It would be heartening to think that Fix the System could be the book to change that. Sadly, I suspect the feminist publishing boom has passed most male readers by. Because, as Bates says: “this is not our mess to clean up”. Which made me wonder: how many men will read Fix the System? In recent years, books such as Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race and White Fragility have been bought in huge numbers by white people. Hundreds already exist, “ignored and unused” in reports and campaign materials of feminist and civil rights organisations.
Disabled women are twice as likely to suffer domestic abuse, but just one in 10 spaces in refuges is accessible to those with physical disabilities.īut Bates is adamant that it’s not her job to find solutions. Black women are four times as likely to die in pregnancy or childbirth in the UK, yet rarely see themselves represented in campaigns to reach out to expectant mothers. Bates also reminds us that if we want to tackle oppression in one sphere, we need to be aware of its overlap with others. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardianįix the System contains plenty of suggestions for reform, including apps that track the movements of men convicted of crimes against women, and banning non-disclosure agreements that gag staff who have experienced maternity discrimination.
Too often, decisions about whether or not to proceed to trial for rape rely on whether the woman fits the societal profile of the “perfect victim”: ie, those who are “sweet and pretty and innocent and careful and didn’t stray off the path or talk to the wolf”. Despite the increased prominence of feminist campaigns, charges in rape cases are now exactly half what they were in 2015–16. As a society “we cannot stop finding excuses for male violence”, she writes. Bates is scathing about Priti Patel’s support for an app to log women’s movements, on top of managing all the other gear they are advised to carry. When a woman is killed, it is often called “an isolated incident”, and yet a woman is murdered by a man in the UK every three days. The fact that only a quarter of the Cabinet are women might just explain why working mothers lost their jobs at far higher rates than fathers during the Covid-19 pandemic, and new mothers were forced to give birth alone while pubs were allowed to open.īut the most rousing sections of the book are on male violence and the burden on women to keep themselves safe. Suggestions for reform include apps that track the movements of men convicted of crimes against womenīates pursues her thesis across five key areas: education, policing, criminal justice, media and politics.
What if, Bates asks, none of it is actually women’s fault? What if women can’t network, mentor, charm, assert and lean in their way out of sexism because this is a system that is rigged against them? A system that relies on its own invisibility for its preservation. Maternity discrimination, workplace sexual harassment, the gender pay gap “and so much more” lie somewhere in between. Rape, domestic abuse, female genital mutilation and so-called “honour” killings are at the other. Sexist jokes and stereotypes are at one end. Bates’s central message, which she has developed through her Everyday Sexism Project, the online forum that has now received 200,000 stories of sexism and misogyny from all over the world, and books including Girl Up (2016) and Men Who Hate Women (2020), is that there is a spectrum of gender inequality. Fix the System, Not the Women is an attempt to highlight “the interlocking systems of domination that define our reality” – and to pull apart the myth that women are complicit in our own oppression.