By Nancy Bernhard
In 1984, Dianne Herman coined the term “rape schedule” to describe how women organize their daily lives to minimize the chance of sexual assault. We avoid walking alone at night, choose strategic routes, put keys between our fingers, keep a friend on the phone.
But women don’t just feel fear when alone at night. We make decisions large and small with a “rape calculator,” measuring the likelihood of harassment and abuse as well as assault, among men we know as well as among strangers, in broad daylight. Men’s disbelief upon learning that the rape calculator says to choose meeting a bear in the woods alone over a man, tellingly links the fear of assault with the insult of having to justify it. That registers on a whole other calculator.
Let’s specify, and quantify where possible, what women lose or give up based on rape calculations, and add up some costs of being a woman.
First, some caveats. Not all women live in fear all of the time. Many are happy and satisfied with being women even if these costs are sometimes painfully high. American women have made immense gains in the 106 years since we won the vote. For 60 years the Civil Rights Act has protected us from employment discrimination, though the present administration is unraveling those protections.
For 50 years we’ve been able to get our own credit cards. Some women have made fortunes and clawed out opportunities freely given to men, but immense gaps remain. We have physical autonomy in some states but not others; more on that to come.
Though no one has yet studied the actual amount of time and effort women spend protecting ourselves from assault, let’s first consider what registers on the Rape Calculator. How would one measure constant vigilance? We check the back seat of the car for predators and bathroom stalls for creeps, assess the men in a room before choosing a seat.
We calculate whether to take public transit among many men, or a ride share, where we’re captive to one man. Should we wear headphones in public to discourage approaches, or not wear them so we can hear approaches from behind? We guard our drinks from roofies, look out for victims of trafficking, and learn hand signals that say ‘help me.’
College students learning to live away from home for the first time navigate the “Red Zone,” the first two months of fall semester when 20% of girls suffer some kind of sexual assault. We agonize over whether to speak publicly for fear of rape threats and violent retribution, or have to cope with the price of self-censorship and silence.
And then there’s the time spent deciding how to dress. It’s a needle-eye to thread, dressing to attract men, but not too much or the wrong men—or to dress without regard to attracting men, and suffer insults and marginalization. This is a no-win calculation, especially in hot weather and when going to the gym.
The time and money spent on appearance—on beauty regimes and body obsession—is another vast sinkhole of time and money as everyone knows, but this is largely to attract rather than repel people, making rape calculations immeasurably more difficult. There’s a lot to consider, and it’s exhausting.
In addition to the time and energy spent protecting ourselves from assault, we also pay steep literal costs for being a woman, call it a Patriarchy Tax. There’s the wage gap, where women earn about 75% of what men do. Then add the motherhood gap in career advancement, costing women an average $18,000 per year, the pink tax, where good marketed to women cost on average $2,000 a year more than those sold to men, higher healthcare costs, greater student debt, and the vast burden of doing 70-80% of unpaid labor, mostly caregiving.
The value of women’s unpaid labor in the home, never mind in the workplace and excluding the incalculable burden of emotional labor, is estimated at $1.5 trillion in the US for the single year of 2024. That’s what the US pays out each year in Social Security, 23% of total federal spending. It’s $11 trillion worldwide. Estimates place the financial cost of being a woman in the US at a minimum of half a million dollars over her lifetime.
So it costs a lot of time and money to be female. In addition, in the wake of the Dobbs decision ending the federal right to abortion in 2022, women face an ever-increasing risk of punishment and death for carrying the burden of gestation. At least four pregnant women have died because their doctors were prohibited from providing life-saving care in states with abortion bans.
Maternal and fetal deaths are skyrocketing in those states, while it’s dropping in states with abortion rights. Medical care for pregnant women, and for new mothers and infants, has become less accessible since Dobbs. In 2022-2024, more than 400 women were prosecuted with pregnancy-related crimes. Call these deaths and related issues Pregnancy Punishment.
Dozens of arrests have followed miscarriages. An Ohio woman who was 21 weeks pregnant sought care at a hospital, and after waiting hours without being seen, went home, where she miscarried. She was charged with abuse of a corpse after someone at the hospital called the police. While bleeding and grieving, she was handcuffed and interrogated.
A Georgia woman was found unconscious and bleeding in her apartment after suffering a miscarriage at 19 weeks. Two weeks later, she was charged with concealing the death of a person and abandonment of a dead body because she put her fetal remains in the trash.
About a million abortions happen in the US each year. The bans in 12 twelve states and early gestational cutoffs in 6 more have done nothing to slow this rate, only made it more difficult for the most vulnerable women to access medical care of all kinds, and made their medical decisions potentially criminal.
The Rape Calculator, Patriarchy Tax, and Pregnancy Punishment are just some of the most quantifiable costs of being a woman.
Beyond these literal costs lie broader historical questions of what gets lost when women’s freedoms and opportunities are restricted. Pioneering historian of patriarchy Gerda Lerner wrote of “the horrifying tragedy of wasted talents and energy extending over centuries and millennia” when women are voluntarily and involuntarily limited from the full range of human endeavor.
What could women have achieved over millennia were they not excluded from education, professions, and opportunities, freed from wasting time protecting themselves from predators, not punished for carrying the burden of reproduction?
What is the name for this loss? The greatest squandering of human potential in history, and an immense tragedy.
Nancy Bernhard’s historical fiction debut, ‘The Double Standard Sporting House’ (Jan 20, 2026, She Writes Press) explores the life of brothel women and the unfortunate ones who are forced into slavery by powerful men. The book follows Nell “Doc” Hastings, a brothel owner who also runs a small free clinic for women. When a young woman enters her clinic bleeding and bruised, Nell discovers a sex ring selling virgin girls to the most prominent men in the city–and risks her entire business to bring them to justice. Nancy Bernhard voices the need to talk about the very steep costs of patriarchy, to women individually and collectively, and to men as well, not to mention the costs of the binary itself. If we believe in democracy, we have to unravel hierarchies, and gender is the original hierarchy. Follow Nancy on Facebook, Instagram, and Bluesky Social.
