Gender Relations In The 21st Century: Gender Analysis

Gender in Caribbean societies has been shaped by the region’s cultural diversity that have been influenced by the region’s history of slavery, colonialism and indentureship (Blank, 2013). Many scholars have argued that there have been major changes in gender relations in the Caribbean over the past years and both male and female are adapting to the newly emerging gender relations. This paper presents an overview of how of how far Caribbean men and women in the 21st century are adapting to some of the newly emerging gender relations in both the material and ideological dimensions of gendered life. The first part of this paper involves a brief overview of the historical perspectives of gender relations in the Caribbean while the latter

Authors have agreed with the above statement and proposed that, gender relations in the 21st century have evolved and both men and women are required to adapt to these new changes (Nitsch & Gurow, 2016 & Engell, 2005). One may ask, what is responsible for the adaptation of newly emerging gender relations? Education is one of the main reasons for the adaptation of the newly emerging gender relations of both males and females. Likewise, the early women’s movement and the increase in technology also played significant

Although women are going out to work outside of the homes, they still do the majority of household work and take care of the children as they have been doing in the pass (Tireas & Luis, 2013 as cited in Nitsch & Grunow, 2016). Moreover, Ferguson in her book, Shifting the Center- Understanding Contemporary Families, stated that ‘the gender imbalance in the house is staggering. Wives employed outside of the home performs three more time household duties than their husband’ (Bruess & Pearson as cited in Ferguson, 1998). Similarly, Gary Barker and Piotr “Peter” Pawlak in their study of Men, families, gender equality and care work, found that in Latin America and the Caribbean there has not been a dramatically increase in men’s role in household work and caregiving, even though the men live in the same households with their partners. (United Nations publication, 2011). In spite of these challenges, Jackson in his writing on Changing Gender Roles, said that despite people’s perception of men’s dominance as unnatural and unchangeable part of life, gender inequality has declined across the world over the years (Jackson as cited in Skolnick & Skolnick,