Yet, on a personal level, as the father of three girls and two boys, I have long been perplexed that the opportunities, and not just the pay, awaiting my daughters and other young women are simply not as great as those available to my two sons and other young men.

Recently, my consular chief Tracy Brown and I visited Malta’s National Commission for the Promotion of Equality for Men and Women. We were impressed with the efforts of this Commission, under the direction of Dr Romina Bartolo, to certify progressive private and public entities that give more than lip-service to gender equality. Also of note was the Commission’s recent comparative study of gender-sensitive public budgeting.

Now to mark International Women’s Day, Secretary Hillary Clinton will participate in a celebration in Washington, DC with First Lady Michelle Obama to announce the International Women of Courage Awards to 10 honorees from around the globe. The recipients represent the women who work in their countries against corruption and injustice, and who fight for human rights, good governance and economic opportunity. They are agents of change. Overcoming poverty, discrimination and violence, the honorees not only champion the rights of women and girls, but also serve as an inspiration to us all.

These honours are well deserved, because they illustrate how the cause of gender equality is not just a woman’s concern or grist for a lawsuit. In an article for Forbes magazine a while back, I outlined how the still-wide salary gender gap can be challenged in court, but that does not get to the nub of the problem, which is the conflict between family and career; if you look only at childless workers in similar jobs, the pay gap all but vanishes. Women are paid less and constitute but a fraction of the workforce in areas like science and engineering, since child-rearing is still disproportionately shouldered by women.

In close to four decades in teaching, I have seen very few men step forward to challenge business and professional practices that, yes, disadvantage women, but in truth, devalue the family and its social significance. This “silent shrug”, as I once called it, is not smart. When women make progress, countries make progress. A mountain of research shows that investments in women correlate positively with alleviating poverty and increasing prosperity of families and nations.

Men as well as women should advocate flexible time or changes in the tax code to reward businesses that are family-friendly to both men and women. If we value family as “the first vital cell of civilisation”, as, for example, the Catholic tradition does, it is not enough to create intolerable hours equally applied; rather what is needed is a government and corporate mindset that work is for family and not the other way around. It’s time for public agencies and private businesses to think seriously about whether they genuinely value family and to be honest with their new hires about this. Again, that men seldom have to consider such matters doesn’t mean they shouldn’t. At the very least, the corporate burden of lobbying for workplace accommodation of a well-balanced family life should not be borne by women alone.

If we are to build a more peaceful, prosperous and just world, we must neither leave half the population behind, nor should we sacrifice family on the altar of mammon. We cannot successfully tackle the challenges that confront us in relation to the environment, security, economics, development and more if women are not engaged at every level of society. And women cannot be so engaged if men do not join in the advocacy for gender fairness and help refashion the equation of work-family balance so that neither a man nor a woman are excluded from a role in the market or honoured disproportionately for it.

Circumscribing women’s participation and leaving their potential untapped short-changes women and short-changes our world. We vitally need women’s talents, experiences and leadership. Today we celebrate the contributions of women everywhere who are reminding us that our success depends as much upon the success of our daughters as on that of our sons. There is no reason mothers and fathers, sons and daughters should not be joined in common cause aligned against those who discriminate in wage or opportunity, and, in so doing, falsely make the family the province of women alone.

Douglas W. Kmiec is US Ambassador