"In Caribbean, women are taking care of business" by David McFadden, Associated Press February 15, 2015
KINGSTON, Jamaica — When the young woman was preparing to open a business in Jamaica selling pipes, vaporizers, and other smoking paraphernalia, some acquaintances suggested she would have difficulty succeeding in a niche trade dominated by men.
Related: Boston Globe Smoke Shop
Now, about a year-and-a-half after its launch at a hotel complex in Jamaica’s capital, Ravn Rae’s smoking supplies store is growing and she is proving doubters wrong in a Caribbean country where women have made such big advances in professions once dominated by men.
A new UN study says Jamaica has the world’s highest proportion of female bosses.
‘‘Women are the ones who are the main breadwinners. We push harder to earn,’’ says Rae at her smoke shop, which she hopes to soon expand into a medical marijuana dispensary if lawmakers pass a decriminalization bill and allow a regulated cannabis industry. For now, she manages one saleswoman.
Good thing she is in Jamaica and not Massachusetts!
According to data analyzed by the International Labor Organization, nearly 60 percent of managers in Jamaica are women, including those who work for large companies and those, like Rae, who own their own businesses.
That is the globe’s highest percentage and far ahead of developed countries. Colombia, at 53 percent, and St. Lucia, at 52 percent, are the only other nations in the world where women are more likely than men to be the boss, according to the ILO’s ranking of 108 countries. The highest ranking first world nation is the United States, with almost 43 percent, and the lowest is Japan, at 11 percent.
Overall, women in the Caribbean and parts of Latin America make up the managerial ranks to a greater extent than in the developed world. Experts say the gain is partly because of improvements in the level of female education, but also because men have failed to keep pace and have in some cases gone backward.
The Caribbean and Latin America have seen such big improvements in the economic and social status of women that gender gaps in education, labor force participation, access to health systems, and political engagement ‘‘have narrowed, closed and sometimes even reversed direction,’’ according to a World Bank study.
More women get advanced degrees even as a number also juggle household and child-rearing responsibilities.
But while government officials and educators celebrate that fact they also have serious fears about stagnating men, who have lower levels of academic achievement and are at increased risk of falling into criminality, trends that undermine the gains by females.
Also looks like the plan to use feminism to undermine traditional societies, too.
I'm not saying women -- or anyone -- should be repressed; I am just seeing this article through the agenda-pushing prism that is bringing it to me. Sorry.
Wayne Campbell, a Jamaican high school teacher who blogs about the problem of male underachievement, believes toxic notions about masculinity permeate entire communities, reinforced by a popular music culture that often celebrates law-breaking.
Boys who display school smarts are often ridiculed as effeminate by peers and even adults in areas where academic excellence by men is typically devalued, Campbell said.
‘‘It’s almost as if manhood and masculinity have been hijacked by a thug culture far removed from education,’’ he said.
(Blog editor just nodding his head)
From the southern country of Trinidad & Tobago to the northern archipelago of the Bahamas, Caribbean education ministries have focused attention for years trying to solve the vexing reality of male underachievement and the social problems it leaves in its wake.
Grace McLean, Jamaica’s chief education officer, says ‘‘it is evident that boys’ underachievement in the education system is weighing heavily on national socioeconomic development.’’
Regional educators say the scale of academic underachievement by boys, a trend that is mirrored in other parts of the world including the United States, points to the need for systemic changes in the way that lessons are planned and delivered.
And who will be deciding that?
Some globalist uberbody or local school boards (like in America)?
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