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.