The difficult balance of New York’s female delivery workers in a predominantly male-dominated job

The customer opened the door, received the delivery and scanned the body of the delivery woman Marleny Chumil, covered in layers of black clothing and a helmet that concealed her long hair. No matter how much he insisted, she refused to enter the house. Chumil thought of her three children, got out of the building and blocked that moment from her mind. She did not tell anyone about it. “What am I going to report? Sometimes as a migrant woman they do not take your word into account, you have no value,” says the 27-year-old Guatemalan resident of Brooklyn.

Chumil clenches her hands nervously as she recounts that night of work. Her eyes are watering, but she doesn’t cry. Her five-year-old son William, sitting next to her, almost spills his hot chocolate and she immediately gets up to get a napkin.

A month after giving birth to William in 2020, Chumil got an electric bike and started working as a delivery rider with the DoorDash and GrubHub apps. It was work that she could do while her newborn son was cared for by a friend, or dropped off at daycare. For three years, she was one of the more than 65,000 food delivery people in New York.

“Many people say that a woman cannot do it because not everyone dares to make deliveries, but I did dare because I needed to. It is the only job that left me time for my son,” says Chumil with a very proud look. Delivery work fits in with the care tasks of many women. However, these same responsibilities limit their ability to participate in the activism of food delivery workers, a field dominated by men that ignores their particular needs such as protection from harassment or access to bathrooms during menstruation.

The Mexican delivery worker Sandra Ortiz, 37, has grown accustomed to the pain in her uterus caused by the icy gusts of New York wind during her menstrual cycle. For her, enduring the pain at work is normal, as is the pain from weekly falls from her bike. “Here everyone gets by as best they can,” says Ortiz, a food delivery worker for the Relay app who is responsible for supporting her son, who lives back in Puebla, while sending money to her parents and paying for her younger sister’s education. She is the head of the family.

Ortiz has scars on her right arm from blows and falls at work. Her right wrist shows a bone that sticks out from a fracture that was never treated in a hospital. Her black, deep and lost gaze seem to look toward Puebla. She believes that there are very few female delivery workers because not all of them can “endure” the cramps at work, going from one food order to another without stopping, and the falls.

One in four delivery workers is a woman, according to the most recent report from New York City, and Ortiz is part of that 24%. On her morning shifts around Harlem, she rides her bike at nearly the same speed as cars. She dodges trucks and passes motorcycles to deliver hot bagels and coffee to customers.

Despite being shouted at in English to “get out” of the country, despite having someone bang her helmet at a traffic light, and falling while crossing intersections, this type of work gives her freedom. In her previous jobs as a nanny in a home and as a restaurant employee, she felt like she was being “absorbed” and “locked in.”

Like Ortiz, Guatemalan delivery worker Micaela Quibajá, 34, prefers riding her bike as an independent contractor to working as a delivery driver for a restaurant. That way, she can create her own schedule and be her own boss. “I’m not locked up, but I’m tied to apps. I go from work to home, that’s all,” said Quibajá, who works to provide for her six nephews, siblings and parents. She’s the oldest sister.

When she stops at a red light, her skin crawls. And she puts all five senses on alert if she sees a cyclist passing by. She says she gets nervous, thinking about the day someone pointed a gun at her at a stop sign.

Bike theft is common in food delivery work, along with muggings, traffic accidents, and even deaths. In 2024 alone, the Workers’ Justice Project recorded 10 deaths of delivery workers, but that may be an undercount.

Despite the risks, delivery work continues to attract migrants in New York. Food delivery apps and authorities view delivery workers as independent contractors, which means that they have no labor protections such as social security and minimum wage. With food delivery work booming in New York during the Covid pandemic, a group of delivery workers and activists formed Los Deliveristas Unidos, along with the nonprofit Workers Justice Project.

Over the past three years, the organization has been able to pass packages of laws that guarantee bathroom access in restaurants, limit delivery distances, protect against unfair fees and establish a minimum wage. Few women have been involved in organizing the movement. One of them was the Mexican delivery worker Ernestina Gálvez, from the state of Guerrero.

Gálvez has been working as a delivery rider for six years. In the mornings, she makes pancakes or quesadillas for her eight-year-old son, and lunch for her daughters. She says goodbye to them, takes him to school, then gets on her bike and begins her delivery shift. Her day ends shortly after noon. Then she returns home, fixes lunch, makes sure her children do their homework, and goes back to work during dinner. Even before she separated from her partner, she was also in charge of household chores, paying the bills, and taking care of the children.

She started out as a volunteer with Los Deliveristas Unidos, but months later she was offered the position of organizing leader with a salary. She ended up being the “mother” of hundreds of delivery workers who asked her for help. She dealt with cases of assault, robbery and death, to which delivery workers continue to be exposed. “I would start to cry, I would tell them that I couldn’t find a way, I really felt helpless and angry,” she remembers while wiping away a few tears.

Gálvez says she left the organization in 2021 due to multiple internal disagreements, one of them being that they do not provide financial assistance to the delivery workers who have accidents or help with the repatriation of bodies to their countries of origin. Also, because there were moments when the leaders of the organization displayed sexist behavior towards her in WhatsApp groups and at conferences. “For them, a woman knows nothing,” says Gálvez.

William Medina, a case manager at Los Deliveristas Unidos, said in a phone call that he is not aware of any cases of sexism within the organization, but did not specify whether they have measures in place to detect sexist behavior or cases of gender-based harassment. Gabriel Montero, communications director for the organization, clarified that if a female delivery worker needs help, she can go to their offices in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, to receive assistance.

The sociologist Ruth Milkman explains in one of the few national studies on female food delivery workers in the United States that this work fits into the caregiving tasks of working-class women, from feeding and clothing their children, to serving as emotional support, to household management such as managing budgets and paying bills. In most of the country, suburban women are the ones who hold more food delivery jobs using cars, but New York is a particular case where the delivery workers are mostly men and use electric bicycles and motorcycles to get around because it is easier and faster on congested streets, also leaving them exposed to more risks.

The Justice for App Workers coalition, led by Dominican taxi driver Adelgysa Payero in New York, provides organizing spaces for women who work with apps. These include delivery riders and drivers. “I think that women are not as involved in activism as men because our time is more limited and many times what we were taught as children is to make ourselves small,” explains Payero, a mother of four.

Payero organizes monthly meetings in which she tries to adapt the space so that more women who work with delivery applications can join. For example, she tries to hold virtual meetings during times when children are at school. If they are in person, in the afternoon, she encourages women to bring their children and tries to have food ready so that the women who attend do not have to worry about preparing dinner at home. “Their voice counts, what they think and feel matters, it matters that they speak, not only for themselves, but for other women who may go through the same thing,” she says.

Meanwhile, Quibajá is in her second winter in New York and already knows how many layers of clothing she needs to withstand the cold and the cramps. She misses playing soccer, but since she moved to New York, she hasn’t been able to because she doesn’t have the time. Cycling is not a sport for her; it is a means of working that can be quite lonely. She wants to earn enough money to repay her debts and, perhaps, return. “Yes, I would join them in protesting,” says Quibajá while she continues to send money to her family in Guatemala.

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