Mia Mottley: Female leadership rare in Caribbean

Prime Minister of Barbados Mia Mottley has said female leadership in the Caribbean has been rare since independence.

Mottley was speaking during the Women In Leadership 2021 Virtual Conference hosted by the UWI Arthur Lok Jack Global School of Business on Friday.

Mottley said given the chance, she would have given up modern technology and conveniences in exchange for being an “influential adult during the period of birth of the modern Caribbean.”

She said by the time she was born, in 1965, the Caribbean had already experienced significant achievements, including Caribbean scholarship led by CLR James and Eric Williams, who had already dispelled the notion that it was colonial charity that resulted in the end of West Indian slavery, and the world record for the highest score in Test cricket by Barbadian Garry Sobers in 1958.

“So you now see what I mean when I said I missed the good stuff?” she said with a smile. “But did you notice it? Something so insidious and commonplace that it may have slipped the attention of many of you – did you notice that amongst the undeniable iconic names associated with the heyday of Caribbean development, not a single one was a woman?”

She said despite more than half the population of the region being female, only five of the 15 Caribbean Community (Caricom) countries have elected women leaders, and only four of the 13 UWI campus principals and six registrars of the Caribbean Examination Council have been women.

“None of the five secretary generals of the Caribbean Tourism Organisation (and) six presidents of the Caribbean Development Bank have been women."

Female leadership in the Caribbean has been a rarity, she concluded.

“These terribly lopsided statistics scream inequity. They demand deep enquiry, for how can we, as victims of hundreds of years of uneven development and systemic discrimination, allow ourselves to become perpetrators of such imbalance?”

Mottley said it is not that women did not make contributions, but they were not among those whose iconic contributions are celebrated now in the region. She said, unfortunately, this trend is still reflected in the present-day Caribbean landscape.

She said in a recent conversation with American economist Prof Jeffrey Sachs, he referred to data that indicated female-led countries had performed significantly better that male-led countries during the pandemic.

“He asked me pointedly, did I think male leaders had special qualities that male leaders didn’t? My first thought was to mischievously respond, ‘Yes there are a lot of them.’ But no; if I were to personalise and attempt to place my leadership philosophy within neat boxes, I think of it as a constant balancing act of possibility with practicality, urgency with compassion.”

Mottley said it is a balance she sees in the daily construct of being a Caribbean woman.

“I see it in mothers leading the household, in teachers, who are predominantly women in our region as they lead the classrooms.”

She said it is a trait she admires in her personal favourite leaders, including her parents; Nelson Mandela; and, most recently, Barbadian-born international singer and entrepreneur Robyn Rihanna Fenty.

She said discrimination of any kind is an act of “shortchanging our region’s future.”