Women and Men in the Caribbean Community

PrefaceThis report, Women and Men in the Caribbean Community: Facts andFigures, 1980-2001, has been prepared as one of the main outputs of theUnited Nations Project, “Strengthening Capacity in the Compilation ofStatistics and Indicators for Conference Follow-up in the CARICOM Region,”jointly carried out by the United Nations Statistics Division (UNSD) andthe Caribbean Community (CARICOM) Secretariat. The Project has beenexecuted with the participation of the CARICOM Member States, which areAntigua and Barbuda, The Bahamas, Barbados, Belize, Dominica, Grenada,Guyana, Haiti 1 , Jamaica, Montserrat, St. Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia,St. Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname and Trinidad and Tobago.The report brings together statistics and indicators on key social and genderissues of particular concern to the CARICOM Region. It is the first reportof its kind for the Region that seeks to highlight the emerging issues, through asystematic presentation of statistics, and the first in a series of biennial reportsthat will compile and present gender-sensitive statistics on key emerging socialissues in the Region.The purpose of the report is three-fold. First, it is to provide preliminary review andassessment of the availability of statistics with respect to issues that were the focusof recent major United Nations conferences, such as the International Conferenceon Population and Development (1994); the World Social Summit (1995); andthe Fourth International Conference on Women (1995). Second, there is the needto illustrate the importance of statistics in understanding social dimensions withrespect to the key issues, such as power and decision-making, violence againstwomen and education; and towards the goal of equal opportunity for womenand men. The third is to make better use of available statistics, to shed light on thecomparative situations in CARICOM Member States and to help identify gaps inthe data at the national level for countries that may not be collecting some of thisinformation. Some countries may have the information but have not effectivelydisseminated them to regional institutions.1 Limited information has been presented on Haiti, because of difficulty in obtaining much of the informationrequired for this report.iii