Male Studies in The Caribbean - Male Academic Underachievement

Male Academic Underachievement

Mark Figueroa wrote that the “decline of male, relative to female, academic performance in the Caribbean… has captured the attention of professionals.” At the common entrance examination, the first level of testing, Jamaican females achieve a higher number of places than males. This includes discriminatory practices employed in some Caribbean territories, which favor male students to redress the balance. The imbalance in academic performance continues at the University level. By the end of 1992, seventy percent of graduates from the Mona campus of the University of the West Indies were female, and Odette Parry’s sample of Jamaican schools revealed that there is less than one male teacher for every four female ones.

Although the theory of male marginalization, introduced by Miller, is popularly held, it has been suggested that male “Academic Underperformance” is rooted in male privileging and gender socialization. At home boys are “expected to misbehave while girls are expected to conform to a rigid code. If a boy misbehaves it is essentially expected, but if a girl does so it is a serious matter.” Research has also indicated that male academic under-performance is misleading and that it is actually a matter of differential gender performance. Within Caribbean academia traditional patterns of study exist. Boys have identified English and reading as “too girlish” for males, and Parry’s study indicated that even female teachers perceived English and grammar as being women’s subjects. Female dominance can be explained in certificate programs because “their male counterparts do not need further qualifications to get ahead.”

Jamaica’s recent statistics on education have indicated that females now outperform males at all levels and in a wide range of disciplines, including some formerly dominated by males. Women have been the majority among Jamaican students since 1974-75 across all three campuses of UWI. In 1974 women made up nearly 80% of students in the arts and education disciplines but less than 40% of students in law, medicine, and natural sciences.

Research has also indicated an anti-academic male sex/gender identity. Parry wrote that “according to teachers, males are sexually rejected by their female peers”.