myAIPMMentoring to support women’s leadership in the Pacific
Elise Howard, Julien Barbara, Sonia Palmieri | Asia & The Pacific Policy Society
Understanding how mentoring programs transfer to Pacific contexts is crucial to the future of women’s leadership in the region, write Elise Howard, Julien Barbara and Sonia Palmieri.
Women are significantly underrepresented in leadership in organisational and political contexts across the globe, including in Pacific Island countries. Mentoring is a much-touted solution to this problem, particularly in public sector and corporate governance settings. It is often positioned as a core component of professional leadership training in contexts as diverse as sports, politics and academia, and a significant body of literature has been dedicated to the success or otherwise of mentorship programs in these contexts.
The translation of mentoring in a development context to support women’s leadership has received much less academic (and development practitioner) attention. However, the dearth of literature has not stemmed the enthusiasm for mentoring as a mechanism to support women’s leadership in this context — in politics, academia, government, or the private sector — often designed with untested and unrealistic expectations of what mentoring can achieve.
Our comparison of mentoring research with mentoring practices in Pacific contexts shows that four key assumptions have been made in the transposition of mentoring from developed country and corporate contexts to developing country contexts.
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Mentoring to support women’s leadership in the Pacific, Elise Howard, Julien Barbara, Sonia Palmieri, Asia & The Pacific Policy Society, 2020