And What It Says About the World Women Still Live In
I walked onto the TEDx stage in a karate gi. The room shifted. I could feel it. People expected a speaker in business attire. In that moment of disruption, I had their full attention – which was exactly the point.
This is not really a story about karate. It is a story about what it still means to move through the world as a woman.
There were a few reasons why I chose my gi. It supported the topic of my talk and I referenced a story from an experience in Japan, but one reason was deeply personal. To me, martial arts symbolises power and capability – both physically and mentally. I’ve been fascinated by it since I was a young girl.
My dad did karate when I was growing up so I often observed him practicing in the lounge and envisioning our yucca palm as an imaginary target. It was the 80s and I was told that it wasn’t a sport for women and children and so I never took up the sport until I moved to New Zealand and was well into my thirties.
My TEDx talk was about self-leadership and challenging our work structures and the experience of burnout not just as a personal one, but rather as a design flaw that is not serving us anymore. When I step onto the mat in the dojo for kumite, contact sparring, I am there to challenge my opponent and with my talk I challenged ‘the system’ so it felt fitting to go on stage with my gi on.
I fought that system for nearly thirty years, head on, trying to be treated equal to men and while being ingrained in a corporate hierarchy that felt rigid and the fight eventually did burn me out. When the speakers-high of being on that red dot wore off I was reflecting and I realised that part of me actually chose martial arts because I wanted a fighting chance. But it goes much deeper than equal rights at work or being able to be seen and heard with respect.
The reality is that somewhere in my early years I made a quiet, private calculation that as women we shouldn’t have to make or say out loud: I wanted to be able to defend myself. I did not want to become one of the nearly one in three women globally who will experience physical or sexual violence in their lifetime (WHO – Violence against women: https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/violence-against-women). That statistic sits inside me every time I tie my black belt.
I remembered what my dad used to drill into both my sister and me. He used to tell us to always ‘be vigilant’ and said, “When you walk anywhere, I want you to always be aware of who is behind and around you. Observe from the corner of your eyes, and if anybody ever comes into your personal space (which is when he drew a circle around himself with his arms stretched out) then I want you to kick them in the groin or in the shin.
Nobody has the right to come into that space – you’d better be safe than sorry. You have my full permission to kick them.” He was deadly serious, and those words have remained ingrained in my subconscious to this day.
It fills me with rage, because like so many women, I grew up with a quiet awareness that my body and I are vulnerable in a public space. That being female comes with decisions most men never have to make. Which street? Which carpark? Whether to keep keys in hand (I still do, with the pointy end ready to strike). Whether to risk being out after dark alone. That is the reality most women carry in their bodies.
Recently, I came across a question posed on a podcast: What would a woman do if she woke up as a man for a day? The answer was not what you might expect. Not to lift something heavy, not being able to pee standing up. It was simply this: Walk around alone after dark. Mic drop.
What I find even more bewildering is that it becomes so habitual that it can begin to feel like common sense rather than what it actually is: evidence of systemic failure, and yes, I dare say it – Patriarchy. The United Nations defines violence against women as “any act of gender-based violence that results in, or is likely to result in, physical, sexual, or mental harm or suffering to women, including threats of such acts, coercion or arbitrary deprivation of liberty, whether occurring in public or in private life” and that this violence is rooted in and perpetuated by gender inequality. The root of the problem sits way deeper than a gender pay gap.
In recent months we have all been listening to horrendous news. The Pelicot trial in France, the long shadow of the Epstein files or the strategic sexual violence as a weapon of war in Sudan (OHCHR – Sudan: UN Fact-Finding Mission documents large-scale sexual violence, October 2024) to name just a few of the most prominent ‘news-worthy’ stories. Rape used not as a side effect of conflict but as strategy. Terror. Humiliation. Displacement. Domination. The same tactic, replayed across centuries, across continents.
Would it be easier if this were a modern problem? No. Modern international law now formally recognises widespread and systematic wartime rape as a war crime and a crime against humanity – which tells you something important: the pattern was severe enough, and persistent enough, that the entire architecture of international justice had to be restructured to name it. When institutions collapse, rape resurfaces with brutal clarity. Not as an accident of disorder. As a tool of control.
What does that tell us? It tells us about what happens when structures that constrain entitlement are removed. When there are no consequences, domination can rule.
For me the Epstein files highlight domination at a different scale. Across politics, business, academia, philanthropy, spirituality – person after person is being named even those who we’d never thought would “do something like that”. The explanation seems to focus on what enabled the abuse: money, elite networks, institutional corruption, blackmail.
Of course that is real and is worth examining, but why is there an appetite for domination and abuse of women and children to begin with? Can we rationalise them as evil acts by monsters – an entitlement of a billionaire elite? I don’t believe so.
In the case of Gisèle Pelicot it hits a bit closer to home. (https://www.france24.com/en/live-news/20241219-ex-husband-of-gisele-pelicot-found-guilty-in-france-mass-rape-trial) Her husband was sentenced after drugging and raping his wife for years and facilitating assaults by dozens of other men. All 50 co-defendants were convicted of rape, attempted rape, or sexual assault.
Now, they were not rich untouchables. They were ordinary men from the same community – nurses, teachers, firefighters, fathers, grandfathers. That sends chills down my spine and I struggled to comprehend it when the news broke.
And I had tears in my eyes when Gisèle bravely chose to be named. In her own words she “chose to convey a message of strength and courage to all those who are subjected to difficult ordeals. May they never feel shame. And in time, may they even learn to savour life again and find peace.”
She shattered the notion that sexual violence only belongs to a rare class of monsters. Maybe the question should not be “how did these men get away with it?” but “what kind of culture produced men for whom violation felt like a desierable option when it was made available?”
The lazy explanation for male violence is biology. Testosterone. Aggression hardwired by evolution. Nothing to be done about it, just the way it is – managed. But if biology were the main driver, rates of sexual violence would be consistent across cultures. They are not.
A meta-analysis of studies found no overall difference in baseline testosterone between sex offenders and non-sex offenders (Wong & Gravel – Do Sex Offenders Have Higher Levels of Testosterone?). Meanwhile, research into what actually predicts male violence points elsewhere: to entitlement, to socialisation, and to what psychologists call masculine discrepancy stress – the distress experienced by men who feel they fall short of socially prescribed masculine norms.
Higher levels of that stress are associated with higher likelihood of perpetrating violence, including sexual violence (Reidy et al. – Masculine Discrepancy Stress, Teen Dating Violence, and Sexual Violence Perpetration Among Adolescent Boys (Journal of Adolescent Health, 2015)).
So the problem may not be biology, but perhaps what we teach men about power, worth, and who has the right to dominate and this is perpetuated. Violence against women is rooted in gender inequality. And studies examining prevalence data across US states found that states with higher gender inequality report higher rates of rape. If inequality is the soil, is entitlement the seed?
Do we live in a system designed for inequality, that normalises that entitlement, and historically protects men who exploit it? Yes, for me it has a name. Patriarchy. A system that rewards dominance, trains women to accommodate rather than challenge, and has spent centuries protecting the perpetrators and their protectors. It is an organised imbalance designed to keep us controlled.
That imbalance carries into all parts of our lives. My mission is to foster change within the system – in places where I can apply leverage and pressure. Women thrive when they feel safe.
By choosing karate and becoming a black belt I swore I’d never become a statistic and that I would fight back no matter what, should I face the unthinkable. And I count myself fortunate that I have not been one in three. The stark reality is that even with the skills I have acquired over fifteen years it may still not save me from potential assault or rape.
Sparring with men regularly and now being in my fifties has made it painfully clear that I have the limitations of being in a female body. Sobering, but the sad reality: I merely give myself a higher than likely chance of using surprise and unexpected force with an attacker that could give me a split second to escape or injure – as much as I’d like to think I could be Uma and pull off a mean Kill Bill move.
I used to think that my black belt meant I could defend myself. Now I think it means something else entirely. It means I have spent years studying force, boundaries, leverage, and becoming aware of my opponents weaknesses.
In martial arts, force is the beginner’s tool. Mastery is something more precise: awareness, timing, redirection, structural leverage. Knowing where the weight is, and how to shift it.
It is what we call fighter intelligence. I put it equal to emotional intelligence. I do not want to teach women how to fight better. Women should not have to train for survival in order to move freely in the world. As a speaker with a black belt mindset I want to challenge the system on bigger stages and inside organisations.
Redesign the systems from within to make it safer for women. Let’s dismantle the conditions that make fear rational in the first place – in everyday life and the workplace. It is long overdue. Leadership needs it urgently.
We are set up to operate in an outdated structure. I believe the problem was never that women were not strong enough. We are strong in our own right and in the right conditions we can flourish. The problem is that inequality has us trapped in a system that was never designed with women’s safety and growth as a priority. Physically, mentally and emotionally.
Women thrive when they feel safe.
Building that safety is not a women’s issue. It is a leadership issue. And it is long overdue.
Name: Tina Kapp-Kailea
Bio: Tina is Women Thrive Magazine’s Senior Content Editor. She’s an award-winning embodiment coach and feminine business mentor, bestselling author, book doula, and international speaker. An unapologetic wild woman and rebel, she is fiercely devoted to helping female leaders break free from limiting beliefs, overcome burnout, reclaim their voice, and escape the “not-good-enough” loop that holds them back. Connect with Tina if you’re ready to realign and want to truly step into your wild CEO era.
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