Educated, Enterprising and Still Unequal: Women and Development in the Caribbean

By Ann Smith, Editor, Kingstonmouth.com

Ann Smith is a British educator and social activist.

Walk into almost any Caribbean university graduation and you will notice something remarkable: the women outnumber the men. Look across the region and you will find women who have served as prime ministers, governors-general, chief justices and central bank governors. By many measures, Caribbean women are among the most educated and accomplished in the developing world.

And yet the same women are more likely to be underpaid, more likely to be stuck in insecure work, and far more likely to suffer violence at home. That is the Caribbean paradox. Our region has opened the classroom door to women, but not yet the door to equal pay, equal safety or equal power.

If the Caribbean is serious about development, it cannot afford to leave the talents of half its population underused. Here are the issues that matter most.

Educated but underpaid

Caribbean women outperform men in school enrolment, completion and attainment at every level, according to World Bank research across several Eastern Caribbean states. Women dominate many training programmes in law, education and healthcare.

But education has not translated into economic equality. About 1 in 3 young women in Grenada and St Lucia is not in education, employment or training. Those who do work are concentrated in lower-paying sectors such as tourism, retail, domestic work and the informal economy. In some countries studied, men earn more than women across occupations, education levels and sectors. In other words, even a woman with the same qualifications, doing the same kind of work, often takes home less.

The reasons are familiar: jobs segregated by gender, few women in the technical and engineering fields that pay best, and workplaces that penalise women for family responsibilities.

Enterprising but underfunded

When formal jobs fail them, Caribbean women build their own. Women own between 32 and 57 per cent of firms in the Caribbean states the World Bank examined, well above the Latin American and Caribbean average of 31 per cent.

The trouble is scale. Most women-owned businesses are micro-enterprises with fewer than five workers, and the biggest obstacle is finance. Banks often demand collateral, such as land or property, that women are less likely to own. A market vendor's business that never gets the loan to grow into a shop is a loss not just for one woman, but for the whole economy.

The violence we do not talk about enough

No issue is more urgent. According to UN Women, rates of violence against women and girls in the Caribbean are among the highest in the world. National surveys in Grenada, Guyana, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago and other member states have laid bare the scale of it.

In Grenada, about 27 per cent of women have experienced physical violence from a partner, and for more than two-thirds of them the violence was severe: hitting, kicking, burning or threats with a weapon. More than 5 per cent of women who had been pregnant were beaten during a pregnancy. Close to 1 in 4 had experienced sexual violence by someone other than a partner.

Just as worrying are attitudes. UN Women research across five CARICOM countries found a high tolerance for violence among both men and women, including the young, raising fears that it is being passed from one generation to the next. In Grenada, 1 in 5 women saw violence between husband and wife as a private matter.

Violence is not only a crime against individual women. It keeps women out of work, school and public life, and it costs economies dearly in healthcare, policing and lost productivity.

The invisible workload

Caribbean women also carry a disproportionate share of unpaid care: raising children, looking after elderly relatives and running households. Many households across the region are headed by women alone. Every hour spent on unpaid care is an hour not available for paid work, study, business or politics. Without affordable childcare and elder care, equal opportunity remains a slogan.

First in line when disaster strikes

Climate change makes all of this worse. When hurricanes hit, women, especially farmers and heads of household, are often hit hardest. After Hurricane Maria in 2017, 79 per cent of women farmers in Dominica reported severe damage and losses. Women also shoulder the burden of caring for families through evacuation, displacement and recovery, often while their own livelihoods lie in ruins.

Power: visible at the top, missing in the middle

The Caribbean can point with pride to women who have led governments and nations. But a few women at the very top does not mean women share power across the system.

The international benchmark for a "critical mass" of women in parliament is 30 per cent. When UN Women and ParlAmericas assessed the region in 2023, only two Caribbean countries, Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, met it, and the regional average fell short. Women remain under-represented on corporate boards, in trade unions and in local government, the places where everyday decisions about budgets, jobs and services are made.

What about the boys?

Misogyny: the attitude beneath it all

Pay gaps, violence and the shortage of women in power are not separate problems. Underneath them lies something harder to measure but impossible to ignore: misogyny, the deep-rooted contempt for women, and the belief that they are worth less and should know their place.

In the Caribbean it shows up in many forms. It is the remark shouted at a woman walking down the street. It is the joke at work that a woman cannot challenge without being called "too sensitive". It is the assumption that a woman who was beaten or raped must have provoked it. It is the question of whether a female candidate is "too emotional" to lead, when no one asks the same of a man. And it is the tolerance of violence that UN Women found among both men and women across the region.

The culture we celebrate can reinforce it too. Caribbean music, comedy and talk radio have produced some of the region's proudest tributes to women, but they also regularly treat women as objects, mock their bodies and make light of abuse. What is repeated as entertainment becomes normal.

Misogyny has gone online. Social media has given it a new and vicious platform. When ParlAmericas brought together women parliamentarians from across the region in January 2026, a study of current and former women politicians found that every single one had experienced technology-facilitated abuse during her career. The attacks often targeted their appearance and personal lives and intensified at election time. Many never reported it, and those who did often got little help from the police. The result is a chilling effect: capable women deciding that public life is not worth the abuse.

The law has been slow to catch up. Not every Caribbean country has dedicated sexual harassment legislation, and where laws exist, enforcement is often weak and complaints rarely reach court. Laws against online abuse are only now being drafted, with some parliaments looking to a new Inter-American model law on digital gender-based violence.

Tackling misogyny cannot be left to women alone. It requires men, as fathers, pastors, artists, employers, police officers and politicians, to challenge it where they see it, including among their friends.

Any discussion of women in the Caribbean soon meets the argument that it is now boys and men who are being left behind. There is real substance to the concern. Boys' underachievement in school and men's high involvement in crime are serious problems in their own right, and they deserve urgent attention.

But it is a mistake to treat this as a contest. Women's higher qualifications have not produced equal pay, equal safety or equal power, so the evidence does not show that women have "made it" at men's expense. Both challenges grow from the same roots: rigid ideas about what men and women should be, and economies that offer too few good jobs for anyone. Solving one helps solve the other.

An agenda for change

The Caribbean does not need more awareness campaigns. It needs action that can be measured.

1. Treat violence against women as a national emergency. Enforce domestic violence laws, fund shelters and specialist police units, train judges and prosecutors, and start in schools with education on respectful relationships.
2. Close the pay gap. Require larger employers to report pay by gender, and open apprenticeships and scholarships in engineering, technology and the trades to women.
3. Finance women's enterprise. Create loan guarantee schemes and collateral-free credit for women's businesses, and give women a fair share of government contracts.
4. Invest in care. Affordable childcare and elder care are economic infrastructure, as vital as roads. They free women to work and create jobs at the same time.
5. Put women at the centre of climate plans. Include women farmers and heads of household in disaster planning, insurance and recovery funds.
6. Share power. Political parties should commit to fielding women in winnable seats, with the goal of at least 30 per cent women in every parliament and cabinet.
7. Count what matters. Regular, comparable data on women's work, pay and safety across CARICOM would let citizens hold governments to account.
8. Confront misogyny head-on. Pass and enforce sexual harassment and online abuse laws, update parliamentary codes of conduct, and back public campaigns led by men as well as women.

Conclusion

Caribbean women have already done the hardest part. They have educated themselves, built businesses against the odds and held families and communities together through storms of every kind. What they have not been given is a fair return on that effort.

The region's development depends on changing that. A Caribbean where women earn what they are worth, live free from violence and share equally in power is not only a fairer Caribbean. It is a richer, stronger and more resilient one.

What do you see as the biggest barrier facing Caribbean women today? Share your views in the comments.

Sources

• Five trends in gender (in)equality in the Caribbean — World Bank, March 2023
• Research brief: intimate partner violence in five CARICOM countries — UN Women
• 1 in every 3 women in Grenada will experience intimate partner violence — UN Eastern Caribbean
• Only two Caribbean countries meet 30% gender quota for women in parliament — UN Caribbean, November 2023
• International Women's Day 2026 in the Caribbean — SXM Talks, March 2026
• St Maarten delegation pushes regional action on tech-facilitated gender-based violence — SXM Talks, January 2026