Why more women are picking up power tools
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. “It’s very creepy down here," says Hannah Lee Duggan as she leads the way into her basement. It looks like the staging area for a “Saw" trap.
There are drills and nail guns neatly arranged on a shelf. The walls are made of metre-deep stone. There are no windows.
We are in the middle of the woods. Hannah is not a serial killer. Far from it.
She is known for something impeccably wholesome. She fixes up her home and posts about it. She is one of a growing number of female do-it-yourself influencers.
All over America, women are upping tools. In Virginia Cass Smith, who posts videos of her projects on Instagram under the handle “cassmakeshome", is building herself an office in her basement, from two ikea dressers. In Utah Elise Hunter, known as “huntersofhappiness" on TikTok, is hand-painting flowers to make wallpaper for the playhouse that she has built for her two young daughters.
It is not just homeowners who are at it. On the Upper West Side of Manhattan Shelby Vanhoy has wallpapered the dining-room ceiling in the rented flat she shares with her husband, her son and an enormous dog. How big is this trend? The Bureau of Labour Statistics conducts an annual “time use" survey in which it asks thousands of Americans what they do with their days.
Taking “interior maintenance, repair and decoration" as a proxy for DIY, it finds that Americans in general are doing less of it now than two decades ago. But drill down into the data and another trend becomes clear. Men still do more diy than women, but over the past five years the time that men spend on it has remained flat while women have put in 60% more.
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