By Karla Hershey, Mamadou Kane and Dirk Wagener, United Nations Resident Coordinators in the Pacific
In 2016, Dr Hilda Heine of the Republic of the Marshall Islands became the first woman elected president of a Pacific Island country. She returned to the presidency in 2024.
Her leadership demonstrated that women can lead Pacific nations.
A decade after her historic election, a harder question remains: are the Pacific’s political systems ready to make room for more women to lead?
Cook Islands has just completed its national elections, and Fiji, the Federated States of Micronesia (FSM) and Marshall Islands are preparing to go to the polls next year. Gender parity therefore deserves particular attention now, while candidate lists are being drawn and campaign budgets set. The problem is not a lack of women with leadership qualities and credentials. It is the barriers women encounter on the way to power.
The 2025 Pacific Gender Outlook cites Inter-Parliamentary Union figures that put women at under 8 percent of the seats in Pacific Island parliaments. This figure is among the lowest globally.
Four Pacific cabinets have no women ministers at all: Marshall Islands, Solomon Islands, Tuvalu and Vanuatu. In Tuvalu, the complete absence of women MPs further illustrates the scale of the representation gap.
In Palau and the Marshall Islands, lineage and land pass through women, and women hold recognised traditional authority, yet very few of them are entrusted with political leadership positions: even where custom recognises women’s authority, the political machinery keeps them on the sidelines.
The Pacific has already made commitments to close the gap. The 2050 Strategy for the Blue Pacific Continent identifies gender equality and inclusive participation as central to the region’s future. The Revitalised Pacific Leaders Gender Equality Declaration of 2023 commits leaders to accelerating women’s political participation. In 2024, the CEDAW Committee named the standard those commitments must meet: fifty-fifty parity as “a starting point and universal norm”, with 30 percent targets held incompatible with the Convention.
In 1995 women held 2.3 percent of the seats in Pacific parliaments. Thirty-one years have yielded just over five percentage points. FSM elected its first woman Senator only in 2021 – more than four decades after its Congress was founded. On this trend, the region will not reach gender balance until 2274! By the original 2050 target, women will hold fewer than one seat in eight.
Vanuatu shows what structural reform can do. A 2013 amendment to the Municipalities Act reserved one seat for a woman in every ward of the Port Vila and Luganville councils. In the 2023 municipal elections women won six of Luganville’s thirteen seats, two more than the reserved seats required, and the council became the most gender-balanced elected body in the country’s history. Vanuatu’s national parliament, meanwhile, went fourteen years without a single woman member. This contrast is telling: the measure made a difference where it applies, making a case for considering the measures at the national level for greater impact.
Samoa shows the limits. Its constitution guarantees women a minimum of 10 percent of parliamentary seats, filled, where too few women are elected, by appointing the highest-polling women candidates to additional seats. Following the 2025 General Election, only five women were elected to Parliament. It took more than a year for election petitions and subsequent by-elections to conclude before the constitutional provision was finally activated in October 2026. Although the process will increase the number of women MPs to six, thereby meeting the constitutional threshold, the prolonged delay highlighted the controversy that continues to surround mechanisms designed to promote women’s political representation.
Vanuatu and Samoa illustrate the promise and challenges of Temporary Special Measures, targeted interventions designed to accelerate women’s participation and representation where persistent barriers stand in the way. Such measures can create space for women. Political parties determine whether that space expands. They decide whom to recruit, whom to nominate, where candidates stand and what resources they receive. If parties are serious about equal representation, it will show on their candidate lists and in their campaign spending.
Safeguards matter. They help prevent a parliament with no women at all. But a minimum should never become an ambition.
Support for women must translate into votes
But the barriers do not end with political parties.
UN Women’s 2016 study of gender attitudes and voter preferences in Solomon Islands set two findings side by side. In the 2009 RAMSI People’s Survey, 81 percent of men and 86 percent of women said they would vote for a good woman candidate. The 2014 Voter Behaviour Study found that 26 percent of men and 27 percent of women had actually done so.
That gap matters.
Public support for women’s leadership means little if it disappears at the ballot box. Changing that takes sustained public education that confronts assumptions about who looks, sounds and behaves like a political leader.
And it is not that there are not qualified women candidates. In FSM, for instance, women now match or exceed men’s participation at every level of education, yet remain underrepresented in senior political and government decision-making roles.
Women should not have to endure abuse to enter public life
Winning a place in public life does not mean the barriers disappear. Women who enter politics face another barrier: technology-facilitated gender-based violence.
In 2025, the Inter-Parliamentary Union surveyed 150 women parliamentarians and parliamentary staff across 33 Asia-Pacific countries. Sixty percent had been targeted online with hate speech, disinformation, image-based abuse or the release of their personal data, the highest rate the IPU has recorded in any region it has studied. Political disagreement is part of democracy. Gendered abuse, threats and attacks on a politician’s private life are not.
Women considering public office see what is done to those already there. Abuse becomes another cost attached to political participation.
Pacific countries therefore need laws and enforcement mechanisms capable of addressing technology-facilitated gender-based violence while protecting legitimate political debate and freedom of expression. Parliaments need codes of conduct and complaints procedures that cover it.
Stop holding women to a different standard
Even beyond online abuse, women leaders face another, quieter double standard.
Women leaders are expected to be competent and, beyond that, embody a higher personal standard. Their behaviour, families and personal lives are weighed alongside their policies and performance in ways their male counterparts rarely face.
Women cannot be expected to serve as the moral corrective to male leadership.
Good governance demands accountability from every politician, judged by the same standards, regardless of gender.
Open the door
The Pacific has produced women presidents, prime ministers, ministers, parliamentarians and community leaders. Their ability to lead is not in question.
What remains in question is whether the systems around them will change.
Governments should review the electoral laws and party rules that hold women back and legislate temporary special measures where the evidence supports them. Political parties should recruit and resource women candidates on the same terms as men.
Donors should ask whether their funding reinforces the inequalities it is meant to correct. Platforms should face enforceable obligations on gendered abuse. And voters must confront the gap between saying they support women leaders and voting for them.
A decade after Dr Hilda Heie first became president, the Pacific already knows what women’s leadership looks like.
Now it must make room for it.
