The Map With Missing Streets

On women, cities, innovation, landlords, venture capital, and the cost of being careful

There is a version of every city that only exists in women’s heads.

On Google Maps, the road looks the same at 10 a.m. and 10 p.m. In a woman’s mental map, it doesn’t. There are streets that disappear after dark. Cafés that are safe only if you’re in a group. Shortcuts you will never take, even if they save fifteen minutes. Whole neighbourhoods marked not by pin codes but by vibes: okay if I’m in an Uber, okay if I’m with someone, never alone, never at night.

No one calls this a market. We call it “being careful.”

I’ve started to think of it as a balance sheet.

Because underneath the cultural language (be sensible, beta; don’t stay out too late; call me when you reach) there is a very simple financial fact: every woman you know is paying a safety premium. In rent, in cab fares, in time, in opportunity cost, in emotional bandwidth. And for the most part, markets either ignore this completely or misprice it so badly that it might as well be invisible.

Which is funny, because if there’s one thing venture capital loves, it’s mispriced risk.

We’ll happily write memos about inefficient markets in logistics or lending or B2B SaaS. But the most obvious mispricing in front of us, women’s fear, is still filed under “culture” and “women’s issues,” not under “total addressable market.”

I want to talk about what that mispricing actually looks like, who benefits from it, and what it would mean to finally price it correctly.

What the safety tax actually costs

If you actually sat down with a spreadsheet and logged what safety costs women, it would be staggering. Not because any single line item is huge, but because the tax is levied on everything, all the time, in ways that compound.

Start with housing.

A “good” building in a “good” neighbourhood with a watchman, decent lighting, and a functioning gate costs more. Everyone knows this. But the premium isn’t just about amenities or square footage. It’s about what brokers mean when they say, with that particular smugness, “Madam, very safe. Only families.”

That phrase, only families, is doing a lot of work. It means: fewer single men, more surveillance of comings and goings, a whole unspoken contract about who belongs and who will be noticed. Women aren’t paying for a nicer apartment. They’re paying to not have to think about what happens when the lift door opens.

I know women who have turned down cheaper, larger flats because the building “felt wrong”. Too many men in the parking lot, no other women on the floor, a watchman who looked at them a beat too long. These aren’t irrational preferences. They’re risk assessments, and they come with a price tag.

Now add mobility.

You leave a friend’s house at 11 p.m. You could take the metro and save three hundred rupees. But you don’t. You book an Uber. You toggle “share trip status” with three people. You sit in the back, behind the driver, not the passenger seat. You pretend to be on a call for the first few minutes, loudly saying things like “Yeah, I’m in the cab now, I’ll be there in twenty.” You track the route on your phone to make sure it matches.

That difference, between what a man might spend to get home and what a woman will spend, is the safety tax. It’s not a rare emergency choice; it’s an everyday process.

In city after city, this isn’t a metaphor. Studies in New York and London literally quantify a “safety tax” of roughly £40–£50 a month that women pay in extra taxis they wouldn’t otherwise take, just to avoid trains and streets that feel wrong. Multiply that across years and across millions of women and you get a transfer of billions, from women’s pockets into mobility companies, in exchange for thirty minutes of not being terrified.

And the tax is temporal and cognitive. The twenty minutes you spend researching which cab service has better driver ratings. The mental load of always, always having to have a plan. The way you can never quite relax in transit the way men can, scrolling through their phones with their headphones in, oblivious.

Now add work.

There’s an internship that sounds perfect, but it’s at a factory in an industrial area and the shifts run late. There’s a co-working space that’s cheap and has great coffee, but it’s in the middle of nowhere and you’d have to take two autos to get there. There’s a job that pays well and has smart people, but the office is in a park where transport dies after 9 p.m. and everyone just assumes you’ll figure it out.

Men evaluate these opportunities by asking: Is it worth my time? Is the work interesting? Will I learn something?

Women have to first answer a prior question: Can I get home?

This doesn’t just change your answer. It changes which questions you’re even allowed to ask. It changes which opportunities are visible at all. Safety doesn’t just affect “should I take this job?” It affects which jobs you let yourself consider in the first place.

I think about this when I see data on women “dropping out” of the workforce, as if it’s a personal choice, a matter of ambition or family pressure. For some women, yes. But for a lot of women, the funnel just narrows. The job that requires travel. The promotion that means late nights. The conference in another city. One by one, the options fall away, not because women aren’t ambitious, but because the logistical cost of being ambitious while female is higher than anyone is willing to name.

Across India, Latin America, the US, you see the same pattern: women declining roles, degrees, colleges because the route there isn’t safe, not because the work isn’t interesting.

And then there’s what I think of as the emotional ledger.

The constant scanning of rooms, routes, faces. The automatic noting of exits. The way you hold your keys. The text you send when you reach. The alertness that never fully switches off, even in places that are supposed to be safe.

None of this shows up in GDP. It shows up in cortisol. In sleep quality. In the particular exhaustion of having to be vigilant all the time, in a way that men who love you will never fully understand, no matter how much they want to.

How we’ve built for fear (so far)

If you look at the products and infrastructure we’ve built in response to all this, a pattern emerges quickly.

We’ve mostly built for containment.

We have gated communities with guards who log every visitor’s name and number in a register that nobody ever checks. We have ladies’ compartments on trains. Ladies’ hostels with 10 p.m. curfews. Ladies’ queues outside clubs. We have pepper sprays, “smart” keychains with alarm buttons, SOS apps that let your family watch you move across the city like a blinking dot on a screen.

Notice what these have in common.

They all assume that the world is hostile, and that the solution is to carve out protected zones within it. They work by separating women from public space, not by making public space safe. The underlying logic is always the same: danger is the default, so women must be fenced, tracked, escorted, contained.

From a product perspective, we’ve mostly built surveillance tools and sold them as empowerment.

I see a lot of “women’s safety” pitch decks. The vast majority are some combination of panic buttons, location sharing, and CCTV analytics. The founders are usually well-meaning. The technology is sometimes genuinely clever. But the underlying model almost never changes: women will be in danger, so we’ll sell them a way to call for help after the fact.

It’s reactive. It’s individualised. And honestly, it’s a failure of imagination.

Because the point isn’t to help a woman call for help faster when she’s already scared. The point is to build a world where she doesn’t have to be scared in the first place. That’s a much harder problem. It doesn’t fit neatly into a feature list. But it’s the actual problem.

The other thing we’ve built is a robust market in private safety for people who can afford it.

If you have money, you can stack enough layers of protection around yourself to approximate freedom. Live close to work so you don’t have to commute late. Take cabs instead of buses. Order in instead of walking to the market after dark. Pay the premium for the building with the gate and the guard and the CCTV. Hire a driver. Stay in hotels with good security when you travel.

This isn’t safety. It’s risk outsourcing. You’re not actually safer; you’ve just transferred the risk to someone else, or paid to avoid the situations where risk is highest.

If you don’t have money, you don’t get these options. Your safety depends on luck, on community, on your own vigilance. It’s the nurse who travels at 5 a.m. because her shift starts at 6. The domestic worker who walks home through unlit streets because she can’t afford an auto. The college student in the hostel with the broken lock that management keeps saying they’ll fix.

We’ve allowed safety to become a luxury good. Something you buy your way into, not something the city provides.

And because the current system works reasonably well for people with money, the people who make decisions, who fund startups, who design policy, people like me, there’s very little pressure to change it.

Why redesign the grid when the top 10% can buy inverters?

Pricing fear like an investor

At its core, VC is just a set of opinions about risk. You look at an uncertain future and decide what you think is likely, what you’re willing to bet on, and at what price.

We have all these toys for it: risk-free rates, discount factors, scenario trees, expected value. We’re trained to sniff out mispriced risk; situations where the market is wrong about how dangerous something is, or how safe.

But when it comes to women, we treat fear as a fixed input. A background condition. Just how things are.

Here’s a simple example. A man and a woman are both considering walking down a dimly lit street at 10 p.m. Same street. Same time. Same weather.

For the man, this is low-risk. Maybe slightly inconvenient. Not worth thinking about.

For the woman, this is high-risk. She’s calculating: How many people are around? Is there a shop open? Do I have network coverage? How fast can I run in these shoes?

The street hasn’t changed. What’s changed is how risk is filtered through bodies and histories. The woman isn’t being paranoid. She’s pricing in information the man doesn’t have to carry.

If you accept that women’s perception of risk is rational, that it’s based on experience and observation, not hysteria, then the current state of our cities and transport and workplaces is wildly mispriced. We’re running an economy as if half the population is operating in a low-risk environment, when they’re actually paying high-risk premiums every day.

That mispricing shows up everywhere.

It shows up in participation rates. Women who never apply for jobs that require late shifts or frequent travel. Not because they’re not qualified, but because they did the math and the math didn’t work.

It shows up in geography. Women who turn down opportunities in certain cities because they’re “not safe.” Startups that can’t hire female engineers because the office is in the wrong part of town and nobody wants to say that out loud.

It shows up in education. Parents steering daughters away from colleges in “risky” areas. Fields of study that require fieldwork or odd hours becoming more male.

It shows up in entrepreneurship. Women building “safe” businesses, home-based, online, low-capital, instead of the thing they actually wanted to build. The bias toward certain sectors isn’t just about interest or aptitude. It’s about which businesses a woman can run without putting herself in danger.

If I treated women’s safety as a fund problem, I’d say: we’re leaking upside at sourcing (women who never show up in the funnel), at diligence (founders who self-select out of certain models), and at portfolio support (growth that never happens because the founder can’t be in the room at 11 p.m.).

Add it all up and what you get is a massive drag on productivity, on innovation, on growth. Pipelines that VCs never see because the founders were too busy managing risk to build the company. Markets that never form because the people who would have created them couldn’t move freely enough to spot the opportunity.

We call this “culture.”

I’d call it a mispriced market.

If you want a sharper contrast: the world has built a $10 billion industry around seniors pressing a button when they fall in the bathroom. Women pressing a button when a man won’t leave them alone on the bus is still treated as an ‘NGO problem’. The risk is real in both cases. Only one of them has been priced properly.

Who captures the premium now

Women are already paying for safety. A lot of money is changing hands. It’s just being captured in the wrong places.

Who benefits from the safety premium right now?

Landlords, for one. The premium for a “good” neighbourhood isn’t really about parks or metro access. It’s about perceived safety, and landlords in those areas can charge for it. The rent gap between a “safe” building and an “unsafe” one is, in large part, the safety tax made visible.

Cab platforms. They make their highest margins during surge pricing, which correlates heavily with times when people, especially women, are most desperate to get home safely. The 2 a.m. surge isn’t just about supply and demand in some abstract sense. It’s about extracting maximum value from fear.

Gated communities and RWAs. Those maintenance fees are paying for guards, cameras, gates, the whole apparatus of private security that lets residents feel insulated from the city outside.

Security companies. There’s a whole industry providing manpower, guards, bouncers, drivers, often underpaid and undertrained, but still a cost that gets passed on.

None of these players has any incentive to make public space safer. Their business model depends on public space remaining dangerous enough that people will pay for private protection.

This is bad design, but worse, it’s lazy design.

We’ve let the safety premium get captured in fragmented, extractive ways, instead of channelling it into structural improvements. Better lighting. Better transit. Better policing. Better urban design. These are investments that would benefit everyone, with compounding returns. But there’s no business model for them, or at least no business model that’s legible to the people who allocate capital.

So we keep building private fortresses, and the public realm keeps decaying, and the gap between those who can afford safety and those who can’t keeps widening.

Why investors have mostly looked away

I don’t think the venture capital industry’s indifference to this is malicious, exactly. It’s more that the problem is invisible to people who’ve never had to live it.

Most investors I know have never turned down a job because the office was in a part of town that felt unsafe. They’ve never skipped a networking dinner because getting home after midnight seemed risky. They don’t price those frictions because they’ve never had to.

So when a founder pitches “women’s safety,” the default response is somewhere between pity and boredom. It sounds like an NGO. It sounds like a nice-to-have. It doesn’t sound like a market.

Investors like clean events: a transaction, a claim, a churn. Safety is often the absence of an event. There’s no neat KPI for the job she did take because the route felt okay, or the company she did build because the city wasn’t trying to kill her. We treat the absence of data as the absence of a market.

And then there’s the uncomfortable truth that a lot of current business models depend on women absorbing risk.

Restaurants assume women will plan their outings around “safe” areas and times. Employers assume women will solve their own commute problems. Platforms assume female gig workers will figure out how to handle late-night routes in iffy neighbourhoods.

If you took women’s safety constraints seriously as a hard requirement- not a preference, not a nice-to-have, but a non-negotiable- you’d have to redesign a lot of businesses from scratch.

That sounds expensive. It’s easier to just not think about it.

What a different approach would look like

I’ve been thinking about what it would mean to treat safety not as a feature or a vertical, but as a condition. Something foundational that everything else sits on top of.

The analogy I keep coming back to is electricity.

In the early days of electrification, power was unreliable. Factories had to generate their own. Rich households had private generators. Everyone else made do with candles and kerosene.

Over time, we built a grid. Standardised it. Made electricity something you could assume, not something you had to solve for yourself. And once that happened, a whole cascade of other innovations became possible. Appliances, air conditioning, computing, the internet.

We haven’t done that for safety. Women are still expected to be their own generators.

If you want to be safe, you have to build your own infrastructure. Choose the right neighbourhood, take the right cab, follow the right protocols. There’s no grid. There’s no baseline you can rely on.

What would a safety grid look like?

For mobility, it would mean public transport that’s actually good enough that taking it is the default, not a last resort. Frequent, predictable, well-lit, with real-time information and genuine accountability when things go wrong. Not a ladies’ compartment bolted onto a broken system, but a system designed from the ground up with the assumption that half its users are making risk calculations the other half never has to think about.

We know this works. In Delhi, a city-wide safety audit mapped thousands of “dark spots”, unlit, deserted stretches women avoided. Once the government actually fixed the lights, whole routes came back onto women’s mental maps. The city didn’t change culturally overnight. The grid got a little stronger.

For housing and urban design, it would mean thinking seriously about what makes streets feel safe. Jane Jacobs figured this out decades ago: eyes on the street, mixed uses, buildings that face outward, people moving at different times for different reasons. The opposite of the dead zones we keep building; residential blocks that empty out after 6 p.m., commercial areas that become ghost towns after shops close, industrial zones where no one has any reason to be except the people who work there.

For workplaces, it would mean employers actually taking responsibility for how their employees get to and from work. Not as a perk, but as a basic operating requirement. Shift structures that account for transit realities. Genuine consequences for managers who schedule women into situations they know are unsafe.

For platforms, it would mean designing with the assumption that your female users and workers are rationally afraid, and that “she can always cancel the ride” or “she can always report the incident later” is not an acceptable answer.

None of this is technically hard. Cities that feel safe to women exist. I’ve been to them. The difference isn’t budget or technology. It’s whether anyone with power has decided to care.

The upside of getting this right

Let me try to make the affirmative case here, because I think it’s actually strong.

Imagine a city where women’s safety tax is cut in half. Same people, same economy, same culture. Just better-designed systems.

What changes?

More women live alone, or with roommates they chose rather than relatives who can “keep an eye.” They live in places optimised for their jobs and their lives, not for their family’s peace of mind.

More women take night shifts, travel for work, say yes to the last-minute meeting, attend the conference in another city, go to the dinner that turns out to be where they meet their co-founder.

More women study what they want, where they want. The calculus of college admissions stops including “but is it safe for a girl.”

More women start the businesses they actually want to start, instead of the businesses they can safely run from home.

This isn’t marginal. It’s a step change in how half the population participates in economic life.

From an investor’s perspective, you’d see:

New founders. The woman who didn’t start a company because her first choice of city felt too risky now starts one. The deep-tech founder who didn’t do the PhD because it required fieldwork in a sketchy area now does the PhD.

New markets. Products and services that become viable when women can move freely. The late-night economy expands. The whole geography of consumption shifts.

New capital flows. More women earning, saving, investing. More women relocating for opportunity. More women building wealth.

All those PowerPoints about demographic dividends and rising middle classes assume people can participate. That they can get to work, get home, build careers, start businesses. If half the population is effectively under curfe (not legally, but practically) the dividend doesn’t materialise.

Safety isn’t a cost center. It’s a growth lever.

What I’m not saying

I want to be careful here about what I’m not arguing.

I’m not saying that safety is only a market problem with a market solution. Markets are good at some things and bad at others. The reason public space is unsafe is mostly a failure of governance. Bad policing, corrupt institutions, no accountability for violence. Those are problems that money alone can’t fix.

I’m also not saying that the solution is more apps or more technology. The “women’s safety” startup space is littered with well-intentioned products that don’t actually work because they’re solving the wrong problem. Panic buttons don’t help if no one responds. Location sharing doesn’t help if the danger is already inside the car.

And I’m definitely not saying that the burden should stay on individual women to “be smart” about safety. The whole point is that the current system puts all the cost and effort on the people least responsible for the problem. Women aren’t unsafe because they’re not careful enough. They’re unsafe because the world is built without them in mind.

None of this is an argument against the hacks women already use to feel safe. Keys between fingers, live locations, fake calls, code words in group chats, that’s survival, not stupidity. It’s the world around those hacks that I’m arguing with.

What I am saying is that there’s a huge amount of value currently being destroyed (or captured by the wrong people) because we treat safety as a soft issue instead of an economic one. And that reframing it might help.

Money follows attention. If investors and policymakers and employers started thinking about safety as infrastructure, as a precondition for growth rather than a nice-to-have, resources would flow differently. Incentives would shift. The conversation would change.

Freedom, not fortresses

The easy path forward is to keep building fortresses.

More gated communities. More premium services for people who can pay. More ways for the affluent to opt out of public space altogether. This is already happening. It’s profitable, in the short term.

The long-term cost is a city that’s increasingly hollowed out. Public space abandoned to those who have no choice but to use it. A permanent underclass of women, domestic workers, gig workers, nurses, students, who bear all the risk because they can’t afford the fortress.

I don’t think that’s the city anyone actually wants to live in.

The harder path is to treat freedom of movement as the product. Not safety as absence of threat, but safety as presence of possibility. Streets you can walk at any hour. Jobs you can take without a logistics plan. A city that works for everyone, not just the people who can buy their way out of its failures.

This is achievable. It’s been achieved, in other places. It requires political will, capital, and a willingness to hold institutions accountable. But it’s not utopian. It’s just a choice.

What I keep thinking about

There’s a walk I used to take in Delhi, years ago. From my PG to a bookshop about twenty minutes away. Lovely walk during the day. Tree-lined, interesting buildings, the kind of neighbourhood people write about in essays about urban life.

I never took it after dark. Not once.

It wasn’t that anything bad had happened to me there. Nothing had. But I’d learned, the way women learn, that certain freedoms aren’t really available. The mental map had a cutoff, and the cutoff was sundown.

I think about that walk sometimes. Not with resentment exactly, but with a kind of accounting. What did I not see, not do, not think, because of those boundaries? What ideas didn’t I have because I wasn’t wandering home at midnight the way writers are supposed to? What chance encounters didn’t happen?

I’ll never know. That’s the thing about the safety tax. It doesn’t take things away in a dramatic, visible way. It just quietly forecloses. The path you didn’t take. The neighbourhood you didn’t explore. The city you never got to live in, even though you lived in it for years.

Every woman I know has her version of this. The map with the missing streets. The calculation that’s become so automatic she doesn’t even notice she’s doing it.

The money part matters: the rent, the cabs, the jobs foregone. I’ve tried to make the economic case because I think it’s real and I think it might move people who aren’t moved by other arguments.

But underneath the economics is something simpler. The question of who gets to move freely through the world, and who has to ask permission. Who gets to be a little bit reckless, a little bit spontaneous, a little bit careless in the way that often leads to the best things in life. And who has to always, always be careful.

I don’t know exactly what the solution looks like. It’s not one thing. It’s policy and infrastructure and technology and culture and a hundred other pieces that have to fit together.

But I know what the goal is.

It’s a city where the map in a woman’s head looks like the one on her phone. Where streets don’t disappear after dark. Where the safety tax is zero, not because women have figured out how to avoid it, but because there’s nothing to pay.

That’s the market I want to see built. Not because it’s profitable (though I think it is!) but because the alternative is a world where half the people in it are always, on some level, afraid.

We’ve been building for that fear for a long time. Fortresses and trackers and compartments and curfews.

Maybe it’s time to stop building for fear, and start building for the kind of freedom we keep telling girls they already have.