Illuminating challenges

She became an active member of the reading room's support group for women, and encountered many who, like her, had left their rural homes for work in the city at an early age in order to support their families.

"When we were in a private space, we could talk about our shared experiences of gender discrimination, but we couldn't talk about these problems once we left the room or when men were present," Ding says.

"I also realized that many people were researching female workers or writing about their stories, but we rarely get to know these women's true thoughts. I wanted to allow women workers to speak for themselves, instead of always being represented by others."

She believes that although women workers have huge potential, their personal development is often restricted due to a lack of resources.

Since 2012, she and a few like-minded people have been organizing events to celebrate female workers, usually on every International Women's Day at venues dedicated to laborers, including Shenzhen Baoan Labor Museum. There they perform songs, dances and plays crafted by female workers as vehicles for self-expression.

In 2015, she founded the Green Rose Social Work Service Center in Longgang district's Niushipu. Occasional events were not helping to establish a social network of the permanent kind, so she set up the organization in a highly industrialized area in order to draw in large numbers of migrant workers and their family members. Now, she did not have to seek them out. They could come to her.

Referencing official data from 2015, Ding says that Liuyue community, which Niushipu belongs to, covered 1,250 hectares and was home to around 100,000 people, but only 1,800 of them were native to Shenzhen; the majority were migrant workers.

Green Rose was founded with the core belief that female workers make important contributions to families and society. The organization works to build a safe, healthy and equal community.

Local female workers are encouraged to express themselves via cultural and artistic means, such as writing songs and plays to tell their own stories, and they also produce handmade products for the organization to earn extra income.