Deepali asked, "Why was the response to the Taliban's misogynist rule in the 1990s so slow to come by? Why has sex selection been allowed to take the proportions it has in India before anyone realizes that it is the symptom of a much larger problem? Why should a 16-year old German Afghan girl be yet another victim of an 'honor killing' (in Germany and not in Afghanistan) despite prior knowledge of her severe beatings at the hands of the family?"

I think the answer is depressingly obvious -- because these all seemed like "just" women's issues, and it is quite hard to get powerful forces exercised unless they think there is something beyond mere women at stake.

One can despair about this -- and at times I do -- but there are also ways to work with it. Because, of course, there is even more at stake. The Taliban was perhaps the starkest example -- societies that treat women barbarously pose a danger to the wider world, and, at the same time, the abuse of women creates dangerous societies. When Lawrence Summers was at the World Bank, he argued that there was no investment developing countries could make that paid greater dividends than the education of girls. This was not because Summers is a great feminist (though I actually think he gets a bit of a bad rap), but because decades of economic and social science research shows the profound correlation between women's rights and social health. Where women have some degree of autonomy over their bodies and their destinies, they have smaller, healthier, better-educated families; where they don't, families are more likely to be large, plagued by illness and bereft of opportunity. And so there's a really strong case to be made for promoting women's rights on public health, environmental and national security grounds.

Yet we are very, very far from anything like a worldwide consensus on women's equality, despite the kind of technocratic language that often surrounds "women's empowerment" programs. It's actually a pretty threatening proposition to a lot of people. That's why I believe people who care about women's rights need allies who have other priorities, and why I think it makes sense to advocate for them from both a moral, human rights perspective and from a strategic, realpolitik one.