Leadership Quote by Stephen Lewis

It lands like a grim diagnosis: the patient isn’t “women’s confidence,” it’s men’s behavior - and the treatment being prescribed is still administered to the wrong body. Stephen Lewis, speaking as a policy-minded moralist, strips away the comforting fiction that social progress is a steady march. The line is built on a blunt causal chain (“Men haven’t changed... so women...”), and that structure does two things at once: it assigns responsibility clearly, then exposes how institutions routinely reroute that responsibility away from men and onto women.

The subtext is an indictment of the empowerment industry when it becomes a workaround rather than a challenge. “Strengthened” sounds benevolent, like development-speak and NGO brochures; “ward off” snaps it into something closer to self-defense. The phrase quietly concedes that the baseline expectation for women remains vigilance: learn the rules, anticipate risk, manage male conduct. It’s a critique of the way public discourse praises “resilience” in women while treating male violence, harassment, and entitlement as weather - unfortunate, persistent, and oddly nobody’s job to stop.

Contextually, Lewis has long been associated with human rights and global development, especially women’s health and gender equality. That background matters: this isn’t a hot take, it’s frustration from someone who has watched well-funded programs teach girls to navigate danger while politics stalls on accountability. The line’s sting is that it frames “empowerment” as necessary and still profoundly unjust - a survival strategy sold as progress.