WASHINGTON, DC, USA — Men are being encouraged not to take a back seat, but to engage in gender advocacy with women; a solution that could do wonders for democracy.

Yasmin Solitahe Odlum, gender specialist, Inter-American Commission of Women (CIM) in the Organisation of American States, said change is needed as the women's movement in the Caribbean struggles with the academics in gender producing research on one hand, and the activists who are getting older and retiring.

Commenting on an observation from Wilfred Leeuwin, a journalist representing Suriname on a US State Department Foreign Press Centre domestic violence tour in Washington, DC, last Tuesday, Odlum said that in that country the women's movement had expanded to the point where men were feeling inferior.

Odlum, who had identified Suriname as a blueprint country for gender mainstreaming, said men should not feel automatically disempowered in the presence of empowered women.

"In Suriname the women are strong," Leeuwin said, explaining that the universities were chock full of females studying, while boys don't often go beyond secondary education.

He was supported by his colleague journalist Rachael van der Kooye, who said in Suriname, "we are the ones who work outside and the men are house men".

It's a problem Odlum identified as a direct repercussion of men feeling threatened by female empowerment.

Suriname, she said, has very strong policies and programmes and the resources to address violence against women and inequality, yet the gender inequality issue with men is a spin-off.

"I think that the men, in many cases in the Caribbean, have somehow retreated from the home in such a way that they've left a preponderance of female headed households," she said, adding that men are taking a back seat instead of engaging this gender struggle and engaging in gender advocacy.

Hilary Anderson, specialist on key women's issues in the region at the CIM, said it's not an issue that is unique to the Caribbean, where men are unsure of what their role is in the new society where women are empowered.

"Women over the last 60-70 years have gone through this whole process of reflection over 'what is a woman, what can we do, what are our possibilities, what roles do we play?'... Men have not gone through a similar process of reflection and women have now taken on these new roles, but men have not," she said.

She said men need to engage in a similar process of reflection on how they will fit into this new society and how to engage this new woman, but they're still confined to a negative view of what a man really is.

"The secret lies in this, when women are empowered, it empowers our families. But when men can come now, and join with that struggle, we'll have more prosperous societies," Odlum said.

This is also important, she said, as "there is not that sense that there are these young, active feminists who are not in academia [who are left] to [continue] the struggle".