Women are paying a fortune to avoid the wrong man

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It’s half past ten on a Saturday evening and I’m standing outside a restaurant waiting for an Uber. I don’t really need it – home is just a twenty-minute walk away. I’ve walked it at night before, and ended up jogging most of it, with my keys between the fingers of one hand and my phone clutched in the other. Because there’s a stretch with low street lighting, very little foot traffic and a series of narrow alleyways along it. Somewhere around the third alleyway, my body decided that running was the logical response. So I stand on the footpath and wait for my ride-share. At the end of it, I pay $20 and I tell myself that it was worth paying a little extra to stay safe.

Safe from what, exactly?

Sexual assault, rape, homicide, obviously. What a silly question.

The taxi ride sits in its own category of products and services aiming to keep women “safe”, alongside pepper spray, glass-covers that prevent drink-spiking, tracking apps and self-defence classes. Then there is the dagger-like self-defence ring advertised on Instagram, and the “anti-rape nail polish” developed by four male students, which detects date-rape drugs if you stir your drink with your finger. Jessica Valenti wrote in the Guardian that the effort might be better spent preventing the rape than helping women individually to avoid it. The VenusGuard is currently raising donations towards clinical approval: an internal silicone sleeve, inserted like a tampon, which its makers say incapacitates an attacker with intense pain and preserves his DNA for the prosecution. It reminded me of a cucumber-shaped kitchen gadget that cuts vegetables. Its manufacturers argue it will deter rape once enough people know about it, which means that until then, it’s deterring nobody at all. None of these prevent an assault. They activate once one is underway, which the VenusGuard makers describe as “a woman’s last line of defence”.

Which raises the question of why anyone buys them. The answer is that a purchase is something you can do, and the alternative is doing nothing while a stranger decides.

A Reddit user called the cost of all this the “can’t tax”: can’t jog at night, can’t leave my drink unattended, can’t wear headphones, can’t make eye contact. Can’t walk home. Most of those are paid in forgone freedom rather than money. The ones paid in money have a more technical name, the women’s safety tax, the extra women pay to stay safe.

Plan International UK asked a thousand girls and young women aged 14 to 21 how they get home. 62% said they take a taxi at least monthly, to avoid harassment and violence they might otherwise encounter on their walk home, or on public transport. This cost them, on average, £44 per month, £528 a year, and 16% are paying more than £900 annually.

The spending doesn’t stop at age twenty-one; it finds friends: the flat above ground level for a premium, the more expensive hotel room booked nearer the venue, the parking building rather than the free space on the poorly lit side street.

On my own modelling, a £528 annual safety tax compounding at a 5% real return until age 80 amounts to about £270,000 of forgone wealth over a woman’s lifetime.

Every solution on offer is a purchase, which is what makes them popular, because a purchase asks nothing of anyone except the woman paying for it. The woman who cannot find £528 a year doesn’t get the taxi – she walks.

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The fear the tax responds to is not manufactured – it would be convenient for everyone if it were. 89% of female students in Delhi reported having experienced harassment while travelling. Three-quarters of women surveyed in New York reported harassment or theft on public transport, against under half of men. The fear is fuelled by actions that come before the assault: the looks, the cat-calling, the man who sits down next to you on an otherwise empty train.

Then the reporting takes over and social media accelerates it: thousands of anecdotes, shared with billions of users globally, arriving on screens and in nervous systems half a world away from where they happened. So the fear is directed outward, towards the alleyway and the car park and the man who might be there. Now, set that against the figures.

The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that globally, one in three (about 840 million) women and girls aged 15 and above experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime. Intimate partner violence accounts for the large majority of that total, and 263 million women have experienced non-partner sexual violence. Non-partner violence is not stranger violence. It includes acquaintances, colleagues, relatives, family friends, meaning that the 263 million is itself mostly people the woman knew. In Europe, 64% of women murdered in 2024 were killed by intimate partners or other family members. The number has barely moved since 2000. Intimate partner violence declined by roughly 0.2% a year over two decades, which at that rate resolves itself somewhere in the twenty-fifth century.

The safety tax promises protection from assault by a stranger when it is much more likely that an assault will happen by a partner or someone the woman knows. Nobody has built a consumer product for this. There’s no market in telling a woman that the person she should be worried about has already been given a key to her house. The thing that would help is not a purchase. It’s a court date, a housing option, an income of her own and a set of institutions that believe her the first time.

I will learn nothing from this and will call a taxi again next time I need to get home late at night, because paying $20 makes me feel in control.

The Uber drops me at my front door, which is where the numbers say the danger was all along.

I put a number on my unpaid labour

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Jul 11

Unpaid domestic and care labour is estimated at somewhere between 10 and 39 percent of GDP depending on the country – invisible in national accounts, invisible in tax policy and invisible in superannuation and retirement savings. It’s the biggest unacknowledged transfer of wealth in the world, and it flows almost entirely out of women’s pockets.

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