The limited participation of Caribbean women in political leadership

Blog post by Nickesia Gordon, Rochester Institute of Technology, USA
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The thematic focus of the July 2023 Commonwealth Parliamentary Association’s (CPA), Regional Conference on Women’s Political and Parliamentary Leadership once again underscores the need for greater equity as it pertains to women’s engagement in political leadership across the Caribbean. This event was hosted by the group, Commonwealth Women Parliamentarians from the CPA Jamaica Branch, under the theme, ‘Empowering Women in Politics and Parliament: Inspiring Leadership, Driving Change.’ As much as the title theme of the conference is telling, so too is the location in which it took place; namely, New Kingston, Jamaica, an upper middle class mixed residential and business neighbourhood populated by Jamaica’s elite. 

The CPA’s conference theme highlights two persistent and glaring issues that continue to plague women’s political participation in the region. First, the conference’s thematic concern spotlights the fact that Caribbean women are hitting a ceiling regarding equitable and sustained political participation, especially in leadership roles. Second, it illuminates the tendency for interventions and policy approaches to gender inequity in politics, to focus on women from elite segments of Caribbean societies. My Identities article, ‘The unrealised potential of women’s political leadership in the Caribbean: a co-constitutive approach’, calls attention to these pervasive issues while recommending an approach that goes beyond numbers and traditional gender empowerment strategies.
 
Quality is as important as quantity
Popular intervention strategies such as gender quota initiatives try to address the role of patriarchy in stymying women’s access to political leadership. Other tactics such as national gender policies normally concentrate on gender inclusivity via programmes that aim to ‘empower’ women. However, neither strategy fundamentally accounts for class and other social inequities such as those based on sexual orientation, ability or age, to name a few, or the various intersections of which create barriers to women’s political participation. These approaches are, for the most part, inattentive to how different matrices of oppression operate to limit leadership opportunities for women who aspire to political leadership in the Caribbean. A more holistic course of action is therefore required, such as one that prompts researchers and policymakers to treat the issue of gender equity in politics as essentially a human development issue.
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A Co-Constitutive Approach to address a human development challenge
One proposed strategy that is offered in my Identities article is a Co-constitutive Approach. This involves adding the human Capabilities Approach (CA) to current strategies such as quotas and other gender policy interventions. A Co-constitutive Approach is a framework that provides stakeholders with a wide-ranging and more nuanced understanding of the challenges that preclude Caribbean women’s equitable political engagement. It enables policymakers to assess the intersectional components that structure political engagement as well as reveals how the latter potentially creates different sets of opportunities or barriers for different women.

A Co-constitutive Approach may also help us understand why certain measures have not yielded expected results. In states such as Haiti and Guyana, scholars note how legislated electoral gender quota systems have failed to increase women’s participation in Parliament or shift gender ideology towards equality and justice. In other states such as Trinidad and Tobago as well as Jamaica, national gender policies have not netted gender equality and equity across or within sectors of the political state machinery. This is perhaps because policymakers and institutions are prone to utilising generalised approaches that treat women as an undifferentiated group. In doing so, proposed strategies do not typically recognise how women’s lives are structured by race, colourism, socio-economic status, sexuality, age and geographic location.

A Co-constitutive Approach, informed by CA, emphasises the quality of participation as against the quantity. It is about what each woman is able to do and to be without arbitrary restrictions. Are women free to campaign without the constraints of the cultural demands of femininity? Are they free to offer themselves as legitimate candidates despite their socio-economic backgrounds? Are they free to engage in a discourse that disrupts the masculinist political rhetoric without backlash? Are they free to receive the kind of education and exposure that will encourage political leadership ambitions? The untapped potential of women’s leadership in the Caribbean is therefore a capability failure, one that is the result of multiple forms of discrimination and systemic marginalisation.     
 
A Co-constitutive Approach, informed by CA therefore offers policymakers an opportunity to rethink current practices. Caribbean states, including affiliated political parties, and women leaders who have been or who are now privileged to hold political office, must be challenged to rethink current practices that are unconducive to women’s freedoms, and which limit the local political imaginary.  They must engage in transformative social justice that will improve the quality of life for all people as defined by their capabilities.

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​Image credit: Photo by Joakim Honkasalo on Unsplash

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Read the Identities article:
Gordon, Nickesia S. (2023). The unrealised potential of women’s political leadership in the Caribbean: a co-constitutive approach. Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power. DOI: 10.1080/1070289X.2023.2264644

Read further in Identities:

​Reassessing philanthropic cartographies: the Caribbean lens

Critical explorations of gender and the Caribbean: taking it into the twenty-first century

A narrative exploration of gender performances and gender relations in the Caribbean diaspora