The alleged underachievement of males within the educational system has become the subject of ongoing debate in both academic and lay circles in the Commonwealth Caribbean. The present study sought to build on the Commonwealth Caribbean research literature by (1) providing a longitudinal analysis of the performance of a representative sample of 16 year-old boys and girls in secondary schools in Barbados, (2) putting forward non-gendered explanations for the performance of the 263 students in the sample, and (3) estimating the relative contribution to variations in performance of a number of personal and systemic variables which had been found to be important determinants of school achievement in an earlier (1997) three-country survey by the authors. The main finding was that there were gender differences, which favoured female performance, but that most of the variance in performance was accounted for by the type of secondary school attended, parental occupation, and sex of the student, in that order. Our main conclusion is that when use is made of multivariate - and not just univariate-analysis - social background and stratification of the secondary school system appear to provide more substantive explanations of achievement (or lack of it) than the fashionable gendered explanations stressing male marginalization or matrilineality.