Kathmandu: In the recent years, conferences and conventions have been emphasizing a lot about women’s empowerment and mainstreaming. Kathmandu based NGO’s and INGO’s usually cover specific women’s programs but they notably lack a broad gender perspective. The fact is that still the women in rural areas are the greatest losers with increasing work burden, reduced access to resources, discrimination, and lack of education and identity crisis.

Defining Empowerment in concrete terms becomes difficult but it is a process of gaining control over the self, over ideology and the available resources, which defines power, says UNFPA report on “Gender Equality and Empowerment of Women, 1997”.

Kamala Bhasin, an Indian expert on issues dealing with “Women Empowerment” said that, in the recent years more emphasis has been given to women and women related issues but said we have forgotten to provide due attention to issues related to “Men and Masculinity”, which is of course the other side of the same coin.

She was expressing her views at a program organized by Society for International Development, Nepal Chapter here in Kathmandu, Monday afternoon.

“Power and Masculinity” has been equated with “men” and, adds Bhasin, time had come to explore the whole concept of masculinity.

In the process of women’s empowerment role for men has to be defined, as power is associated with men and masculinity, said the Indian expert.

Meanwhile Professor Bishwa Keshar Maskey president of the SID, Nepal Chapter, said ‘denying the gender equity is not only a matter of gender discrimination but it is a bad development policy’. Maskey further said in South Asia despite its ancient civilization roots and tradition of learning, orthodox tradition, social taboos imposed on women, plus the geographic and economic inaccessibility to schools and traditional preference for male child, etc have all put together inhibited social and equalities and consequently hit the lives of the entire community. This has not only hit the girl child but has affected the whole society itself, he added.

What impact, intellectuals ask, seminars such as this one would be on the numerous women folks in Nepal still being manhandled, misbehaved and often killed on the pretext of practicing witchcraft in the 21st century?