The harrassment tax: unseen

What do you think it means, in economic terms, that the majority of women, currently comprising 50% of the global labourforce, experience some sort of sexual harassment on a weekly, if not daily, basis?What is this sociological phenomena costing us as a species? What does it cost particular communities relative to others? How does it affect me and my relationships; how does it affect Kosovo, my home?

These questions are tumbling around inside my head as I lace up for another run. I am an economist and business consultant in my day job, feminist photographer in my off hours, and an avid runner. 

I am also a 28 year old woman raised, and presently working in, the developing country of Kosovo. 

Owing to research and work I have  lived in many other countries (Jordan, South Africa, Eswatini, USA, UK, Israel, Palestine, Afghanistan, Switzerland, Kenya) affording me the chance to compare other types/rates of harassment.

I will call the answers to the aforementioned questions the harrassment tax. 

It's necessary and useful to conceptualise this tax for two reasons: first, for what I know it costs me personally as a woman and how that should inform my relationships. Second, because of what I perceive it is costing some countries over others in terms of economic output and efforts toward progress. To the first point, I think it needs to drive a new conversation about relational egalitarianism between friends, partners, colleagues.. To the second, I focus on Kosovo, my home, where I perceive it to be at risk of holding us back. 

Throughout this article I will oscillate between the personal and empiric, grounding the discussion in my lived experience while also utilising numbers to try and zoom out/conceptualise how it is likely affecting us more widely. I have done this with full understanding a proper empirical analysis would require a much larger sample size and hundreds of hours of interviewing. Given more time this would be better grounded in actual data: a randomized survey across Kosovo to assess experiences and resulting symptoms, deriving a mean. Ideally we could do a similar thing to compare between countries. However, there is no such data at the moment and the scope of this paper doesn’t allow for that; I am simply asking you take my experience as a rubric for the maths to demonstrate the concept. Think of it more as a thought experiment to demonstrate an idea.

Last month on the route I am lacing up to run today I was groped by a passing cyclist. It involved him coming at me twice, front, shocked me, in my dazed state he then came again, rear and left me trembling in the bushes; as he laughed and sped away, my body still trying to process the interaction–my brain sped through any courses of retaliation. Shout? Run? Chase after him? Report to someone? Who? How? Sadly, still shaking, tears pricking the corners of my eyes, I came up short: not much to do but brush myself off.

This is not the first time something like this happened; most likely it will not be the last. As I have experienced it, there is almost always not much to do. Get up, wipe away the leaves,  tears, and shame threatening to take hold of your skin– move on. The day is still there: the meetings must be had, the deadlines met. As women in the world (or anyone who is the victim of harassment, I am talking mostly about women but this is not unique to women alone) we just have to let it go, moving into the next thing, internally preparing for how it will show up symptomatically in the days to come. 

The symptoms are what I want to focus on in conceptualising the tax. I identified 5 ways in which harassment impacts my working capacity, leading to a sort of taxation. Whether it is 1) distraction from an important meeting 2) fear that keeps me from making it to the grocery store/public event 3) several nights of restless sleep 4) inability to focus on a task owing to hyper vigilant body state 5) potentially forgoing exercise/being outdoors alone. Each of these has distinct ramifications for my health and ability to contribute meaningfully to the labour force. They cost me. 

*There are of course other factors, on an ethical basis, such as pain or right to bodily autonomy/human dignity, a moral weight we could consider, but I have focused here on these 5 elements specifically for how I perceive they detract from my ability to be a contributing member of society and productive participant in the economy. They directly result in reduced productivity and therefore is an economic tax, to each woman individually, but also to her society as a whole.

The groping incident described above took place weeks ago now so I am no longer trembling at every cycle or jumping at every passing person as I was the first days. I still know the exact spot, of course, and it does occasionally disrupt my concentration for the audiobook I am listening to on my 10kms. 

What did I undergo, though? I experienced about 72 hours of more acute symptoms, namely from the 5 listed above. Since then, I have only been catcalled or honked at (which have less impactful spillover effects for me) and no physical attacks. I have enough distance from it that on today’s run,  I am reflecting on the quantifiables of what an instance like that costs. In labour force participation output, can we make a quick calculation of what the harassment tax costs us as a species, and what is it costing my country of Kosovo specifically?

In Kosovo, we have experienced large-scale gender liberalization in real terms (members of parliament, women in workforce, higher education attainment rates) since the war in ‘99, but we have not shaken off the more subtle lived-experienced elements of the patriarchy, such as the tax of harassment.

Lets do some math together:

I make decent money. As a consultant and freelancer, with masters degrees from Oxford, my hourly earning potential, or we might say, the quantification of my outputs worth to society, is quite high. In a given month, if I add up the amount of harassment I deal with and how much it results in the 5 subtle symptoms quantified above I estimate it costs me about 6.5 hours per week in output potential. In a month, assuming a 40 hour work week, that’s a total of 26 hours of lost output per month. This is nearly ⅙ of my month's inputs to the economy. If I work 48 weeks of the year a total of 312 potential working hours are lost to this country’s economy by my contribution alone. Panning outward: at present 147,000 women are in the labour force in Kosovo (only 20%, which sadly is one of the lowest in the world.) If all our working women face similar spillover effects from harassment this practice is costing the economy (312 hours per year, X 147,000 women) over 45 million hours of potential output per year.

This is no small sum.

In real terms, that's significant and a massive contribution (or detraction) from GDP. Now let’s consider it in comparative terms. No where in the globe is completely free of patriarchy or the effect of this tax, let me be clear.. However, in other locations I have lived it varies by degree. If we take Switzerland as an example one of the least harassment heavy contexts I have been in: I would estimate there I paid about 1.25 hours per week to the harassment tax. That is 5.25 hours less per week than what I experience at home: 21 hours less per month, 252 hours less per year. If we apply that across the whole woman working population of Kosovo, it would result in 37.044 million hours less per year to the harrassment tax. Now, even if my numbers are just estimates and there is variance, it still demonstrates something big, begging us to consider: just how much are countries with a stronger patriarchal hold being held back? What has it meant for progress this past decade, and what will it mean in the decades to come, as more and more women enter the labour force and GDP is increasingly the result of both sex’s contribution? 

This idea first came to me a year ago. I was for the first time in a stable and committed partnership, living through the rhythms of life alongside a man–sharing a flat, exchanging details of a day, supporting each other’s work, etc. 

At the time I was contracted by one of the world’s largest philanthropies (devising a framework for impactful giving) managing my own team, and overall relatively stressed. I was paying ⅔ of our rent and definitely the “breadwinner.” It occurred to me, through time, how often in recounting our days, mine would involve a story of being followed on a run or called a “whore” in the street or ogled in a cafe. It felt like on repeat I would end with, “but then I had to move locations because xxx wouldn’t stop staring” or “was trying to clear my head after that interview by going to the gym but wound up edged out of the weight room” or, (it truly once did happen) “had to leave the co-working table to avoid hearing the guy on the other end recount to his colleagues his assumptions about other women’s success being owed to how good they are in bed.”

I would arrive to the end of a day, we would be sitting for dinner and I would hear myself recount, on repeat, how I had been in a flow state, trying to solve a particular intellectual problem, and the incursion of touch/sight/voice directed to my body knocked me entirely out of that realm. It struck me how much this was really costing me, financially and in terms of my output.

We conceptualised together how this is likely impairing countries comparatively; now let us consider ways it might inform our sense of relational egalitarianism and gender equity in more micro terms (person to person.) As women, in these supposedly “equal” times, we are endlessly told we should not let men pay for our dinners, should not let them help with the groceries, should not expect them to take us to the airport, etc. etc. In theory this is because we are living in an equal world now, each making our own money, sharing all costs and labour–I certainly bought this idea for many years. Over time, though, in conceptualising the harrassment tax (and having men colleagues and partners who never really pay it) I came to realise, no one is redistributing what I pay everyday just by being a woman. They are not even considering it.

Should we not be talking about this in our estimations of equality and shared expenses? I am losing 6.5 hours every single week to this tax. So, not only do we globally make less, but we also have to work extra hours to arrive at the same output because of these losses. 6.5 hours per week is plenty of time to clean the flat, pick me up from the airport, and do the grocery shopping. In redistribution terms, if we really want to talk about “equality” that seems owed by having lived the week harassment free. Or, if you multiply my hourly earnings in euros by 6.5, in a week, you arrive at a sum that certainly equals being able to pick up the tab, call the cab, pay the cleaning lady. Should we then be open to conceptualising sharing and equality differently, given what this quick discussion of the harrassment tax demonstrates?

Do not misunderstand me, I make these statements not in the hope that I ever enter into a relationship with that level of “tit-for-tat” way of thinking. I absolutely do not wish to conceive of ‘tax’ within a friendship/partnership/colleague relationship. Those connections should be built on trust, reciprocity, and equal respect of human dignity. I am simply brainstorming the numbers to encourage us to think differently about “equal” in a world where the phenomena of harassment still exists. Are we really equal, if just by our identities (again in this case womanhood, but could apply for racism, ageism, classism etc.) we pay differently the costs of harassment? The MeToo movement brought it to our attention, now I am asking us to expand that conversation beyond awareness into a restructuring of our understanding of what it really costs and how to behave. To my dear Kosovo, may we dismantle this element which continues to hold us back so we win back millions of hours of unrealised labour gains. And to my male colleagues and friends reading, maybe it is okay if you pick up the tab sometimes or take a longer route home with a female friend or clean the flat for your partner– doing your personal part in redistributing the impact of the harassment tax on the all women around you (even if you “make an equal amount” in real terms in the labour market.) 

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1 https://genderdata.worldbank.org/en/data-stories/flfp-data-story
2 https://www.unwomenuk.org/campaigns/safe-spaces-now/
3 https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2018/02/21/587671849/a-new-survey-finds-eighty-percent-of-women-have-experienced-sexual-harassment
4.https://www.ourwatch.org.uk/streetharassment/understanding#:~:text=Half….
5 https://stopstreetharassment.org/resources/statistics/statistics-academic-studies/
6 https://library.fes.de/pdf-files/bueros/kosovo/21012.pdf
7 https://askapi.rks-gov.net/Custom/2c09a68c-35f9-4131-9c66-beb6255acfb0.pdf
8 Gender pay gaps represent one of today's greatest social injustice. According to the ILO Global Wage Report 2018/19, women earn on average about 20 per cent less than men, although there are wide variations across countries.Apr 15, 2024; ILO
9 https://www.ilo.org/resource/other/gender-pay-gap
10 https://newcomb.tulane.edu/sites/default/files/MeToo%202024%20Report%20_1_0.pdf
11  Key findings from the #MeToo 2024 report include

• Roughly 1 in 4 U.S. adults (26%), or more than 68 million people, experienced sexual harassment or assault in the past year alone, with significantly higher rates for women (32%) compared to men (15%). 
• Non-binary/gender non-conforming (79%) and transgender (87%) individuals reported high lifetime prevalence rates, demonstrating the heightened vulnerability of LGBTQ+ communities.
• Perpetrators are most often strangers for verbal, cyber and physically aggressive harassment, often in public spaces, while sexual assaults more frequently involve known individuals like partners, family members and acquaintances, most often in private spaces like residences or cars.
• Most victims — 87% of women and 89% of men — did not disclose their experiences to anyone, highlighting the need for improved support and accountability systems