Fix the System, Not the Women: The Invisible Tax of Survival

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We are maintaining a system designed for abuse. Women are exhausted from the conscious effort required to stay safe. It is time for men to apply that same level of conscious effort to ensure it.

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**Review: Fix the System, Not the Women by Laura Bates**

Laura Bates’ book, Fix the System, Not the Women, forces us to confront the elephant in the room: male violence. Society is obsessed with telling women how to modify their behaviour to survive, while stubbornly refusing to address the system that makes survival necessary.

The result is a paradox where women are tasked with solving a problem they didn’t create.

The Invisible Tax: “Safety Work”

The concept of “Cognitive Load” is usually applied to workplace productivity, but Bates forces us to apply it to survival. For women, it is the invisible mental tax of constantly scanning our environment: Is that footstep too close? Is this carriage too empty? Do I have a signal?

Fiona Vera-Gray calls this “Safety Work” — the endless, subconscious risk assessments women perform from the moment they leave the house. This constant background processing drains energy that could be used for living, working, and thriving. Women aren’t just exhausted by the fear; they are exhausted by the calculations.

This creates a massive “Safety Gap.” While we often discuss the physical differences between men and women, we rarely discuss the mental disparity. Privilege, in this context, is the absence of cognitive load. It is the ability to walk down a street, sit in a meeting, or exist in a public space without constantly calculating the “what ifs” of your own safety.

The Foundation: Normalized Disrespect

Violence doesn’t happen in a vacuum; it starts with normalized disrespect. As Dr Jackson Katz argues, attitudes form the base of the violence pyramid. We teach girls their bodies are the problem while teaching boys they are not responsible for their actions.

This lesson starts early. A BBC story from earlier this year perfectly illustrates the point: a girls’ football team won a tiny plastic cup while the boys took home a full-size trophy.

We aren’t just giving them a smaller prize; we are giving them an early lesson in their own “value” relative to men. The cognitive load starts here: these girls now have to process the injustice that their effort is worth less than a boy’s. And sure, they reportedly received a proper trophy later — behind closed doors. But that speaks volumes. The disrespect was public; the correction was hidden.

The Myth of “Isolated Incidents”

When violence occurs, we are told these are “isolated incidents” or the work of “a few bad apples.” The media portrays the murders of women like Bibaa Henry, Nicole Smallman, or Sabina Nessa as tragic anomalies.

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But the data reveals the lie: one woman is killed by a man every three days in the UK. You cannot have a ‘pattern’ of isolated incidents.

This denial is particularly dangerous because it ignores who the perpetrators are. They are often the people we are told to trust, and recent headlines make this undeniably clear. Consider Nathaniel Spencer, a Birmingham doctor charged with 45 sexual offences against 38 patients — including children under 13 — at the very hospitals where they sought care. Or look at Rylan Ray, a Peterborough city councillor, charged with 26 sexual offences, including rape and possessing indecent images of children. Similarly, Joe Baker, a former Redditch council leader, faces charges for sexual offences alleged to have occurred while he was a serving councillor.

When the people sworn to heal, represent, and lead us are the perpetrators, the “stranger danger” narrative collapses. The only safe number of predators in these positions is zero.

Systemic Gaslighting

This denial reaches its peak with the police. After a serving officer murdered Sarah Everard, the Met famously advised women to “wave down a bus.”

It is the ultimate absurdity. It asks women to navigate a threat the police failed to manage. The problem was not a woman failing to check a warrant card, but a force harbouring a murderer.

This creates a terrifying paradox. A woman reporting abuse plays a game of chance. Is the officer a protector, a predator, or someone sharing graphic photos of victims in WhatsApp groups for “jokes”?

This is systemic gaslighting. It mirrors the experience of a Bradford abuse victim who felt ‘insulted’ by the police compensation response. While authorities publicly apologized for failings, privately they denied liability. When the police advise us to “wave down a bus,” or deny liability in private while apologizing in public, they aren’t just failing to protect us; they are actively increasing that cognitive load by adding yet another layer of responsibility to the victim.

The Boardroom Connection

It is impossible to separate this from our professional lives. You cannot bring your “full self” to the boardroom when a percentage of your cognitive load is permanently allocated to survival strategies for the commute home.

We often discuss “burnout” in corporate terms, but we ignore the burnout caused by hyper-vigilance. Until we fix the system, women are effectively working a second, unpaid job just to stay safe.

Shifting the Load

“Men are conditioned with the casual authority to disengage.”

That specific line from Bates highlights the disparity perfectly. “Men are products of the system” is an explanation, not an excuse. While women are forced into exhausting hyper-vigilance to survive, men are conditioned with the casual authority to disengage.

We must shift this load.

To the men reading this: shifting the load doesn’t just mean “not being violent.” It means actively interrupting the behaviour of other men so women can finally turn off their internal threat-detection systems. If you aren’t exhausted by the effort of ensuring women’s safety, you aren’t doing enough of the heavy lifting.

Whether on the street or in the boardroom, we must turn off the autopilot and stop asking women to fix a system they did not break.