Essay. Latitude59, Tallinn, 2026.
A woman told me, on the sidelines of Latitude59 in Tallinn, that the city felt safer than the ones she knew. She could walk home from a bar at two in the morning without arranging for a friend to call and check she had got back safely. I know that precaution from women in Germany too. That it apparently isn't needed in Tallinn is what made me listen more closely. I started asking other women whether they felt the same.
What began as an offhand remark turned, over my days in the city, into an observation, and the observation into a question I can't answer cleanly: what does "safe" mean, and who gets to take the word at face value?
This essay records what I heard, asked, and looked up afterwards. It doesn't end with a solution. It ends at the points where I get stuck myself.
A Little Too Unanimous
Over my days in Tallinn I spoke with about fifteen people on the subject, ten of them women. The agreement was broad and strikingly uniform. Two Estonian founders confirmed the impression for Tallinn without qualification. When I asked whether harassment was simply rarer here than elsewhere, they corrected me: not rarer. In their experience it didn't happen here.
Another woman compared Tallinn with Sydney, which she had found unsafe, and said Tallinn had changed for the better; fifteen years ago it had been different.
Asked what accounted for this, most offered an uncertain shrug. A few added explanations. They spoke of a reserve that keeps people in public more to themselves, less likely to approach one another than in other European countries, a trait I have described for the Nordic region elsewhere [1]. Others suspected a generational effect, or pointed to older codes of courtesy: boys are taught at school to hold doors and let girls go first.
These are everyday interpretations, not established causes, and I pass them on as what they were: attempts to explain something that surprised the speakers themselves.
So much agreement makes an account both credible and suspect.
- Credible, because people in separate conversations said the same thing.
- Suspect, because a group that resembles itself easily sees the same thing, and overlooks the same thing.
I set that second thought aside at first. It came back, and with it a sentence from the first conversation that I hadn't written down.
The Pitch Room
The second layer entered the conversation in passing. At one of my meetings a woman said she felt safe on the street, but that she had been warned it could be different in the room where power and money are decided. There was an article about it, she said.
The article is by the founder Liis Narusk and appeared at the end of April 2026 [2]. In it she describes how women in the funding world meet intrusive behaviour that male founders often never see. The perpetrators in the cases she describes: male investors, who hold the money and with it much of the power. Among other sources she points to a survey by Y Combinator and Callisto, in which about one in five women founders surveyed reported inappropriate behaviour from investors, in fifteen cases amounting to sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo demands [3].
Do You Know What Venture Capital Is?
In my own conversations this second layer came through at different volumes. One founder said she had met with noticeably less regard in the founding world than male founders did; whether from her own experience or from others' accounts, she wouldn't say. At one point she became specific. At a founding event she had been asked, in all seriousness, whether she knew what venture capital was. A male founder, she was sure, would not be asked that. Her own assessment stayed measured: Estonia was at a certain point in its development, she said, and that mostly needed time.
An Estonian man I spoke with read the same kind of question differently. It could be an opening question, he said, one you put to anyone, regardless of gender. Which reading came closer to the intention, I can't decide. But the perception of being taken less seriously as a woman founder than men with comparable professional experience and education is one I know from Germany too.
And a study backs up that perception. A 2025 survey put the question to 361 international venture capital investors using the crosswise model, a technique that guarantees full anonymity and dampens the urge to answer in socially desirable ways [4]. Under that protection, 26.9 percent considered women's participation in founding teams overrated, 15.3 percent considered women poor entrepreneurs, and 11.9 percent would not invest in women-led ventures.
The study can say nothing about the specific case, but it shows that the environment in which such questions are asked is, on average, not neutral.
Flirtation or Overreach
The two Estonian founders who had described the street so unambiguously dealt with this second layer with confidence. They knew Narusk's article and had discussed it; they had not had negative experiences of their own. They would break off a funding process if an investor behaved unprofessionally or intrusively. They took meetings in pairs, not as a precaution, they said, but because it was more fun.
Several women had drawn a distinction between settings: the same remark could be a flirtation in a private context and an overreach in a professional one, such as a founders' fair. One of the two Estonian founders did not draw that line. A flirtation was fine by her, whatever the setting. What mattered to her was something else: that she could say a clear no, and that the other person accepted it and respected it. She described it as a game of small steps. One signals interest, the other responds, and then it gets interesting, or it ends.
That is her personal line, not a general rule for what is acceptable in a professional setting. The clear no she speaks of is not equally available to every woman, and it does not remove the imbalance of power: someone who depends on the other side's capital risks more than a rejection. And whether an investor means a remark as a harmless flirtation does not decide how it lands with the woman. What her answer mostly shows is that even women who know the same environment judge its situations differently.
What emerges here is not Tallinn as a safe or unsafe place, but several layers of the same city. The street is one layer. The setting where money is decided is a second. And for many women the professional setting is yet another layer than the private one, where flirtation happens. The same remark can be a game on one layer and an overreach on another.
What I Don't Have to Ask
I move through Tallinn as a white, well-educated man, privileged in several respects. When I visit an unfamiliar city, the only safety question I realistically ask myself is whether I might end up in a physical altercation somewhere, or get robbed. That the list ends there, that sexual harassment, catcalling, and the constant assessment of public space don't even appear on it, is itself a privilege. I take the sentence "the streets here are safe" at face value, because "safe" means something narrower for me than it does for the women I asked.
Research has a term for this. Safety work describes the everyday, often unconscious security work that women do: changing the route home, weighing where to sit on public transport, holding keys between the fingers, putting on headphones so as not to look approachable [5]. In a survey reported in 2022, 37 percent of women said they avoid quiet places like parks after dark, against 24 percent of men. The sentence about the friend and the call, the one that had caught my attention, is exactly this work, only spoken aloud. In my own city visits it doesn't come up.
And then there is the sentence I didn't write down. The same woman who spoke about being safe at two in the morning had added that it might be different if she had darker skin. I didn't note it at the time. It came back only days later, as I was putting the conversations in order. The blind spot was not in what I was told. It was in what I considered worth recording. The most important qualification of my whole observation was there in the first conversation, and I had missed it.
Who I Didn't Ask
The ten women whose accounts were so uniform were participants in and guests of Latitude59. That explains the makeup of the group: read as European, well-educated, professionally mobile, not part of the city's tourist party world. I belong, except for gender, to the same group, and that is part of the problem. Their safety is real, and at the same time it says little about two groups who were not in my circle.
The Nightlife Next Door
The first group moves through the nightlife. In 2024 the City of Tallinn, together with the Estonian Social Insurance Board, launched the campaign "Märka. Sekku. Aita." (roughly: notice, intervene, help). The initiative includes a guide and training for the staff of nightlife venues, modelled on London's Women's Night Safety Charter [6].
A survey by the board found that 73 percent of women and 32 percent of men had experienced some form of sexual harassment in Estonia's nightlife. Where a city has its staff trained and collects figures like these, there is a problem the measure is responding to. My conversations did not reach this part of experience.
The second group is the one the overheard sentence touched on. A special report by Estonia's Commissioner for Gender Equality from 2024 records the following: in a survey that makes no claim to be representative of the population, 55 percent of respondents said they had experienced offensive comments, and 71 percent inappropriate stares or gestures because of their skin colour; harassment in public space was named most often [7].
The report calls racism in Estonia a hidden problem and notes that there is little data on it so far, because none is collected. A report by the International Women's Network in Estonia from the same year gathers accounts from affected women, including physical violence in public space [8]. The woman from the first conversation had a point, and I was the one who nearly missed it.
What "Safe" Means
I have no solution, and I distrust the urge to formulate one here. What women who are read as foreign experience in Tallinn I did not ask about systematically, because none of them were in my small circle, and the data it would take barely exists. Whether the venture capital question was a sign of something or just small talk, I can't resolve from where I stand. Both stay open.
What remains is a city of several layers. It is not safe or unsafe like a switch that is on or off. It is safe for certain people on certain layers, and whoever arrives on the quiet layer easily takes it for the whole city. I have seen that in myself, in the reflex to let the first, reassuring answer be enough, and in the sentence I missed. What "a safe city" means depends on whom you ask, on which layer the question is asked, and on whether the one asking can hear the answer that is not his own.
Sources
[1] Björn Burghard, "Für die Distanz gebaut" (in German), waycleft.com, section on Nordic reserve. https://waycleft.com/de/fuer-die-distanz-gebaut/#nordic
[2] Liis Narusk, "We need to talk about harassment", Fomo.Observer, 29 April 2026. https://fomo.observer/liis-narusk-we-need-to-talk-about-harassment/
[3] Y Combinator and Callisto, survey of women founders on sexual coercion and misconduct by investors: 125 founders contacted, 88 responses, 19 reporting inappropriate incidents, 15 involving sexual coercion or quid-pro-quo. Published 2018; Narusk's piece misdates it to 2025 via a secondary source. https://www.ycombinator.com/blog/survey-of-yc-female-founders-on-sexual-harassment-and-coercion-by-angel-and-vc-investors/
[4] Laura H. Koch, Elisabeth S. C. Berger, Andreas Kuckertz, "Gender bias and discrimination towards women entrepreneurs by venture capitalists - a randomized response survey", Venture Capital, 2025. Method: the crosswise model, a sensitive-question technique. The respondent answers the sensitive statement together with an innocuous one whose probability of being true is known, and reports only whether none, both, or exactly one of the statements applies. No single answer can be traced to a person, while the share within the whole group can be estimated statistically. This guarantees anonymity and lowers the tendency toward socially desirable answers. Sample: 361 international investors. https://doi.org/10.1080/13691066.2025.2493049
[5] On the term safety work: Liz Kelly (2012) and Vera-Gray and Kelly (2020). The 37 percent / 24 percent figure comes from a survey reported in 2022 (via The Conversation, 2025). https://theconversation.com/women-are-three-times-as-likely-as-men-to-feel-unsafe-in-parks-heres-how-we-can-design-them-better-248465
[6] The "Märka. Sekku. Aita." campaign by the City of Tallinn and the Estonian Social Insurance Board (Sotsiaalkindlustusamet), 2024, with the guide "Sexual Harassment-Free Nightlife", modelled on London's Women's Night Safety Charter and Bristol Nights; survey figures (73 percent of women, 32 percent of men) ibid. https://news.err.ee/1609267404/tallinn-releases-new-guide-to-create-sexual-harrassment-free-nightlife
[7] Estonia's Commissioner for Gender Equality and Equal Treatment (Võrdõigusvolinik), special report "Racial Discrimination in Estonia 2024", baseline study by Civitta Estonia (55 percent / 71 percent); 104 online responses and 16 interviews. https://www.volinik.ee/en/information-materials/report-racial-discrimination-estonia.html
[8] International Women's Network in Estonia (IWNE), report on racism and xenophobia, 2024; a publicly distributed, anonymous online survey. https://iwne.ee/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/IWNE__Report_on_Racism_and_Xenophobia_2024.pdf