The women's maintenance team will soon be stationed in Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou

New Weekly

2024-04-29 16:03Published on the official account of Guangdong New Weekly

"The refrigerator is not refrigerated, is there a female master who can repair it? ”

"In Chaoyang District, Beijing, the range hood is dismantled and cleaned, and a female master is needed to come to the door. ”

In the community of Xiugou Wanshiwu, a female netizen started such a post. There are many similar help posts in the community, and they all have one thing in common: female customers want to find female service providers.

▲Screenshot of the community of Xiugou Wanshiwu

Xiugou Wanshiwu is a women's mutual aid door-to-door service platform. The original intention of the founder, Didi, to build this platform was to provide women who live alone with the service of female maintenance workers to reduce their safety anxiety.

▲Screenshot of the interface of the mini program of the Repair Hook House

According to the White Paper on Urban Women Living Alone, safety is one of their biggest concerns. The starting point of urban women living alone is mostly when they have just graduated or just started working, and more than 70% of women aged 18-35 have lived alone for more than 2 years.

Women who live alone are easy targets to be targeted. Because of the innate difference in size, they are a little powerless in the face of illegal infringement. Even if you pay attention to it, when it is time to move and repair, women who live alone still have to face the situation of sharing a room with a strange man in a confined space, and after the repair is completed, they may encounter the situation of the master asking for a high price or even harassment.

Past events have triggered safety anxiety in women. In the group of women who live alone, this anxiety is almost very common and can even be pre-empted.

I couldn't find a female maintenance worker, so I became a female maintenance worker

Didi, the founder of Xiugou Wanshiwu, is 29 years old and lives alone in Shanghai. In her usual life, she feels very strongly some of the insecurities in life as a woman who lives alone.

"One day my bathroom heater broke down, and I got a male repairman to come to my door," Didi said. Maybe it was because it was getting dark when he was repairing my heater. Since I lived alone, there was no other partner in the room, just the two of us in the same room, and he was a taller man than me. Although he didn't do anything to me, he was somewhat threatening to me. At that time, I felt very uneasy and oppressed. ”

▲ "Thirty Only" Wang Manni moved and walked with the driver.

Didi then wondered if other women who lived alone would have the same nervousness and anxiety when they had broken appliances or clogged sewers and needed to come to their homes? Disillusioned, she began to learn skills such as repairing appliances and repairing sewers on her own.

For this reason, Didi went to take a serious electrician certificate. Didi found that it was not as difficult as he imagined to take the electrician certificate. On the day of the exam, she observed the examination room, and out of more than 100 candidates, there were less than 10 women. Didi, who won the electrician certificate, in addition to meeting the maintenance needs of his own life, also began to take the initiative to repair electrical appliances for his friends. She began to think: there are so few female maintenance workers, is there a platform to connect female maintenance workers with women who live alone?

▲《MAINTENANCE》

"If we want to change the current environment where women living alone don't have a shortage of female service providers, we should take the lead," Didi said. So Didi first established the official account of "Xiugou Wanshiwu", trying to connect women who need services and women who can provide services.

▲Screenshot of the WeChat public account of Xiugou Wanshiwu

On this platform, Didi also discovered other needs that she hadn't noticed. For example, a significant number of women said that they had a driver's license, but they were afraid to drive, and hoped that they would like to have a female sparring partner to practice driving together. Many people also asked in private messages whether the platform could add some options for female drivers, and they would love to call a car for female drivers.

▲A taxi company in Fuzhou provides special services for women to ride at night.

At present, there are more than 50,000 users on the platform of Xiugou Wanshiwu, but among the more than 2,000 service providers, most of them are volunteering to provide cat and dog walking services. "There are very few female masters who really have maintenance skills, basically only one or two in each city," Didi said. Like Beijing, there is only one electrician. ”

The number of female maintenance workers is still very scarce. On internet platforms, the identity of "female maintenance workers" can also be a cause for concern. The "messy copper sulfate" of station up is a post-00 who lives alone in Wuhan, and is also a part-time female master who repairs computers at home, and usually updates her daily routine of door-to-door maintenance on the Internet. Different from Didi's starting point, "Copper Sulfate" initially only accepted orders from girls, because she was still underage, and for her own safety, she only served female customers.

▲Screenshot of the main "messy copper sulfate" page of station B UP.

She said in her video: "My price is very transparent: the door-to-door fee is 50 yuan, the system installation fee is 10 yuan, and the bus fare is about 10 yuan. This career allowed her to meet girls from all walks of life in the city of Wuhan – models, junior high school class teachers, graphic designers, and accountants. She has received a lot of kindness from women and has become friends with most of her female clients.

Although "Copper Sulphate" initially joked that her purpose as a female maintenance master was to earn cat food money for her cats, now this part-time job has brought her a lot of unexpected gains. She has more than 270,000 fans on station B, and she has also gained the money to advertise for her. She has also attracted many women who want to become computer repairers like her. As she has more and more experience in door-to-door installation, and chats more and more with women who live alone, she has gradually found that it is quite common for women to worry about strange men coming to their homes.

A woman who lives alone and is afraid of encountering maintenance assassins

There are some "unspoken rules" between women who live alone that they know each other. For example, use masculine names when shopping online and ordering takeout, regularly change and dry men's clothes on the balcony, keep a few pairs of men's shoes at the door, and double-check doors and windows before going to bed. These are all ways for women who live alone to gain a sense of security and ensure their personal safety.

At the same time, women who live alone are also more vulnerable to maintenance assassins. Xiaoxue once encountered a clogged toilet. She agreed with the master on the platform for a maintenance fee of 200 yuan, but in the end, the master used the cost of toilet unclogging agent as an excuse to increase the price to 900 yuan. And Xiaoxue, who lives alone, is forced to compromise because she is worried about her personal safety.

▲ "Door Lock"

Xiaoxue said: "After living alone, I was unusually resistant and insecure about the door-to-door service of strange men. Especially for home services that need to be visited, such as various home appliance repairs, I have to do a long psychological construction before the male service staff comes to the door. Like that time, the toilet was broken, and I couldn't solve it by all means, so I couldn't bear the maintenance worker who was not suitable to find, and finally I was slaughtered. Whenever something breaks down in my house, I'm very anxious. Although in reality, most people are 'normal'. But my anxiety won't subside until they arrive. ”

The same anxiety also occurs in Dandan, who lives alone. Dandan said: "Some time ago, the toilet at home was broken, in order not to find a male master to come to the door, I tried almost all kinds of methods myself, bought toilet piers, wire hooks, dredging agents, etc. are useless, I had to place an order for toilet repair on a service platform." When the master entered the door and saw the shoe cabinet at the door, the first thing he said was, 'Your high heels are so high'. This sentence made me instantly feel like I was being stared at by a man, and I was extremely uncomfortable. At that moment, I had never longed so much for a female maintenance worker. ”

▲ "Thirty Only" Zhong Xiaoqin was taken to a deserted place by the driver by the driver alone.

Although this demand is real, why are there so few female maintenance workers who can be found in the market for on-site service?

Didi's thinking on this is that electricians, carpenters and other jobs themselves require learning costs, such as time, money, physical strength, and brain power, and only women who are willing to pay the cost of learning can be qualified. In the case of the scarcity of women who want to enter the relevant jobs, women who live alone want to be served by women who "need to pay the cost of studying", so they need to pay more. This means that the supply and demand relationship and the difficulty of getting started lead to higher costs for female maintenance workers than for male maintenance workers.

However, many female users believe that men and women should be paid equally for equal work. While women living alone need female maintenance workers, it is a mutual benefit to create more employment opportunities for female maintenance workers. If a female client has to pay more for her own choice, it is essentially a shift of responsibility.

▲ "Thirty Only" Wang Manni moved and was temporarily increased.

Didi once launched a questionnaire survey on the Internet: "If the current market price or higher pay is used, would you be willing to work in the maintenance industry as a woman, would you be willing to work as a female maintenance worker, female electrician, female decorator?" The results showed that 59% of women believed that they would be willing to work part-time or full-time only when they were paid more.

The answer is obvious – they all want to have a female maintenance worker to provide their services, but they don't want to be a female maintenance worker.

In this regard, Xiaoxue, who lives alone, said: "Women's safety is not only a social issue that needs to be solved urgently, but also a rigid demand for single women at this stage. As women's overall economic power increases, more and more women will be willing to pay for their own comfort. ”

How women living alone abroad can cope with safety issues

In South Korea, the number of women living alone is very large. According to the BBC, more than 3.09 million women in South Korea live alone, and they tend to feel uneasy about male maintenance workers who come to their homes.

In 2020, a repair company made up of female maintenance workers became popular in South Korea, and it specializes in providing door-to-door repair services for women living alone, including assembling furniture, replacing lamps, repairing sinks and toilets, replacing doorknobs, and assembling cat towers, among others. The business was so hot that these female repairmen were able to repair more than 500 families in a year, with little active publicity.

The founder, Ahn Hyung-sun, is a person who likes maintenance very much, even if she is always counted down by her parents, "A girl should look like a girl, what's the matter with carrying a toolbox to homework every day?". At the beginning of the company's establishment, there were not enough female maintenance workers, so she and the whole team systematically learned maintenance skills.

Ahn Hyung-sun set up the Korean women's maintenance team, firstly, in the hope of attracting women who also like maintenance work, helping them find employment and avoid gender discrimination, and secondly, she has lived alone for ten years, considering the increase in burglary and sexual assault cases in South Korea, she knows that the safety anxiety of women living alone, and female maintenance workers can give women who live alone the greatest sense of security.

▲The Korean women's maintenance team provides door-to-door service

Similarly, there is also a company in Japan that employs a large number of female employees to provide moving services for women living alone, and its main focus is to provide "mental security" for women living alone. After all, moving for women who live alone means that many strange men suddenly come to the house, and her personal belongings and private life are all exposed to the eyes of strangers of the opposite sex. This discomfort is even more intense when they walk through the living room into the bedroom, take a closer look at the house, enter the toilet, and even touch your clothes, utensils, and other personal items.

The rise of such home services for women living alone is undoubtedly to address their maintenance needs, especially safety concerns.

▲Customers who come to the door of the Korean women's maintenance team

After half a year, Xiugou Wanshiwu has developed into a women's community platform that can provide various life assistance such as door-to-door maintenance, moving sparring, pet services, and accompanying medical treatment. As an all-female mutual aid platform, Xiugou Wanshiwu will inevitably attract a lot of doubts.

Some people think that women should be free and should not be charged. Someone else said to Didi, "How do you know that a female maintenance worker won't do bad things? Or, "How can you be sure that 'she' is not a man who registers with a female ID card and is impersonating a woman?"

Faced with many questions, Didi couldn't respond to them all. She would also "reply" to the other party at first, but gradually learned to ignore these voices. What she wants to do now is to make the house an outlet for the needs of women who live alone, so that their voices can be heard better and answered, even if it is not perfect.

Despite the many challenges that come with it, the emergence of women maintenance workers is a positive sign of progress and changing gender roles in the service industry. Of course, for female maintenance workers to be treated fairly in the workplace, they need to make sustained efforts to address the challenges ahead – including equal access to vocational training opportunities, gender bias in the workplace, and a safety index in the workplace.

In China, the repair industry covers a wide range of areas, from home appliance repair to building maintenance. While the industry has traditionally been dominated by men, more and more women are starting to enter the industry.

"If we want to change the status quo, we have to start with 'We who care about these women's voices,'" Didi said. ”

References

[1] Global Times, "Women's Maintenance Team Gives Korean Women Living Alone a Sense of Security"

[2] "When Strangers Knock on the Door: How Women Living Alone Cope with Safety Issues"

[3] White Paper on Urban Women Living Alone

[4] "Defending a Woman's Own "Room"

[5] "Japan Launches "Women's Moving" to Provide Tidying and Caring Services

Content: Elise

Editor: Felicia

Typesetting: Yang Panpan

Title image: "Door Lock"

View original image 132K

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