The Uncomfortable Reality of Being a Female Delivery Driver

This article originally appeared on VICE France.

Like around 100,000 other people across the world, 22-year-old Julie’s evenings start when she changes into a turquoise jacket and hops on a bike. For the past six months, she’s been working as a Deliveroo courier in Marseille, France. Like everyone we spoke to for this piece, she asked to use a pseudonym because she was scared of losing her job.

She was initially hesitant about taking the job. Not because she was worried about not being up to it, but because she was worried about being even more exposed to harassment in public than usual. “You see a lot of men doing this job and it makes you not want to,” she said. “You wonder if you’re going to feel comfortable, or if people are going to bother you.”

A 2021 study carried out by researchers at Paris’s Université Gustave Eiffel showed that women only make up around seven percent of couriers in France. It’s still very low, but the number of women working in delivery jobs across the country like Julie is rising – in 2020 only two percent of the workforce was female.

These rates vary not only from country to country, but from company to company. The American service Doordash boasts that 58 percent of its drivers are female, with UberEats claiming that half of their drivers are women.

In 2019, Kelly became the first female Deliveroo driver in the French city of Nîmes, France. She’d always enjoyed cycling, so the job was appealing. “For the first few months, I just got looks [from male drivers]. And then some of them started to talk to me. They weren’t necessarily nasty, but they wanted to explain the job to me.”

Julie has had similarly patronising experiences. “Sometimes, guys would tell me that I’d struggle, that the bags get heavy when you’re picking up a lot of orders. You don’t have to be an athlete to deliver McDonald’s, though.”

The comments weren’t limited to remarks made by colleagues. Kelly recalls that while interacting with restaurant, staff was “always fine”, but customers could be tricky at times. “It was sexist and awkward. They’d say things like, ‘You’re brave for a girl.’”

It isn’t the weight of their takeaway-stuffed cooler bags that can slow female delivery drivers down. It’s actually the danger that comes with having to spend long minutes hanging around restaurants and apartment blocks in badly-lit streets after dark. 

Coralie, a 44-year-old French driver, has been delivering for two years. “There are times when I’m scared,” she admitted. “Depending on where it is, I might ask customers to come outside.”  To feel safer, Coralie decided to make her deliveries by car. It’s a risk given that this defies Deliveroo’s company policy in France, where workers – or “riders”, as they are known – can only use bikes or motorcycles to carry out couriering.

For 25-year-old Jade – who, with three years of service under her belt is something of an industry veteran – getting chatted up has become an unwelcome part and parcel of the job. “People have made passes at me. Some customers have managed to find me on social media. I was seen as a trophy because I was the only girl in town doing this job.”

These passes aren’t limited to strange looks and social media. “A guy in the street put his hand on the handlebars of my bike and insisted that I give him my number,” Julie recalled. “Another time, the boss at a kebab shop put his hand firmly on my bum. He said that it was a joke. I had no idea how to react.”

Though there’s money to be made in delivery driving - Jade said that she could earn up to 2,500 euros a month – it is precarious work. Drivers for the likes of Deliveroo and Uber Eats are self-employed and thus not protected by the employment rights that salaried members of the workforce are entitled to. This adds another layer of hardship to their day-to-day experience. 

“In some ways we’re the same as the boys,” Julie said. “You have to do a lot of hours for not very much. You have to provide your own vehicle and phone. And as a self-employed person, if you’re ill, you’re screwed.”

While many of us have used their services in the past 18 months – The Guardian reported that Deliveroo alone processed 74.6 million orders in the third quarter of 2021 alone – the job remains a largely thankless one. 

The women doing this work face harassment from customers and colleagues alike, are subjected to sexism in and outside of the workplace, and experience a lack of recognition for doing what they do. “When I tell people I’m a delivery driver, I never get congratulated,” Jade said. “It is a job with a negative image. And that’s yet another obstacle.”