The Dial: When The Rich Get Richer, Women Get Hurt

Content note: this post discusses male violence, including reference to research on sexual violence.

There are societies where rape is almost unknown.

Not rare. Not hidden. Infrequent or absent, and where it happened it was punished hard enough that the women in them didn't build their lives around the possibility of it.

An anthropologist called Peggy Reeves Sanday found them in 1981. She compared 95 societies, drawn from a standard anthropological sample built specifically so researchers couldn't cherry-pick, spanning six world regions, and asked a question almost nobody had bothered to ask: is rape universal? It isn't. She found rape-prone societies and rape-free ones, and what separated them wasn't luck or climate. The rape-prone ones had rigid gender roles, male dominance and violence running right through them. Sound familiar? The ones where rape was rare or absent had men doing care work, women holding real power, and not much hierarchy anywhere [1].

So male violence isn't fixed. It has a dial. And the dial is hierarchy.

Nearly thirty years later, two British epidemiologists found the same dial in modern economies. Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett spent thirty years on the data, comparing 23 rich countries, and published it as The Spirit Level in 2009. The bigger the gap between rich and poor, the worse a country does on almost everything: mental illness, prison, trust, child wellbeing. The strongest link of the lot was violence. More unequal countries have more homicide, consistently, study after study, decades of them [2].

Their explanation matters more than the graphs. Inequality makes status matter more. When status matters more, humiliation costs more. And the commonest triggers for male violence are exactly that: disrespect, loss of face, being made to look small. James Gilligan, a psychiatrist, spent decades interviewing violent men in prisons and found the same thing underneath nearly all of it. Shame [2]. Widen the distance between the top and the bottom, and the men near the bottom will hurt someone rather than be seen there. Usually a woman. Usually the nearest one.

Every man who ever punched a wall over being disrespected. Every man who exploded because she earned more, because she laughed, because she left. That isn't nature. That's the dial, turned up, and it lands on her.

Today, 56,000 people own three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity. Four billion people on one side of the scales, and on the other a crowd that wouldn't fill two thirds of Wembley, winning three times over. The richest 10% own three quarters of everything on Earth. The poorest half own 2%. Billionaire wealth hit 18.3 trillion dollars, up 81% in real terms in five years [3]. Steeper than at any point in my lifetime, and two separate fields of research, forty years apart, have already told us what that steepness does to men.

Ask who it's steep for and you already know the answer. The same report counted the work women do for nothing, the caring, the cooking, the remembering, and found that per hour of actual work done, women earn 32p for every pound a man earns [3]. Men at the top. Women underneath, holding it up for free. And the violence all that steepness generates lands on women as well. We built something that manufactures humiliated men, we point its output at women, and then we call the result human nature.

Human nature is the alibi. It's the abuser's own sentence, scaled up to a civilisation: it can't be helped, it's just how men are. The research says otherwise, and it has been saying so for forty years. Sanday documented societies where the dial sits near zero. Wilkinson and Pickett went back fifteen years later and the pattern still held [2]. The World Inequality Report says it in five words: inequality is a political choice [3].

A choice. Which means somebody makes it, over and over, every budget and every tax cut for the crowd that wouldn't fill Wembley. And every one of those decisions has a number attached further down the line, in refuges, in A&E, in the three days between one dead woman and the next [4].

I can't tax a billionaire from my kitchen table. What I can do is refuse the alibi every single time it's handed to me. Boys will be boys. Men are just like that. It's always been this way. No. No. And no. I've had enough.

And the next time someone asks what any of this has to do with women, the answer is all of it. Every argument about tax, about care work, about who gets paid and who doesn't, is an argument about how much male violence we're willing to manufacture. Vote like it. Argue like it. There's a dial, we've watched it move, and the people insisting it doesn't exist are the ones with their hand on it.

## Receipts

[1] Rape-prone and rape-free societies identified across a cross-cultural sample, with rape-prone societies characterised by rigid gender roles, male dominance and interpersonal violence. Source: Peggy Reeves Sanday, "The Socio-Cultural Context of Rape: A Cross-Cultural Study," Journal of Social Issues, Vol. 37, No. 4, 1981.

[2] Violence, especially homicide, consistently higher in more unequal societies, with disrespect, loss of face and humiliation the most common triggers; James Gilligan's prison research identifying shame as the root of violent acts; the homicide link independently supported by Daly and Wilson's research across US states and Canadian provinces; patterns confirmed in the fifteen-year follow-up. Sources: Richard Wilkinson and Kate Pickett, The Spirit Level, 2009; Daly, Wilson and Vasdev, Canadian Journal of Criminology, 2001; Pickett et al., The Spirit Level at 15, The Equality Trust, 2024.

[3] The wealthiest 0.001%, around 56,000 people, owning three times more wealth than the poorest half of humanity; the top 10% owning close to three quarters of global wealth and the bottom half around 2%; global billionaire wealth reaching 18.3 trillion US dollars, an 81% real-terms increase since 2020; women earning 32% of what men earn per working hour when unpaid domestic and care labour is counted; the report's conclusion that inequality is a political choice. Sources: World Inequality Report 2026, World Inequality Lab; Oxfam, "Resisting the Rule of the Rich," January 2026.

[4] A woman is killed by a man, on average, every three days in the UK. Source: Femicide Census, 2,000 Women report, March 2025.

Sources checked at time of writing. Figures and reports current as of August 2026.