Pinking up the public sector in the Pacific

Transcript

NICOLE HALEY: The public sector is the largest single employer of women across the Pacific. So it is very significant but the overall rates of women's participation in the respective countries varies quite significantly as does women's share of leadership positions. So for instance, Polynesian countries Samoa and Tonga are performing very well, so is Kiribati in that respect. The Melanesian countries are performing nowhere near as strongly.

SALLY ROUND: And what percentages are we talking about?

NH: In terms of leadership sort of roles, executive positions in PNG we are sort of looking at seven percent of senior leadership positions in the Public Sector being held by women. In Samoa and Tonga we are looking at 50 percent of those positions so it is actually very significant. And then if you look at somewhere like Samoa and Tonga. The next level down the deputy chief executive officer position women actually typically outnumber men in those positions. One of the really positive things that we uncovered is that in the case of Tonga the gender profile has changed markedly in the past decade. One of the things that have contributed to that is the public service commissions actively awarding a disproportionate number of scholarships to women.

SR: And what else works?

NH: Well scholarships have been shown to work across the region as well so some earlier research that we did showed that, that was probably one of the, the single most significant contributing factors, that the vast majority of women in senior leadership positions in various public sectors have held scholarships to study abroad either in Australia or New Zealand. So typically donor funded scholarships but also these countries themselves have sort of their own sort of scholarship schemes. In PNG's case where I actually mentioned earlier that there is very low proportion of women at senior positions. In 2013 they implemented a gender equity and social inclusion policy and that has actually been shown to have modest but real appreciable gain.

SR: So your message to governments about getting more women into the public sector, would be what?

NH: It is important to persist and where we have seen gains in this region. It has come through sustained investment and sustained focus. I think the key challenge for the Pacific is to actually increase the number of women in key leadership roles. They PNG example that I gave involved a attacking it on numerous different fronts it had sort of high level male leadership and backing from the secretariat of the department of personnel management. They champion the initiative, they set up gender equity and social inclusion focal points in a number of key departments and so it was a sustained strategy that has been implemented over a sort of three year period and so tI think it does show that taking that multi-pronged approach and focusing can actually achieve results in some of the countries that are lagging behind.