Women describe routes into DIY and plumbing as demand grows on tradeswomen platform

Women taking up DIY and plumbing in the UK have described how online instruction and flexible work are opening routes into traditionally male-dominated activities, in a BBC report published on 29 September 2026. The accounts offer a view of changing attitudes, while official statistics leave important gaps about how many women work in individual construction trades.

The BBC spoke to Bedfordshire DIY creator Jasmine Gurney, south London plumber Bliss Cunneen and Anna Moynihan, who founded TaskHer to connect customers with women tradespeople. Their experiences cover home projects, training for a trade and building a business around demand for tradeswomen. They do not, by themselves, measure a national change in employment.

How Jasmine Gurney built a DIY audience

Gurney, 33, told the BBC that her social media page gained traction during Covid lockdowns, when people unable to bring in professionals learned to do jobs themselves. She has documented work including replacing flooring, erecting a fence, insulating and boarding a loft, and building an outdoor workshop and custom cabinetry. At eight months pregnant, she was trying to finish a fitted wardrobe before her baby arrived.

She said criticism of her techniques online had encouraged her to keep going. ‘I like proving people wrong,’ she told the BBC. Gurney said she wanted other women to see that they could take on projects, and described showing herself working while pregnant and with her first child in a carrier. Her account shows why visible examples matter to her, rather than proving how many viewers go on to complete projects.

Bliss Cunneen’s route into plumbing

Cunneen, 28, left an anthropology university course in 2020 to train as a plumber. She called trying the trade ‘the best thing I've ever done’ and told the BBC she values the freedom and flexibility of running her own business. Her route illustrates a career change into hands-on work, rather than a direct move from school into an apprenticeship.

Some customers have doubted Cunneen when she arrived to work, she said; on one occasion, she was mistaken for the receptionist. She told the BBC that customers became comfortable once she showed confidence and demonstrated that she knew what she was doing. She also said online content had helped broaden attitudes towards women doing DIY or working in a trade.

What TaskHer’s growth figures show

Moynihan said she set up TaskHer after tradesmen working on her renovation addressed her husband instead of her. The platform links customers with women tradespeople. She told the BBC that enquiries on the site had more than doubled so far in 2026 compared with 2025, while the number of tradeswomen signing up had almost quadrupled.

Those are figures reported by TaskHer’s founder about activity on one platform. They show the growth she says her business has experienced, but provide neither a national count of tradeswomen nor a measure of the wider market. Moynihan also described women joining after white-collar careers, citing three Oxford University-educated tradeswomen who had signed up in the preceding month. She said some valued self-employment and saw trade work as less exposed to advances in AI.

What UK workforce and training data can establish

The BBC cited the Federation of Master Builders for an estimate that women make up about 4% of the UK construction workforce. That figure concerns the workforce as a whole; it should not be read as the proportion of plumbers or of women in every construction trade. The BBC also reported that one in ten people starting a construction apprenticeship in 2024–25 was a woman, compared with about one in fourteen five years earlier.

The Office for National Statistics says its occupation estimates by sex come from the Annual Population Survey. In a February 2025 response, it said many estimates for women in individual trades were suppressed because the numbers were so small that publishing them risked identifying people. It therefore could not provide the requested complete breakdown by trade and geography. This makes detailed comparisons between occupations harder to substantiate from that response.

Department for Education figures provide another measure with a different scope: England recorded 24,590 apprenticeship starts in Construction, Planning and the Built Environment in the 2024/25 academic year, a slight increase from the preceding year. That total covers a subject area, not employment in construction trades, and the figure alone does not say how many starters were women. Taken together, the interviews and statistics show routes women are taking into the work, alongside the limits of current trade-by-trade counts.