This report, prepared annually by the Office for Women, reports on the federal government’s performance against its gender diversity target.

The concept of Temporary Special Measures (TSM) was introduced in the United Nations Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women came into force in 1979. Besides Samoa the rest of the Pacific countries have been slow to adopt TSM, which may be seen as a reluctance to improve gender equality in...

Senior leaders in business, government, education and community are calling on all employers to continue to improve the representation of women in leadership, address resistance and be prepared to engage with the range of responses to gender equality initiatives.

This report identifies six leadership competencies critical to successfully developing business opportunities in line with the Global Goals. Research highlighted in the report underscores that women in business can play a critical role in deploying these six competencies within more gender-balanced leadership teams.

Recent policy and academic writing on women in the Pacific has focused on the barriers women in the region experience when seeking to participate in formal politics. This paper contributes to the small body of work that seeks to explain how some women defy these barriers, are elected to parliament and achieve high office.