As the 2026 academic year begins at the University of the West Indies (The UWI), a striking demographic reality frames a critical conversation about gender equity across the Caribbean: 70% of the university’s enrolled students are women, even though women make up only 50% of the region’s general population. Caribbean women have stormed through the doors of higher education opened by institutions like The UWI, and today they walk confidently into leadership roles across the regional corporate sector. But a deeper analysis of systemic power structures reveals a persistent gap that standard gender equity metrics often miss.
The most widely cited benchmark study on female corporate leadership in the Caribbean remains the International Labour Organization’s (ILO) 2017 report *Women in Business and Management: Gaining Momentum in the Caribbean*. The data paints a relatively positive picture compared to global and neighboring counterparts: on average, 25% of corporate board seats across the Caribbean are held by women. Forty-three percent of regional companies have already crossed the 30% “critical mass” threshold for female board representation, nearly one-quarter have achieved near gender parity on their boards, and only 19% of boards remain entirely male—far below the global average of 31%. Jamaica, in particular, ranks among the top countries worldwide for its share of female managers. Unlike Latin America and the United States, where women remain significantly underrepresented in C-suite and board leadership, the Caribbean outperforms both on paper.
To understand why this gap exists despite these promising numbers, we must first look to the region’s unique historical context, which defies the one-size-fits-all gender frameworks imported from Europe and North America. Decades ago, esteemed Professor Emeritus Rhoda Reddock dismantled the persistent myth of the universal male breadwinner that underpins most Western gender equity analysis. Decades before that, anthropologist Edith Clarke summed up the long-standing Caribbean reality in the title of her seminal work *My Mother Who Fathered Me*. The Victorian ideal of the stay-at-home housewife never aligned with life in the Caribbean, where the brutal system of slavery enforced a brutal form of labor egalitarianism: enslaved women worked alongside men cutting cane in the same field gangs. For centuries, Caribbean women have worked as higglers, market vendors, household heads, civil servants, and industry leaders—they never “joined” the workforce, because they were never excluded from it. The push for European-style “respectability” in the post-emancipation and colonial era was an unnatural effort to force domesticity on women who had always contributed economically to their families and communities.
This unique history explains why standard gender equity metrics rank the Caribbean far ahead of North Atlantic economies. But those metrics fail to answer the most important questions for the region. While the ILO data confirms women hold 25% of all board seats across the Caribbean, only 18% of board chair positions are held by women. In Jamaica, for example, women hold roughly 22% of directorships on the country’s listed companies, but only three boards are chaired by women. The clear pattern that emerges is clear: women fill managerial roles and occupy boardroom seats, but men still hold the top positions of power. The core issue facing the Caribbean is not access to seats at the table—it is who gets to sit at the head of that table, and who controls the capital and ownership of the companies women help run.
The unfinished project of Caribbean emancipation and independence has delivered expanded, democratized access to educational credentials, but the structural concentration of capital inherited from the plantation economy remains largely unchanged. Today, young Caribbean women earn MBAs and advanced professional degrees at higher rates than men, but control of companies and board chairmanships still passes through male inheritance lines. Education has opened the door to managerial participation for women, but it has not broken down the barriers to ownership and top leadership. Meritocracy rewards educational achievement, which women have mastered, but wealth, capital, ownership, and leadership succession still follow patriarchal lines of inheritance. Anyone can study for and pass an exam, but shareholding and control remain locked in intergenerational male privilege.
There are other underdiscussed, context-specific challenges that require a nuanced, Caribbean-centered approach to address. For generations, the high labor force participation of Caribbean women has relied on uncompensated, informal care work from extended family networks—grandmothers, aunts, and community members who step in to care for children while women work. This unrecorded “subsidy” has enabled generations of women to pursue education and careers, but growing urbanization and outmigration have eroded these networks, leaving a gaping care gap that weighs heavily on working women across the region.
Quantitative data counts how many women hold corporate offices, but it ignores the qualitative double standards that shape women’s authority. A woman’s leadership is constantly scrutinized through unspoken biases that men never face. A man’s firmness is celebrated as strong leadership, while a woman’s identical approach is dismissed as coldness. A man’s career trajectory is taken at face value, while a woman’s path is constantly questioned and examined. A man can maintain professional distance without pushback, while a woman in the same position is accused of abandoning her roots. These biases are often perpetuated by both men and women, because both groups have been socialized into the same patriarchal script.
Some observers frame the frequent criticism of high-achieving Caribbean women as a regional “crabs in a barrel” phenomenon, claiming women pull other women down as they climb the career ladder. But this misdiagnoses the problem: the issue is not the character of the women competing for positions, but the structure of the barrel that limits the number of seats at the top. When power and positions are intentionally rationed, competition between marginalized groups is a design feature of the system, not a flaw of individual character.
At its core, the question of women in Caribbean corporate leadership is a question of power. It is not just about whether women can hold office—it is about whether a woman holding that office commands the same unchallenged deference automatically granted to men. It is not just about how many women sit on a board—it is about who chairs the board, who owns the company, who inherits its control, and who bears the unpaid care work that allows all board members to show up to work.
Caribbean women have earned their seats at the table. The chairmanships, though, still elude them. The difference between a seat and a chair is the difference between being present in the room and leading it. A region that now educates more women than men owes its daughters more than just a space to occupy—it owes them the power to preside. This commentary is by Professor C. Justin Robinson, Pro Vice-Chancellor and Principal of The UWI Five Islands Campus.
