‘Two different worlds’: Papua New Guinean women working in development in Port Moresby

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.