Accountability After Harm Isn’t Enough: We Must Lead With Gender Equity
The allegations that we’ve seen emerging from Cornell University over the past weeks are deeply disturbing. Our thoughts are with Jane Doe, the former undergraduate student at the center of this case, and with every survivor who is reliving their own experience. Survivors deserve care, justice, and accountability, and this moment should prompt all of us to examine the conditions that allow this kind of harm to happen and how we can move forward to collectively design a more equitable future.
As we digest the allegations, it is understandable to ask, What happened in that fraternity house? Who is responsible? What consequences should follow? But if we stop there, we miss the harder and more consequential questions: What institutional conditions make this violence possible? What cultures allow it to happen? Who stays silent and why? And what systems of power determine whether survivors are believed, whether perpetrators are held accountable, and whether institutions protect their reputations or confront the conditions that enabled the harm? These questions are not unique to Cornell. They are the types of questions every institution must be willing to confront if we are serious about ending gender-based violence and all other forms of gender inequity.
While the facts of the case and institutional responses continue to be examined, one thing is clear: rape and all forms of gender-based violence do not happen in a vacuum. They happen within cultures, relationships, institutions, policies, and systems that shape what people believe about power, consent, gender, accountability, and whose experiences matter. The same conditions that allow violence to go unaddressed also produce the gender wealth gap, the underfunding of care work, the erosion of bodily autonomy, DEI rollbacks — and the list goes on.
To advance gender equity, we need to do even more than address the symptoms. We need to change the conditions that make inequities possible in the first place.
Institutions Exist Within Systems of Inequity
At WOMEN’S WAY, we understand gender-based violence, and all gender inequities, as connected to systems of power rooted in cis-heteropatriarchy, racial capitalism, and wealth supremacy. These systems shape whose voices are believed, whose power is protected, whose behavior is normalized, and whose harm is dismissed.
In the case of Cornell, one of the most troubling questions it raises is how these systems shape what happens in response to harm: who speaks up, who stays silent, who protects whom, and whose reputation becomes the priority. What happens when harmful behavior is witnessed and individuals choose loyalty or self-preservation over intervention and accountability? Individuals make those choices, but institutions shape how costly or safe it is to choose differently, sustaining and normalizing systems of inequity that shield those who hold power.
So how do these systems get sustained by institutions? Institutions communicate values through much more than public statements. They are communicated through policies, leadership decisions, reporting systems, disciplinary processes, incentives, resources, and informal norms. A policy can say that sexual violence is prohibited, but culture determines what happens when that policy is tested.
Changing individual behavior is necessary. Disrupting the systems that produce, enable, obscure, or shield that behavior is essential.
There’s Work To Be Done
To move forward, we must evaluate and redesign our institutions with a gender equity lens to both prevent instances of harm and develop cultures where women and all marginalized genders can thrive. Leaders within institutions must acknowledge how institutions are shaped by systems of power and work to identify and change the policies, practices, structures, and cultural norms that reproduce gender inequities and that create the conditions that continue to cause harm.
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Our institutions must start asking questions like:
— What do your policies actually protect?
— Where does power sit?
— What does your culture normalize?
— What happens when someone speaks up?
— How are leaders held accountable?
These aren’t abstract questions. They are institutional design questions, and the future of gender equity depends on them being answered and challenged.
At our recent Gender Wealth Summit, we convened a panel with leaders across advocacy, philanthropy, and the nonprofit sectors who have pushed their organizations to begin asking these questions and make changes. They shared their journeys of adopting a gender equity mindset and then embedding gender equity internally within their organizations and externally through their programs and partners. This is hard work, but it is necessary work. And it must be adopted across so many of our institutions — higher ed, healthcare, philanthropy, government, and beyond. As we heard on the panel, the work requires leaders willing to confront uncomfortable truths and their own mindsets, and challenge harmful behaviors that have been normalized, policies that work in practice not just on paper, and an honest examination of how power, gender, race, and other systems of inequity shape institutional culture.
That is the work we must all be committed to — whether we “work” in gender equity or not.
Cornell is not an outlier
We cannot wait for the next incident to happen to ask whether institutions are prepared. We must work now to build the policies, practices, leadership, infrastructure, and culture needed to collectively advance gender equity.
After 50 years, WOMEN’S WAY knows this: systems are designed — and what has been designed can be redesigned. For the next 50 years, we are committed to building institutions where gender equity is embedded, power is more equitably shared, people are safe to speak and be heard, and dignity is protected from the start — not something we fight to recover after harm occurs.
If you’re interested in learning more about how we’re working with leaders and organizations to redesign with a gender equity lens, visit womensway.org/GEDP
