Women-First Safety: Designing for Dignity in Domestic Work
For women entering homes as domestic workers, the risks are real and largely unaddressed by existing platforms. JeevikaSetu built its safety architecture around this reality from day one.
A woman accepting a housekeeping job through an informal network faces a fundamental information asymmetry. She knows almost nothing about the household she's entering. The household knows everything about her from the referral. JeevikaSetu set out to invert this.
Every household on the platform goes through a Verified Home assessment — a combination of Aadhar-linked identity verification, community ratings from previous workers, and a behavioural flag system that escalates repeated complaints. Workers can see a household's safety rating before they accept a job. If a home has unresolved complaints, it is suspended from receiving applications.
Phone numbers are never exchanged directly. All communication happens through the platform's masked calling system, which means a worker can be reached without exposing her personal number. For women who have previously dealt with unwanted contact after domestic jobs, this is not a minor convenience — it is the difference between taking the job and not.
The SOS feature activates with a long press on the home screen during an active job. It sends the worker's live location to three pre-registered emergency contacts and, optionally, to a JeevikaSetu rapid-response WhatsApp line. Since the pilot launch, it has been activated twelve times in test regions — and in each case, the situation was resolved without escalation.
Women-only job filters let female workers restrict their visible profile to households that have been flagged as women-friendly — based on the household's own declaration and corroborated by worker ratings. This keeps the economic opportunity open while giving workers control over who sees them.