This is the fifth essay in my series on Delivering Food: The World of a Female Rider by Wang Wan.
Last Sunday, March 8, was International Women’s Day. It reminded me of a section of Wang Wan’s book describing the particular challenges faced by female delivery riders.
Platform-based delivery work has spread across cities around the world. In New York, London, and Delhi, riders thread through traffic under the same pressures of time, ratings, and algorithms. The technology processing orders may differ from platform to platform, but the structure of the work is remarkably similar: speed determines income, delays mean penalties, and every minute becomes measurable.
For women, however, this system carries an additional layer of challenge. Like Wang Wan, many female riders find themselves navigating work environments designed largely for men. Safety concerns, harassment from customers or colleagues, and the lack of basic facilities—something as simple as access to a restroom—turn ordinary working hours into a series of risks and discomforts that most male riders rarely have to consider.
For instance, Wang Wan recounts how male customers sometimes opened the door wearing nothing but their underwear. When they saw that the delivery rider was a woman, “they looked embarrassed and flustered, stumbled over their words, hurriedly grabbed the food from my hands, and then quickly shut the door.” On unlucky nights, she might encounter several such customers.
Sexual harassment, unfortunately common across cultures, also became part of her experience. One male rider repeatedly tried to approach her. Once, while she was swapping her battery, he reached out and touched her shoulder. It was not a brief tap—his hand lingered for several seconds. She immediately stepped back.
Later, that same rider even grabbed her phone from the mount on her bike, opened her WeChat interface, scanned his own QR code, and accepted his friend request on her behalf.
On another occasion, after she had picked up an order and was about to leave from the second basement level of a building, the man suddenly appeared again. Without warning, he placed his hand on her shoulder and slid it down along her back until it reached her buttocks before finally removing it.
This time Wang Wan exploded in anger. “Stay away from me. I don’t even know you. Get off.”
To survive in this male-dominated field, Wang Wan gradually adopted strategies to conceal her gender. She tied up her hair, wore a helmet and mask, and spoke as little as possible when handing over orders.
After a while, she writes: “I gradually forgot my identity as a woman. I stopped caring about what I wore. Except for my irregular menstruation and when I had to use the restroom, I rarely had any sense that I was female. The rest of the time, I was simply a person without gender.”
In fact, many female riders adopt this kind of “de-gendering” strategy in order to survive in the industry. To avoid unwanted attention, they try to make themselves appear as gender-neutral as possible.
Yet even then, some difficulties remain uniquely female. One of the most basic is something most people never think about: using the restroom.
Wang Wan writes: “To avoid needing the bathroom, my first strategy was simply to drink less water. It worked for a day or two, but over time it became a problem. When I stopped drinking water, my mouth and nose felt constantly dry and burning. I often had nosebleeds, and I also became constipated.”
Outside Beijing’s Fifth Ring Road, public toilets are scarce. Male riders can easily find a secluded place to relieve themselves, but women cannot. Wang Wan usually had three options: wooded areas, municipal public toilets, or restrooms in shopping malls. None were convenient. In the woods she worried about being seen; public toilets were too few; and in malls the lines were often too long for someone racing against delivery deadlines.
One night, while urinating in a secluded corner of a wooded area in a villa compound, she was discovered by a security guard. The guard suspected she was stealing something and demanded to know why she was squatting there.
She claimed she had lost her keys, but the guard did not believe her and insisted on searching her bag. “I told him he had no right to search my bag and tried to leave,” she recalls. “But he grabbed me and refused to let go.”
At that moment another guard arrived. After hearing what happened, he pulled the first guard aside and said quietly, “She’s just a woman delivering food. Life isn’t easy for her. Let it go.” He gave her a look signaling that she should leave quickly. She ran off immediately.
What Wang Wan describes goes beyond the experience of a single rider in a Chinese city. It reveals a broader tension in modern urban labor. Technology can organize work with remarkable efficiency, but very often the lives of the people performing that work mean something else—subject to fear, fatigue, vulnerability, insecurity, and even lack of dignity.
On International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that behind the seamless convenience of food arriving at our doors lies an invisible workforce. Among them are women navigating not only traffic and deadlines, but also the challenges of working in spaces that were never designed for them, and understand that the female workers must improvise constantly just to stay safe, respected, and human.
3/10/2026