Girls in Fiji, on average, receive more education than boys; however, women remain severely disadvantaged in Fijian society. According to UNICEF’s 2025 Fiji Education Fact Sheets, girls graduate from all levels of schooling at even higher rates than boys: 99% of girls complete primary school (3% more than boys), 88% complete lower secondary school (15% higher than boys) and 62% complete upper secondary school (also 15% higher than boys). Still, despite these high levels of schooling, women are still very disadvantaged in Fijian society. Pushing back against harmful gender stereotypes in the education system is a crucial part of ensuring that women are able to enjoy the same opportunities that men do in Fiji.
Treatment of Women in Fiji
Women in Fiji face discrimination and significant societal disadvantages. Although graduation rates are higher for girls than for boys, women are underrepresented in the formal labor market: while 81% of men perform formal labor, only 41% of women do so. Furthermore, sexist traditions that prioritize men’s claims to inheritance and property further worsen women’s economic autonomy and agency. Overall, women only earn 38% as much as men, highlighting the economic disparity between genders.
Women are also gravely underrepresented in leadership. Women hold only 10.9% of the seats in Fiji’s National Parliament. This lack of representation means that women do not have as great a voice in Fiji’s government, making it difficult to enact much-needed policy change.
While discrimination at this scale obviously necessitates broad policy, structural and cultural changes, making improvements in girls’ education could help provide women with the opportunities currently denied them in Fijian society.
Changing the STEM Status Quo
In 2019, Graduate Women Fiji and Fiji National University formed a partnership to increase female representation in STEM fields by educating and encouraging girls to pursue these fields. The then-President of Graduate Women Fiji underscored that the main problem is that STEM is culturally recognized as a field for men in Fiji, leading to extreme female underrepresentation in STEM. Therefore, the goal of the partnership was to hold joint programming in order to eliminate this disparity and ensure that STEM jobs and classes become equal across genders.
As of 2023, Graduate Women Fiji has educated more than 100 girls in STEM, for free. The organization has hosted camps to educate girls in STEM, such as a one-day camp held in 2022 in conjunction with Fiji National University (FNU). At this camp, 23 girls learned about STEM through interesting experiments and from career trainers.
Vasenai Kereni, FNU’s Associate Dean for Technical and Vocational Education and Training, stated that involving girls in STEM can help eliminate the stereotypes preventing girls from pursuing STEM and inspire them to pursue STEM in the future.
Fiji’s Commitment to Educating Women
According to a statement by the Honorable Sashi Kiran, Fiji’s Minister of Women, Children and Social Protection, Fiji is doing much to support women in education. Fijian women have recently earned more Tertiary and Loans Scheme Scholarships than men, with a majority of graduates of Fiji’s tertiary institutions being women.
Furthermore, every year, Fiji’s Ministry of Women puts about $100,000 into promoting vocational training for women. The institutions that received this funding have trained hundreds of women, allowing them to better seek employment and attain economic independence. Improving women’s education in Fiji can help address the inequality that women face in Fijian society.
– Isabella Agostini, Jackson Meyer
Photo: Flickr
