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This article explores the frustrations of men – both 'local' and 'international' – who work in the development sector in Papua New Guinea. It explores the views of men not because they are the only ones to express such dissatisfaction, but because their perspectives have not been documented, other than in informal conversations as occur over drinks or messaging platforms. These multiple narratives show how a combination of pay variations, different cultural vantage points, and bureaucratic dynamics leaves both constituencies feeling inconsequential, diminished, and disempowered. The research extends previous work with women. The article reflects a contribution to three bodies of literature which examine, respectively, the professional middle class in Melanesia; linkages between colonialism and racialised hierarchies reproduced in and through development; and the hierarchies of aid and professionalised international development, structures that have been likened to an 'aid chain'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the lives of Port Moresby women who work in the development sector of Papua New Guinea. In particular, it demonstrates how development discourse structures the very fabric of working relationships within this sector in Port Moresby. Underpinned by neocolonial geographies in which those in the global north rescue those in the global south, these discourses produce workplaces in which Papua New Guinean women are seen as lacking the moral and technical capacities to run development projects in their own country. The article argues that the privileges held by expatriates and denied to local women, in conjunction with the workplace discrimination to which they are subjected, ironically undermine the development sector's supposed commitment to promoting gender equality in Papua New Guinea. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The practice of a 'gender-smart safety' is an important part of recognizing and responding to specific risks faced by women in workplaces. This is a relatively new concept within the discourse of workplace safety, and one that is challenging traditional views about what safety is, how it should be managed and who should be included in this management. This article explores the findings of a research project that looks at the safety of women who have experience of working in remote locations in Papua New Guinea (PNG). Drawing on both qualitative and quantitative data, it highlights some of the gaps that exist in employers' responses to the risks faced by female employees. It identifies what businesses are doing to support women's safety and how the careers of women have been affected by workplace safety risks (perceived and real). It discusses how a desire to protect women from risks and the call for 'real men' to support women are both approaches that fail to challenge gender norms, especially the lower social status of women. This research has helped inform new programming for the Business Coalition for Women in PNG. It has resulted in the development of a 'Gender Smart Safety' training programme that is now being offered to businesses to promote greater attention to the safety needs of their female employees. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the migratory experiences of Gogodala women from the Western Province of Papua New Guinea (PNG) in their movements between the village and urban PNG and Australia. Born and raised in Gogodala villages in Western Province, these women were integral to my own experiences as a female fieldworker in rural PNG. Immersed in ato ela gi—‘women's work’ or ‘way of life’—as girls and young women, and embodied through the effort of making sago, fishing, bearing and caring for children, through marriage and opportunity they have travelled and lived far away from the places that resonate with their early experiences of womanhood, as well as their names, and kin and clan relationships. Many of the women have lived in urban centres in PNG, raising children away from the sensory experience and stringent reality of the village, constrained by the necessity to remain ‘Gogodala’ in the face of life elsewhere, while a few others have married and live outside PNG with little access to Gogodala contacts and family. Transformed from women ‘living on sago’, the local idiom for an emplaced village life, each has experienced the sensory and physical displacement of migration. Yet each has retained strong ‘senses’ of being a woman in terms, particularly, of women's work and the gift and consumption of sago, in ways reminiscent of the sweat, smells and sounds of Gogodala places and people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]