Count the Chairs, Not the Seats! Women and Corporate Leadership in The Caribbean

THE 2026 ACADEMIC year is upon us and one the realities of UWI is that in every 100 students roughly 70 are female.

All hail to the sisters who make up approximately 70% of university enrolment but only 50% of the general population. UWI opened a door and our mothers, sisters,

daughters, aunts and cousins waltzed through it and are proudly strutting their stuff in the corporate world.

The corporate numbers.

The benchmark comprehensive study on female corporate leadership in our region is the 2017 International Labour Organization (ILO) publication, Women in Business and Management: Gaining Momentum in the Caribbean. The ILO reports that on average 25% of board members in the Caribbean are female.

Almost half of Caribbean companies, 43%, are past the 30% “critical mass” threshold for female board membership, nearly a quarter are at gender parity on boards and there are only 19% all-male boards against a global average of 31%. Jamaica has ranked at or near the top of the world in the share of female managers. The ILO research states categorically, women are under-represented in corporate leadership in Latin America as in the United States, but much less so in the Caribbean.

The historical floor The historical evolution of gender in the Caribbean is the single best example of the foolishness, laziness and folly of trying to understand and strategise on policy for Caribbean society using imported analytical tools and dressing them in Caribbean costumes. Esteemed Professor Emeritus Rhoda Reddock (she must have Vincy connections with that last name), long exploded the myth of the male breadwinner. Edith Clarke captured the Caribbean reality aptly in the title of her classic, ‘My mother who fathered me’. The Victorian housewife never described modern Caribbean reality. Slavery was brutally egalitarian in its labour policies if in nothing else.

Enslaved women cut cane in the same gangs as men.

The Caribbean reality is the higgler, the market woman, the female head of household, the corporate leader and the Permanent Secretary. Caribbean women never entered the workforce because they were never out of it. She was in the field.

She was in the market.

She was at the head of the household before the household had a name for it. If anything, a typically Eurocentric aspect of our post emancipation/ colonial drive for “respectability” is to try to impose domesticity on women who had always worked.

As a result of our historical context, the standard metrics of corporate gender equity suggest that corporate Caribbean has “less of a gender problem than the North Atlantic economies.”

But do these metrics ask and answer the questions that matter in the Caribbean.

The ILO data says that Caribbean women hold a quarter of board seats and 18% of board chairs. It also shows that in Jamaica, women hold around 22% of directorships in listed companies, but only three boards chaired by women.

What’s the pattern here?

The pattern is that women manage but men preside!

The women fill the room but men sit at the head of the table. The questions that matter in the Caribbean are ones around ownership and power.

The unfinished business of emancipation and independence is that we have democratized access to credentials, but the structure of capital remains highly concentrated. The entrenched plantation economy structure means that our daughters will continue to earn the MBA while others inherit the chairmanship. The credentials allow managerial participation but not ownership and leadership.

Education is the meritocratic channel, and she has conquered it, but wealth, capital, ownership, chairmanship, succession, are the inheritance channel, and it still runs to him.

The exam can be studied for, but the shareholding cannot.

There are other residual issues that require a nuanced Caribbean eye if we are to ask the right questions. Please forgive me but I trained to use financial lens and terms. My financial lens tell me that Caribbean women’s labour-force participation was always fi-nanced by unbooked transfers. The grandmothers, aunts, the extended yard and the village that minded the children and provided so much more. My mother could never have financed my educational journey without these unbooked transfers. Urbanization and migration are calling in that subsidy and the reduction in these unbooked transfers is haunting our Caribbean societies The data answers a quantity question and leaves the quality question open.

When she holds the office, is her authority audited on terms his never faces?

For example, the warmth audit, where his firmness is leadership and hers is coldness. The legitimacy inquest, his path is a career, hers is a story to be checked. The solidarity tax, he is permitted distance, she is accused of forgetting where she came from. This scrutiny comes from men and women alike because everyone was raised inside the same script.

Some have suggested to me that the criticism of women is just another version of the crabs in a barrel story in the Caribbean. Women have risen so women will pull her down.

The crab barrel tells us nothing about crabs and everything about barrels.

No one has ever seen crabs pull each other down on an open beach. If you have, I am very interested in your knowledge, please give me a call or send me an email.

When seats at the top are rationed, contest among the rationed is design, not character.

The question of women in Corporate Caribbean is one of power. Not whether she may hold the office but whether the office, held by her, commands the same unexamined deference. Not how many women sit on the board, but who chairs it, who owns it, who inherits it, and who is minding the children of everyone in the room.

The seats are hers. The chairs are not. The difference between a seat and a chair is the difference between being present and presiding. A region that educates its daughters into the majority owes them more than a place in the rooms it still asks them to warm.

_ Professor C. Justin Robinson is Pro Vice Chancellor and Campus Principal, UWI Five Islands Campus