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Alan Greig uses his experience as a development practitioner to reflect on the lessons that have been learned with regards to women’s empowerment, what questions remain unaddressed, and what the frictions, hopes and challenges are for women’s empowerment. He discusses the things that need to be considered more attentively in the broader attempts to ‘empower’ economically and politically, and offers his opinion on the determining factors for women’s empowerment. …

A diverse mix of people came together in Dakar, Senegal from 13-19 October 2007, to debate issues of men, gender and power: unconventional practical academics, open-minded policymakers, reflective practitioners and activists. It was a unique gathering and offered a unique opportunity – to inform and inspire a greater engagement by men in the struggle for gender justice and broader social change. The symposium was borne out of a realization that much of the most innovative work on men and masculinities has worked at the level of the personal, such as seeking to transform men’s sexual behaviour, violence against women and relations of fatherhood. The HIV epidemic has forced an open space for greater acknowledgement of the fluidity and diversity of men’s sexual and social identities. …

What can men’s interest be in the social and sexual revolution being proposed by advocates for sexual rights? The first answer to this question is to recognise that some men’s sexual rights have long been violated. Those men who ‘betray’ their gender through their ‘feminine’ representation and/or sexual relations with other men are especially vulnerable to such violation. Violence maintains the gender and sexuality hierarchy by keeping the men ‘who are not men enough’ in their place. But what about the men who appear to be, or strive to be, ‘man enough’? What can be said of their sexual rights? Perhaps the most basic demand of advocates for sexual rights is that people be free to live their sexual lives without coercion. …

Representations of men as perpetrator and patriarch have profoundly shaped the terms of gender and development’s engagement with masculinities discourse and practice. Many of those working in the field have remained hesitant, tentative, and often hostile to the notion that men might be potential allies in the struggle for gender justice. Even feminists broadly sympathetic to the principle of working with men tend to set out from the notion that all men everywhere are inherently part of the problem. And so efforts have focused on involving men, engaging men, inviting men in – usually on our terms. …