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The paper explores the limitations of the theoretical presumptions underlying the relationship between empowerment, education and employment that have been emphasized in both the existing literature and the current rhetoric to 'empower' women in developing countries. The research uses findings from in-depth interviews and focused group discussion data to empirically examine the relationship between schooling, paid work and empowerment of women in Fiji. The paper argues that the relationship between education, work and empowerment is conditioned by gender norms surrounding women's and men's choices on key economic decisions. The findings demonstrate that cultural norms about gender roles are considered to persist, generating gender inequality despite women's and girl's education and employment. Empirical evidence makes a strong case for the need to move away from broad-based conceptualizations of women's empowerment to an analysis of the social construction of gender as both a conceptual and an empirical category of inquiry.

Women in Fiji have made steady, albeit slow, progress in terms of parliamentary representation, with women now holding 14% of seats in the lower house of parliament. Some of the progress has occurred as a result of improvements associated with increased socio-economic development, such as education, female employment and incremental changes in women's standing in Fiji society. Much of this change, however, has been due to women's movements and civil society activism becoming more astute to concerns of gender equality and lobbying for women's political participation. In a country that witnessed four political coups, women have had to create their own path into the public sphere. Despite progress, with an increasing number of women in the 2014 parliament, patriarchy is still a major force hindering women's political advancement in Fiji. This paper argues that a combination of cultural stereotyping and persistent gendered norms contribute to masculinisation of the political realm and eulogise women's role in the private sphere. But gender intersecting with ethnicity, age and class create differential levels of political agency for different groups of women in Fiji.

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The central argument in this article is that existing measures of poverty in Fiji and the Pacific are not sensitive to gender for three reasons. First, they use the household rather than the individual as the unit of analysis. This masks inequalities in the intra-household distribution of resources and burdens, resulting in inadequate understanding of gendered poverty (Bessell 2014). Second, they rely on data sources, which are often gender blind, limiting the potential for understanding the gendered nature of poverty. Third, poverty studies are often informed by experts without taking into account local dimensions of poverty and reflecting the interests and views of poor women and men. Drawing from the fieldwork in Fiji and employing a qualitative participatory approach, this article illuminates differences in the extent and nature of poverty at the individual level based on the participants’ poverty criteria. The rationale for engendering the measurement of poverty and the ways in which feminist research approaches inform research methodology and methods are discussed. Key findings on the gendered dimensions of poverty and hardship are presented along with what these may suggest as important steps toward the development of a new, gender-sensitive measure of deprivation. It is hoped that the gender perspective will contribute to widening the concept of poverty by identifying the need to measure poverty in a way that accounts for its complexity and multidimensionality.