Research

The understanding, gender wise. There’s a lot of stereotypes that affect people’s opinions on how a person should look or act.

Think from a strength-based perspective of the beauty that different cultures bring. There’s been an equal standing for women, valued the strength that men and women both bring.

From a woman’s perspective and when I worked at the marae, it’s been a woman-dominated worldview. Had many thoughts about this. Don’t know why men – not a lot of men, we’ll see a lot more doctors [who are men]. You don’t see [men] in social services, the actual front line staff. Rare that you’ll see men in the front line staff, in social staff. Executive table at the Hutt [work], the majority are women. Definitely a higher percentage of women than men. I wonder if it depends on who’s in the leadership [ie the CE]. Does it affect who applies for the role? You unconsciously see in the other what you see in you. Having said that, it was a male when I first started in the [work]. Even in our next level down [there a lot more women], but there’s a lot of males in terms of doctors.

Gender identity is not very well addressed, and there needs to be a certain amount of loosening up about it.

Even in cultural places it would be nice to see more female sports on screens that are devoted to sports. Even if women's stories were on the news – instead of being about politics and war. More female representation in cultural spaces.

Move away from 'she'll be right' attitudes, less sexism and macho culture.

More diversity, ensuring even gender equality, even now in IT Pakistan seems more advanced. We had 50/50 girls. Here I’m the only woman in my team, there are 20 to 25 women in 200 staff, but mostly they are in marketing and other things. Very few of them are in IT. They hire people directly from India, but will not hire here people who have more experience.

I think explicit law and policy change at a macro level. Our human rights legislation is out of date.