Involution, lying flat, mental internal friction, flexible employment...... Here is the series of columns of the Ten Points Portrait "Contemporary Youth Life Record". From employment, marriage and love, to eating and shopping, the happiness and sorrow of the new youth in the 21st century are all here.
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There are 40 million women living alone in China's big cities. If the most embarrassing moment in the life of a woman living alone is that the electrical appliances at home are broken and you have to find a master to repair them.
In recent years, frequent social security incidents have made women wary of encountering strange men in their private spaces. On social media, the revelation of harassment and price hikes by door-to-door masters has evoked another anxiety among women living alone.
According to the data, electricians are one of the industries with the largest gap between men and women, with 98% of men and only 2% of women. Most maintenance platforms on the market cannot display the gender of the door-to-door master, and there have been female users who have called again and again after placing an order to confirm that they are still male masters when they call the 10th.
The scarcity of female practitioners, and the desire for female masters by women living alone, have formed a market gap that cannot be ignored. In recent years, women's maintenance teams have emerged in Korea and Japan specifically for women living alone.
Korea Women's Maintenance Team in BBC Coverage | Source: BBC News
In 2023, Didi, who lives alone in Shanghai all the year round, also came up with this idea, after taking the electrician certificate, she wanted to be a female master part-time, but after mixing with the major mainstream maintenance platforms, she found that the maintenance market is not friendly to women, so she pulled a few friends together to make the first maintenance platform in China that specializes in serving women living alone, "Xiugou Wanshiwu", which has more than 80,000 users and more than 3,000 engineers, of which more than 200 are female repairers who specialize in solving difficult problems.
We caught up with Didi and here's what she had to say:
Safety anxiety for women living alone
My name is Didi, I am 29 years old, and I work as a financial officer in Shanghai. Last year, a few friends and I co-founded the platform "Xiugou Wanshiwu", which serves women living alone, aiming to provide multiple life assistance for women living alone, such as maintenance and dredging, moving sparring, pet services, and accompanying women to seek medical treatment.
The initiation of this project originated from my personal experience of living alone. After graduating, I came to Shanghai to work, although I am an I-person, belonging to the type of people who actively choose to live alone and enjoy it, but when I first started to live alone in a strange city, I often have moments of insecurity haunting my heart.
The first consideration is personal safety. At that time, there happened to be news about a celebrity who lived alone and was found out a few days after he died at home, and I was worried, what if I had an accident at home one day?
In order to reduce this hidden danger, I found a gym near my home and checked in with the coach four or five times a week. In this way, I can establish a regular connection with myself, and if there is an abnormality in my itinerary one day, the coach will find out as soon as possible.
At the end of autumn in the second year of living alone, the weather in Shanghai is very cold, and you need to turn on the heater when you take a bath. But the heater in the house I rented was broken, and there was always an abnormal noise but it didn't heat, so I found a male master to repair it. When he was repairing the heater, it was already dark, there were only two of us in the room, he was taller than me, and the master alone would have some insecurity, and he made his own decisions to change the wiring, in the case of the heating problem was not solved, the abnormal noise stopped, and said that the repair had been completed. The following day, the heater caused a spark due to a change of wiring.
Confessions of a Korean woman in a BBC report | Source: BBC News
Another time it was an upstairs resident's renovation, and there was some problem with the drainage pipe in his house, and the resident knocked on the door and said that if the workers could lift the ceiling of my rented house, it would be easier for them to carry out the construction. In good faith, I was willing to make it easier for the other party, but the workers who came upstairs did not bring a ladder (despite the elevator), but directly pulled my chair and put on my shoes, and did not put the ceiling back on my house after the repair. After the workers left, the floor and chair seats were covered with cement ash footprints, and the ceiling left a few black holes, so I had to clean the soiled floor and chairs by myself, and then find a way to put the ceiling back.
After all these things, I was tired of accepting male workers to come to me for repairs. I wanted to find out if others had the same experience as me, so I typed in keywords such as "women living alone", "maintenance" and "door-to-door service" on several mainstream social platforms, and I found that I was not the only one who had this problem.
For example, a woman said that she placed an order on the platform to dredge the toilet, and discussed with the master that it was a cost of 50 yuan, but the master came to the door and said that the toilet problem was not small, and they must use their dredging agent, and finally dredged the toilet and poured a few catties of dredging agent, and gave her a quotation of more than 1,000 yuan, which can be exchanged for a toilet.
Didi's experience of seeing women on social platforms
When some women who live alone receive door-to-door services from men, they are not only subjected to sitting on the ground, but also psychological blackmail of a worse nature, including verbal and physical indecency.
So I thought, since I'm a woman who lives alone, and the plight of this group in everyday life is so common, can I do something to change that and make it less common for this group of people, including me.
Why are there so few female masters in the market?
At that time, I wanted to get in touch with the electrician industry, and my first thought was to take an electrician certificate, through which I could systematically understand the work content of an electrician. The electrician's certificate is issued by the Safety Supervision Bureau, and if you want to legally provide relevant services in the market, you need to hold this certificate.
The threshold for taking the electrician's certificate is not high, and anyone who can pass the driver's license test should be able to take this certificate. The content of the exam is divided into two parts: theory and practice. The theory is similar to the physical science content in middle school, including the basic nouns of electrician, the principle of electricity, etc., before the practical operation, I took apart the meter and small household appliances at home to see, deduced the circuit working diagram in my mind, and got the electrician certificate after about a week of self-study.
Didi took the electrician certificate before shooting
Before going to the examination room, there was a collective safety education and training, I observed, there were more than 100 people in the room, most of them were blue-collar workers, who should have been engaged in this industry to take the exam to make up for the certificate, among them, there were no more than 5 women, and I was the only young woman.
After getting the certificate, the household appliances of relatives and friends broke down, and I basically solved it. I have repaired garment steamers, gas stoves, water heaters, etc., small problems can be troubled step by step along the circuit diagram, and there are generally teaching videos on the Internet for more difficult problems. This process is like solving equations, usually working under high pressure, and occasionally doing maintenance can also change the brain.
The water heater was broken, and Didi repaired it himself
At that time, I thought if I should settle in a few mainstream housekeeping platforms? Let's see if my skills are enough to support me in the market to earn income.
When I broke into the maintenance master group and mixed around the major platforms, I began to think about the problem from the perspective of the maintenance master, about why the maintenance worker will sit on the ground and start the price after coming to the door? Why are there so few women working in maintenance-related jobs? I had something new to think about.
First of all, the master will face various commissions on major platforms, and some platforms may even receive as much as 50%, which means that the master may only receive half of the money for each completed order; Secondly, door-to-door maintenance is not the same as door-to-door delivery, takeaway is a high-frequency consumption that customers will have almost every day, and a customer may not have a maintenance demand for a year or even a few years, based on the impact of order volume, the competition between masters is particularly fierce. In order to grab the customer's list, they will adopt a low-price strategy to attract customers, and often change their faces after coming to the door, that is to say, the time to compete in acting skills has come, small problems should be said to be big problems, and no problems should be said to be problems, so as to increase the income of each order, otherwise he will have to post his own round-trip expenses for this order.
As for why there are so few female maintenance workers in the market, the first is that women face discrimination in the maintenance-related job market. I came into contact with a female master, who used to work as an electrician in a five-star hotel in Beijing, she has been engaged in this industry for more than ten years, and has quite a lot of experience, and then she was unemployed and came out to look for a job, and found that she was not needed for maintenance-related positions, because she wanted to find a man with great strength. In fact, it is not only employers who are biased, but also the general public who are biased against female maintenance workers, who generally believe that their skills are not as good as men, similar to the stigma of female drivers.
The second is that the maintenance industry is still monopolized by men, and if a young woman wants to work in this industry, she must first find a master who is willing to take her into the industry. In this regard, women also have an advantage over men.
Secondly, the female master will provide door-to-door service, and the younger female master will worry about her own safety and choose to only accept the orders of female customers. Originally, this market was limited, and the customer base was cut in half because of gender, and the single fee was not increased proportionally, and the income naturally decreased, and the living space of young female masters was even narrower. Only female masters who are older, forty or fifty years old, who do not worry about their own safety, do not pick customers, can have the same income as male masters.
To sum up, under the current market conditions, the threshold for women to work full-time as maintenance workers is not as low as working as waiters in restaurants and assembly line workers in factories, and the rewards are not necessarily as high as waiters or assembly line workers.
Female Internet Practitioners
Get together to change careers and do repairs
After coming to the conclusion, I came up with the idea of making a mutual aid platform for women, I wanted to make a mutual aid platform with only female masters and female users, and did not rely on lottery to make money.
I first made some pictures and texts by myself, using the electrician certificate and my daily experience, and wrote a series of tutorial articles on how to repair independently, including toilet repair, gas stove repair and household circuit troubleshooting, etc., with concise and easy-to-understand text and small videos, hoping to help women with financial difficulties to solve the maintenance problems they encounter by themselves.
At the same time, I pulled a few like-minded friends to build a mini program, and they are generally young women who have lived alone in big cities and empathize with the problems they will encounter in life.
I have psychological expectations for the controversy that the platform has received since it was launched. For example, some people think that since it is a female mutual aid, it should not be charged, while the female master believes that some customers' quotations are lower than the market, and subconsciously it is discrimination against female practitioners, disrespecting their labor, and so on.
To this end, I have done a small survey to let you change your perspective and think, if you are a maintenance master, are you willing to engage in the maintenance industry at the current market price? Even if it's part-time. The final results showed that nearly 60% of the 897 people were willing to work part-time or full-time in the maintenance industry if they were paid more.
Screenshot of the survey poll
At present, the total number of users of Xiugou Wanshiwu has reached more than 80,000, and there are more than 3,000 resident engineers, of which more than 200 are female masters who provide hard-core maintenance services. The trading volume has also achieved a small leap this year, from more than 40 orders to more than 400 orders, with a total turnover of nearly 100,000. Orders are concentrated in first-tier cities, and Sichuan and Chongqing, where women's awareness is high, and more remote cities will also have orders, but limited by the number of local users, it is difficult to match the master who receives the order.
The female master who enters the platform is divided into two situations. One is the Internet or other industries have been laid off, suddenly unemployed and thinking about transformation, some of them feel that there are prospects after contacting this industry, they also like it, and they have seriously invested the cost to learn, and some are temporarily part-time jobs, tide over the current difficulties, and no longer take orders when they find a job.
The other is related to maintenance, such as an after-sales engineer of a brand washing machine, who is responsible for maintenance and protection in a large company, and when he is off on Saturdays and Sundays, he comes to earn a little extra money.
At present, the biggest pain point of the platform is that it is unable to respond to every order in a timely manner, and the problem is mainly that there are fewer female masters in various places, and there is a distance problem between the two parties to the transaction, resulting in differences in each other's perception of price. For example, a customer publishes a demand and wants to find a female master to pass the sewer, there is only a senior female maintenance engineer in the local area, and it takes 3 hours to go back and forth from the location of the master to the customer's location, and the master takes into account the traffic and time cost in the quotation process, and the customer feels expensive, because she is looking for a master to repair it near the community with only half the price, and finally this order is over.
Women who live alone are not islands
Compared with a professional housekeeping maintenance platform, our team's positioning of this mini program is more like a pan-life women's mutual aid platform. In addition to public services such as maintenance and door-to-door feeding of cats, we have also developed new sections and functions in response to the needs of users.
A significant demand for living alone is that they want to have some communication with people with a sense of boundaries, and some girls proposed to talk to girls who also live alone on the mini program, so we opened a "life dating" section, and some users said that they wanted to see who was nearby and what businesses were there, so we launched the "nearby" function, where you can view women-friendly businesses close to home.
User interaction in Mini Programs
Accompanying medical treatment is another pain point in living alone. When I am sick, a person occasionally has mobility problems or needs help queuing, for example, a friend of mine who just went to work in a strange city, she is going to have an eye surgery, she doesn't know anyone in the local area, and she is embarrassed to trouble her colleagues, after the operation, both eyes are covered with gauze, and she can't see the road at all.
The "escort" request posted by the user
The richness of the variety of services is often one person who wants to place an order and says, "Eh, I need such a service, is there anyone who can help provide it", and another person finds "Eh, I seem to be able to provide such a service", which is slowly internalized into the consensus of the platform and users.
For example, a large number of female lawyers have settled in the platform, but in fact, several female lawyers have taken the initiative to discover this platform and provide free legal aid to women. For example, some time ago, a girl who lived alone in Suzhou broke out into a physical altercation with a neighbor who was disturbing the people. After calling the police, the two went to the mediation room of the police station. She was there for 21 hours, not wanting to be mediated and not knowing how to deal with it better. At this time, she found female lawyers on the platform. Several lawyers answered her phone in the middle of the night, analyzed her situation, and gave her some advice. Gradually, more users and female lawyers reached a formal business commission on the platform.
This platform is more like a hobby in my life at the moment, but being a community platform for women to help each other will inevitably face various challenges. First of all, the source of funds and the continuous operation of the problem, since the establishment of the platform, the purchase of servers, development and design and other expenses are all paid by me, and about 60,000 yuan has been spent in half a year.
How to ensure sustainability and get the business up and running is the next question I have to solve. Today, the team's main income comes from splash ads when opening the Mini Program, which can only cover the server cost of daily operations.
As a woman who lives alone, I believe that living alone is an active choice, which not only allows us to live more comfortably, avoid the energy consumption of ineffective social interactions, but now has the corresponding platform and technical support, so that we can easily connect with our nearby peers and take care of each other when we need to communicate with others.
Women who live alone are not an island.
The pictures in the article are from the interviewees, except for the annotations.