I have been talking about "institutional betrayal" and women and I wanted to acknowledge Dr. Jennifer Freyd who is credited with coining the p
I have been talking about “institutional betrayal” and women and I wanted to acknowledge Dr. Jennifer Freyd who is credited with coining the phrase. “Institutional betrayal” describes how trusted institutions (like universities, corporations, or healthcare systems) harm those who depend on them—is increasingly being used by women and advocacy groups to describe systemic failures across public life.
When groups speak of women being “erased” or betrayed by institutions, it typically highlights a few major, distinct battlegrounds where women are actively organizing, litigating, and speaking out.
1. Single-Sex Spaces & Sports
A prominent area where women argue they are facing institutional erasure is the modification of sex-segregated spaces and categories (such as sports, domestic violence shelters, prisons, and locker rooms) to include individuals based on gender identity rather than biological sex. Many female athletes and advocacy groups argue that institutions—like athletic governing bodies or universities—are compromising women’s safety, fairness, and privacy.
How women are fighting back:
Litigation: Female athletes have filed high-profile lawsuits against collegiate athletic associations and school districts, arguing that Title IX protections, originally established to ensure equal opportunities for biological women, are being undermined.
Grassroots Advocacy: Organizations like Independent Women’s Forum (IWF) and Women’s Declaration International (WDI) actively lobby lawmakers to pass legislation protecting sex-segregated spaces. Dozens of U.S. states and several international sports federations have since revised their rules to restrict category eligibility based on biological sex.
2. Healthcare and Medical Research
For decades, medical institutions primarily conducted clinical trials on male subjects, assuming the findings would apply equally to women. This has led to severe disparities in how women are diagnosed and treated, particularly regarding cardiovascular health, pain management, and autoimmune conditions—a phenomenon often called the “medical gender gap.”
How women are fighting back:
Institutional Reform: Women in medicine and public policy successfully pushed for mandates requiring federal agencies, like the National Institutes of Health (NIH), to include sex as a biological variable in scientific research.
The “Gaslighting” Movement: Women are leveraging digital communities to share data, call out medical gaslighting (where physical symptoms are dismissed by doctors as purely emotional or psychological), and demand specialized care for conditions like endometriosis, maternal health complications, and autoimmune disorders.
3. Workplace Equity and Corporate Accountability
Institutional betrayal in corporate settings often manifests as a failure to protect women from sexual harassment, gender pay disparities, or systemic barriers to advancement, followed by institutional “DARVO” (Deny, Attack, and Reverse Victim and Offender) tactics when issues are reported.
How women are fighting back:
Legal & Legislative Action: Following the momentum of the #MeToo movement, women have successfully pushed for legislation banning forced arbitration clauses in employment contracts for sexual harassment claims. This prevents companies from burying misconduct in private, non-disclosed proceedings.
Transparency Initiatives: Women-led advocacy groups are forcing pay transparency by pushing for state laws that require salary ranges to be posted on job descriptions, directly combating the institutional secrecy that enables wage gaps.
The Antidote: Institutional Courage
The primary framework women and advocates use to counter these issues is demanding institutional courage—a commitment from organizations to proactively audit their own policies, protect whistleblowers, maintain transparent data, and genuinely listen to disclosures rather than acting out of self-preservation.
When institutions prioritize their own reputation or standard operating procedures over the people they are supposed to protect, it takes a massive amount of collective energy to shift the needle. But as the data and history show, when people name the pattern for what it is, that’s usually where the friction starts turning into real change.
Dr. Freyd and her research team at the Center for Institutional Courage have been actively tracking how institutional betrayal manifests across modern society.
The scope of her work has expanded far beyond its original focus on university campuses. Her recent research and commentary highlight several critical areas where institutional betrayal and institutional DARVO are actively occurring today:
1. Healthcare Systems and “Obstetric Gaslighting”
One of the most rapidly growing areas of study within her framework is medical institutional betrayal. Freyd and her colleagues have specifically spotlighted obstetric gaslighting—where pregnant women, particularly women of color, have their physical symptoms, pain, or medical concerns systematically dismissed by healthcare providers.
The Betrayal: Patients are entirely dependent on healthcare institutions for survival during childbirth, yet the system often protects its schedules, protocols, or liability over the patient’s explicit medical distress, leading to severe physical and psychological trauma.
2. “Institutional DARVO” and Bystander Manipulation
In recent publications, Freyd has focused heavily on the mechanics of Institutional DARVO (Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and Offender). Her data reveals a terrifyingly efficient structural pattern: when a person blows the whistle on institutional harm, the organization adopts the victim role (“This accusation is destroying our reputation,” or “You are harming this institution”).
The New Discovery: Her team’s research shows that when everyday bystanders witness an institution using DARVO, they are instantly swayed by it and begin to doubt the actual victim. However, her current work also offers an antidote: inoculation. When people are educated on what DARVO looks like before it happens, the institution’s gaslighting completely loses its power over them.
3. The “Decoupling” of Diversity & Inclusion
Working alongside scholars like Dr. Jennifer M. Gómez, Freyd’s current frameworks look closely at how institutions use decoupling—the massive, exhausting gap between an organization’s stated values (like equity, safety, or inclusion) and their actual practices.
The Betrayal: An institution might create a glossy diversity committee or a wellness initiative, but use it as a shield to hide ongoing wage gaps, discrimination, or harassment. This forces marginalized individuals—especially women and minorities—to bear a heavy “emotional tax,” spending their own time and energy trying to fix a broken system while the institution takes the public credit for “fixing” it.
4. Frontline Activism and Burnout
Her team’s recent research also looks at how institutional betrayal drives severe burnout among justice-oriented workers, advocates, and whistleblowers. When an institution forces its members to operate in a state of “betrayal blindness” just to keep their jobs, it causes long-term mental health symptoms, including PTSD. Her current work frames burnout prevention not as an individual self-care issue, but as a mandatory act of institutional courage.
“The state of the world is highly vulnerable to institutional betrayal and desperately needs institutional courage.”
— Dr. Jennifer Freyd
By building tools like the Institutional Courage Questionnaire, her work today focuses on handing changemakers a literal measuring tape to hold these systems accountable. It moves the conversation from a vague sense of organizational unfairness to hard, measurable data that can no longer be ignored.