I have been in education for over thirty years. I have sat in laboratories, stood at the front of lecture halls, designed training programmes, and mentored students across every stage of learning. In all that time, one pattern has remained stubbornly consistent: the closer you get to the top of science and technology fields, the fewer women you find.
That is not an accident. It is the result of a long chain of small decisions, quiet discouragements, and structural gaps that, taken individually, seem manageable. But together they add up to something significant.
By the numbers
The Genius Project (2025) study
I want to talk about that. Not in the abstract, and not with the kind of polished language that fills conference programmes and leaves nothing changed. I want to talk about what I have actually seen, and what I believe we need to do about it here in Jamaica and across the Caribbean.
The Problem Starts Early
By the time a girl reaches fourth form and has to choose her CSEC subjects, the decision has often already been made for her. Not by a single person, but by years of accumulated signals. Which subjects her family assumed she would be good at. Which teachers invested more energy in the boys who asked louder questions. Which careers were described as "for people who are good with numbers" in ways that somehow never seemed to include her.
I have watched this happen. Bright, curious girls who asked excellent questions in primary school, who showed real analytical instinct, who could dissect an argument with precision, slowly learning to be smaller in classrooms that rewarded a certain kind of confidence. By the time university arrives, the drop-off is already baked in.
What I am describing has a name in the research, and understanding it matters because it tells us where to intervene. Children form beliefs about what they are "good at" remarkably early, and those beliefs harden into a sense of identity. A girl who is praised for being "neat" and "well-behaved" while the boys are praised for being "clever at maths" is quietly being told a story about who she is. Psychologists distinguish a fixed mindset, the belief that ability is something you either have or you do not, from a growth mindset, the belief that ability is built through effort and good teaching. When a girl absorbs the message that mathematical ability is innate and that she does not have it, a single hard problem becomes proof of a permanent verdict rather than a normal step in learning. The tragedy is that she may be entirely capable. She has simply been handed the wrong story about her own mind.
The Caribbean is not unique in this. But we do have specific conditions that sharpen the problem. In many of our communities, the financial pressure on families means girls are often steered toward what looks like a safe, practical path. Teaching, nursing, administration. These are valuable, important careers. But they should be chosen freely, not defaulted into because no one held open the door to anything else.
🧠The developmental angle: how the gap is built, and how it is closed
The drop-off Dr Budall describes is not mysterious once you look at how young minds form a sense of self. Children decide early what they are "good at," and those judgements quickly become identity. Carol Dweck's research on mindset shows the lever clearly: praise a child for being "smart" or "a natural," and a hard problem starts to feel like a threat to that label, so she avoids it; praise her effort and her strategy, and the same hard problem becomes a normal, surmountable challenge. Telling a girl "you cannot do this yet" keeps the door open in a way that "you are just not a maths person" slams shut.
Two more findings point straight at what helps. Motivation runs on belonging, competence, and a sense of choice, which is why a relatable role model and a string of small, visible wins do more for a girl's persistence than any pep talk. And emotional safety, a calm adult who treats mistakes as part of learning, lets a child take the risks that growth requires. None of this is soft. It is the difference between a curious nine-year-old who keeps reaching and a discouraged fifteen-year-old who has quietly decided the field is not for her.
Growth mindsetSelf-efficacyRelatedness & belongingEmotional safety
The Cost of a Missing Perspective
When I started working in the field of AI and data science, something struck me almost immediately. The tools being built, the models being trained, the systems being deployed: they reflected the perspective of the people building them. And those people were, overwhelmingly, men from a small number of countries and backgrounds.
This is not a small thing. AI systems learn patterns from data. If the data reflects a world where women are underrepresented, and if the teams designing those systems do not include people who will notice that gap and push back on it, then the output will encode and amplify existing inequalities.
We have already seen this. Facial recognition systems that perform significantly worse on darker skin tones and on women. Hiring algorithms that penalise resume gaps, which disproportionately affect women who took time for caregiving. Medical research datasets where women are chronically underrepresented, leading to diagnostic tools that are less accurate for them.
These are not theoretical risks. They are things that have already happened, and that are already affecting real people. The solution is not just better data, though we need that. The solution is more diverse teams who bring different questions to the design process before the damage is done.
When Caribbean women build AI systems, they bring a perspective that Caribbean communities need and deserve. They know what the water access problems look like in rural St. Mary. They understand how informal economies work and why a credit scoring model built for a salaried workforce will fail for a market vendor in Coronation Market. They carry knowledge that no dataset fully captures.
That knowledge belongs in the room where the technology is designed. Keeping it out is not just unfair to the women being excluded. It is a practical mistake that makes the technology worse.
What Actually Works
I want to be direct here, because I have sat through enough panels and read enough reports to know that good intentions and beautiful language do not change enrolment numbers.
What works is access. Genuine, early, repeated access to science and technology in settings where girls are expected to succeed rather than struggle through. Not special programmes designed to fix something broken in them, but learning environments that take their intelligence as a given and build from there.
What works is seeing yourself in the field. I think about the students I teach today, and I know with certainty that representation matters. When a girl sees a Caribbean woman who looks like her working in AI, standing at the front of a data science class, publishing research, building a company, something shifts in what she understands to be possible. This is not sentiment. It is how human motivation actually functions. We extend our ambitions toward what we can see. There is a thread of motivation research, often summarised as self-determination theory, that finds people sustain effort in hard fields when they feel a sense of belonging alongside a sense of competence and choice. A relatable role model supplies the belonging: it answers the unspoken question "do people like me do this?" with a clear yes, and that yes does more for a girl's persistence than any amount of encouragement in the abstract.
What works is removing the financial barrier. Across the Caribbean, the cost of education and training is real. Programmes that are free, genuinely free, do not undercount what this means for the communities they serve. It is the difference between a girl's ambition staying theoretical and it becoming a career path she can actually walk.
What works is having adults around her who treat her curiosity as an asset rather than an inconvenience. This is something I think about constantly in my own work. The students who thrive are almost always the ones who were, at some point, told clearly that their questions were worth asking and their mind was worth developing. There is a developmental reason this is so powerful. A calm, encouraging adult beside a learner creates what psychologists call emotional safety: the felt sense that it is alright to be wrong, to be confused, to try something difficult and fall short. A child who feels safe to make mistakes will reach for the harder problem, and reaching for the harder problem is precisely how ability grows. When we praise a girl's effort and her strategy rather than telling her she is "naturally gifted," we teach her that struggle is part of learning, not evidence that she does not belong. That single habit, repeated by enough teachers and parents, changes who stays in the field.
What We Are Doing at The Genius Project
I joined The Genius Project because I believe what it is building is serious. Not a one-time camp, not a feel-good exercise, but sustained, quality programming designed to give young Jamaicans a real foothold in the technology sector.
Our Learning Support Hub exists in part because I know from thirty years of education that the standard classroom design was not built with everyone's brain in mind. Girls with ADHD, dyslexia, or processing differences were already fighting a harder battle in a system that penalised how they learned. Adding AI tools that adapt to different learning styles is not charity. It is the correction of a long-standing design flaw.
We are also deliberate about who we recruit and who we feature. Our Genius Bootcamp cohorts reflect the diversity of Jamaica. Our mentors include Caribbean women working in data, engineering, and machine learning. The message we send, in every cohort, is that this field is for them. Not conditionally. Not with caveats. Without qualification.
There is more to do. We want to build a pipeline that starts younger, that reaches girls in St. Thomas and Hanover and Portland, not just Kingston. We want to track where our graduates go and build the kind of longitudinal data that lets us see what actually works over time. We want to fund more of this, because nothing good is free to run even when it is free to attend.
A Note to the Girls Reading This
If you are a young woman in Jamaica reading this and wondering whether science and technology is for you, I want to say something directly.
Your questions are not too much. Your curiosity is not a problem to be managed. The fact that you are asking whether you belong in these fields tells me you already have the most important quality a scientist needs, which is the drive to understand how things work.
The field needs your perspective. Not just because of equity, though equity matters. But because the problems we are trying to solve with technology are real problems that affect real communities, and the people with the deepest understanding of those communities need to be in the room where solutions are built.
Come in. There is work to do, and you are equipped for it. Big up yuhself, and do not let anybody talk you out of it.
A Note to Everyone Else
Representation does not fix itself. It requires people in positions of influence, in schools, in companies, in government, in families, to make different choices about who they invest in, whose potential they take seriously, and what they describe as possible when a young woman is listening.
That is not a burden. It is an opportunity. The talent is there. It always has been. We just need to stop getting in its way.
