Mark Figueroa is a Lecturer in the Department of Economics, UWI, Mona. His research interests include aspects of the relationship between the economy and its socio-cultural and natural environment. This has drawn him into a number of areas including a longstanding interest in gender. In the early 1980s he was a founding member of the UWI’s Women’s Studies Group at Mona. More recently he has written a number of papers on gender and socioeconomic outcomes focusing especially on the relationship between historic male privileging and the changing patterns of gender achievement in education. In exploring what he has called the dialectic of gender privileging, he has provided an alternative to those perspectives that have been linked to concepts of male marginalisation and male victimization. His publications include: “Making Sense of Male Experience: The Case of Academic Underachievement in the English-speaking Caribbean”, IDS Bulletin Vol 31, No 2 (April 2000), 68-74 and “Gender Privileging and Socio-Economic Outcomes: The Case of Health and Education in Jamaica”, in Wilma Bailey (ed.), Gender and the Family in the Caribbean (1988), 112-27.