International Men's Day

If we are going to empower women and girls around the world, we have to find new and better roles for men. Last week I led a State Department-sponsored delegation of women tech leaders to Liberia and Sierra Leone to meet with government officials, entrepreneurs, activists, telecommunication and banking executives, and university administrators to explore ways that technology, particularly mobile technology, can help improve the health, education, and livelihoods of women and girls in both countries. Women are doing amazing things in both countries, from President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf in Liberia to First Lady Sia Koroma in Sierra Leone to countless local women and women returning from the diaspora that fled during horrific civil wars in both countries. But as a successful businesswoman was telling me that "women do all the farming" in Sierra Leone, as well as most of the market trading, and as I watched the groups of unemployed young men on every street corner, I kept wondering what men were supposed to be doing. It finally dawned on me that farming was women's work because it was domestic work -- tending family crops. Men were the hunters and the warriors, essential providers of protein and protection. Yet neither of those roles exist today, beyond the option of serving in small national military forces.

When I used to teach civil procedure as a law professor, I would begin the year by telling my students that "civil procedure is the etiquette of ritualized battle." The phrase, which did not originate with me, captured the point that peaceful, developed societies resolve disputes by law rather than by force. Litigation thus becomes "ritualized battle." It is not hard to imagine many litigators as modern warriors, just as it is not hard to imagine many investment bankers as competitive hunters -- of deals rather than game. But in societies that have just recently emerged from actual battle, where men fought each other and raped and captured women and that have only rudimentary legal and finance professions, what's the professional alternative to hunting and fighting?

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