserted, she could not find a way back, rode an electric car around, and came out to find herself in a cold sweat.
In a highly masculine industry, the algorithmic system of takeaway delivery is collected and counted on the basis of masculine massive data, which makes it difficult to include "gender" as a separate variable in the algorithm dispatch model and weigh the proportion. The indiscriminate labor experience encourages women to succumb to the rider's end in the face of the "rider-gender" dilemma.
▌ Dazzling young people, with middle-aged people who are ignored
Gladly 25 years old, not very tall, on an autumn afternoon, she sat in a small restaurant to eat, the sun hitting her shoulders, and the wide takeaway uniform could not hide her beautiful features. Sitting across from her was Sister Fang. She wears a purple cotton coat, wears an oversized Bluetooth headset on her ears, and has obvious wrinkles on her face. On the small round table were peanuts and melon seeds packed in plastic bags, a thermos cup and a super thick charging treasure. One old and one young, chatting unhurriedly, greeting the delivery man who came in from the store from time to time.
▲ Female rider between breaks Side code story
The two are 19 years apart, both belong to the same site, live close together, so they often bump into each other during breaks.
As female riders, they are treated differently. Chatting in the field, the students would say that they were happy to "laugh so sweetly" and "simply fairy delivery workers", and when facing Fang Jie, everyone's mouth seemed to be sealed by something, except for polite questions and answers, there was no extra praise.
This is probably one of the dilemmas of most middle-aged women, when Shaohua passes and wrinkles grow out of the corners of their eyes, they retreat from the center of the stage to the edge with their own hearts, or such and such helplessness.
"We're the lowest job." This was the first sentence that Sister Fang spoke. In December 2021, Fang Jie and a friend did takeaway, that friend was about the same age as her, and slipped away after working for a few days, fang jie said that friends could not eat this pain. Fang Jie is 44 years old and quite motivated. At 6:30 in the morning in Beijing winter, around minus ten degrees, Fang Jie got up, and she had to rush to the station to run more orders, because young people could not get up in the morning, and the list could be sent to her more. It wasn't until 9 p.m. that she returned to her rental house by herself and cooked a light meal to fill her stomach.
Fang Jie has rich work experience, has done business, opened a courier store, worked as a cold storage sorter, and has been to Guangzhou, Shenzhen, Shanghai and Hangzhou before and after. "I'm older, other jobs are not easy to find, takeaway is relatively free, the salary is still working, let's do it first."
▲ The female rider who takes the meal The story of the side code
In our questionnaire, 63.78% of female riders believe that age limits their career choices. Stereotypes about middle-aged women force them to take on more stress. Losing the advantage of appearance and age also loses the opportunity to get a decent job. And such a group of "forgotten" people are faced with families that are "old and old, and small", and careers that may have stagnated. For middle-aged women who are not well educated, it becomes extremely difficult to spend effort to make a living.
We followed Fang Jie to deliver a single, and found that she did not recognize the road, and her eyes stared at the navigation the whole time but still went wrong. In less than two hours, she walked wrong 3 times. And the joy of joining together is obviously very familiar with the road. Sister Fang will not be as happy as she is, she will receive seven or eight orders at a time, and she always sends them in two singles. She said, "If I were ten years younger, I would have been able to do the takeaway well, but when I'm old, my body still can't eat it, so doing this is just a transition." ”
▲ The story of the female rider who is taking orders
For middle-aged women, age anxiety is everywhere. Ah Lan was another female rider we met in the same precinct, "Sister, don't tell others that I'm 47 Ha, I'm afraid others will laugh at me when I'm so old and still come out to run takeaway." The day before the interview, she solemnly sent us a voice.
Ah Lan has experienced the storm of life - many years ago, because her husband gambled and lost all the money in the family, Ah Lan stopped the barber shop business and began to do takeaways.
In her mobile phone, she has always stored a photo of her 20s, thick eyebrows, big eyes, and unique hairstyle. It's just a thing of the past. The other day, she accepted a "female apprentice" who had transferred from the housekeeping industry and taught her to run takeaways. Ah Lan taught her: "Women just have to earn money, young and beautiful is a few years, in a few years it will be finished, no one should take it seriously." ”
Life goes up and down, and many middle-aged women become people abandoned by society. This is especially true for female riders, who, although their bodies cannot keep up with the high physical exertion of takeaways, but in the face of family and personal difficulties, all they can do is to rely on gig work to make the transition. Takeaway has become a support point for them to support themselves, and it has also become a battlefield for them to fight against the shame of takeaway labor. Youth is gone, the strength is exhausted, and all that remains is the courage to fight hard.
▌ They are on the balance of family and work
Many female riders who come out to run takeaways in middle age have encountered family or marital crises.
Mellie is one. Her marriage began hastily and broke down quickly—at the age of nearly thirty, she was licensed and married at the urging of her family. When her son was two or three years old, her husband had someone outside, and "making it up" became the norm of her married life. "I've wanted to get a divorce for a long time, I've been putting up with it since I had a baby, he's beaten me a few times, and we've been frozen like this for years."
Mellie ran past the flash with her son, and the mother and son were jokingly called "mother and son soldiers". When it rained, the mother and son wore a raincoat and hid under the bridge, and the son said, "Mom, I'm too cold", and she saw that her son was all wet under his legs. She took her son to the public bathroom and blew dry the clothes with a hand dryer, but their shoes were still wet, and Mellie rode barefoot for half a day.
▲ Female rider checking the delivery address Side code story
Now that her son is in junior high school and can be at home alone, Mellie no longer runs a single with her son. Whenever it rains, his son will tell: "Mom be careful, pay attention to safety." "Takeaway is a flexible chore and perfect for Mellie. After settling the child in, she often worked until midnight.
This is so because she has to raise the children on her own. "The child's father didn't care too much, and didn't give me living expenses... At home, water and electricity, gas, rent he did not pay, once I could not pay, the property stopped our water, for humanitarian reasons there was no power outage, I was on fire, my son also cried. Finally my brother talked to him, and since then he has paid the rent, but he still doesn't give any money to buy vegetables, water and electricity, and raise his son. ”
Mellie's family life is surrounded by complaints, suspicions, violence and hardship, but she still has faith and hope for the future. "It's okay, fate can be changed, after I get divorced, I will marry myself out, and if I can't marry out, I will live alone, and I will definitely live better than my younger brothers and sisters." 」
For housewives, middle-aged divorce is terrible, they have to face the pain of financial independence, and in many cases, this pain will not easily disappear.
Before the divorce, Sister Zhao had been a stay-at-home mother. The ex-husband was doing small business outside and was not allowed to manage the money. Later, the couple divorced in a dispute that could be big or small. Sister Zhao was heartbroken, and in order to get her ex-husband to sign the divorce agreement, she promised to leave the house.
"When I got married, I didn't have anything, and when I got divorced, my hometown had a house and a stall. He said, I want to divide his things and he will not leave, he wants his son, the house, the stall, then I will go out of the house. After the divorce, Sister Zhao found a job in a nearby factory and moved into the factory dormitory as quickly as possible. Leaving home and only 5 years old son, a life of wandering alone officially begins. Later, the factory closed down, and Sister Zhao came to Beijing alone with the help of her friends and began to deliver takeaways.
▲ The story of a female rider resting on an electric car
Beijing's South Sixth Ring Road, a small bungalow without a bathroom, a monthly rent of 400 yuan, Sister Zhao rented here. Working 10 hours a day, at the peak of the noon, in order to deliver more orders, she rarely eats lunch, but carries snacks bought on Pinduoduo in the lunch box. Seven or eight thousand a month's income, four thousand called to the son. Her husband did not allow her to see her son often, and she could only use money to tie up the mother-child relationship.
"I have a son, if I marry someone else, it will be equivalent to giving up my son, reluctantly... He also buys things and plays games on his mobile phone, and he needs money. She calls her son every week, twice more in the off-season.
Sister Zhao's biggest wish is that one day she will earn enough money to buy a van, load the kitchen and shower room in the car, and transform it into a caravan - "I can either drive to deliver orders or go to see my son, and the mother and wife live in the car and save the accommodation fee." To her relief, her son had good grades and passed the first place, and when it came to this matter, she could not hide her pride in her tone.
Although life is difficult, Sister Zhao has never given up the idea of buying a house in her hometown, "It's already forty years old, and I can't run for long." When I bought a house, I would go back to my hometown and do a stable job. "She also has a small dream in her profession: she used to work as a tailor in a garment factory, so she wanted to go back to her hometown to make a clothing brand and open an online store." Dong Mingzhu can do the world's top 500, why can't we work hard. ”
The dozens of female riders we met implicated dozens of families, dozens of living conditions, and dozens of meanings of life. For middle-aged female riders, family gives them both warmth and strength, as well as sadness and pain. Production and reproduction weigh on their shoulders at the same time, and the relationship between family and work becomes complex and tangled. Most female riders are tied to family and work, sometimes having to make choices and sometimes carrying them all.
Middle-aged female riders, standing on the fork in the road between age and appearance, doing multiple choice questions of youth and strength. Sandwiched between family and work, they hesitate and struggle. The takeaway platform provides them with an optional option, behind the repeated delivery of singles, there are many life stories and life choices involved. Being accepted and abandoned exists in their lives at the same time. Choosing one of the two in life may be the freedom of choice, or it may be, just the helplessness of fate.
(In order to protect the privacy of the respondents, some of the names in the article are pseudonyms)