Professor Barbara E. Bailey

Barbara Evelyn Bailey nee Nash grew up in Saint Andrew, Jamaica, where she attended the St Andrew’s High School for Girls and completed her undergraduate education at the University of the West Indies (UWI), graduating with a B.Sc. in Med. Microbiology in 1974. She later completed a Master’s degree in Education and a Ph.D. in Education; also, from the UWI. In 1999 she completed the Advanced Reading Course on Gender and Development Issues from the Dalhousie University, in Canada.

As an academic, she has engaged in research which has filled a critical void in regional gender and education literature and has had significant implications for public educational policy. Her work in gender and education has made a distinctive contribution to educational practice and curriculum development, especially in relation to gender.

She served as the Regional Coordinator / University Director of the Institute for Gender and Development Studies from 1996 to 2010.

A prolific publisher, Professor Bailey has been the author and editor of numerous books, journal articles and presented at numerous academic conferences.

At the National level, she has served as Chair of the National Gender Advisory Committee appointed by the Government of Jamaica to develop a strategic and comprehensive policy for achieving gender equality and social justice and provide direction, coordination, integration and monitoring of gender mainstreaming activities of the government. She was also Co-Chair of the Jamaica National Preparatory Commission which prepared the National Report on the Status of women in Jamaica for the Fourth World Conference on Women held in Beijing, China.

At the regional level, Professor Bailey has served as advisor to CARICOM on several occasions including at the meeting of the Commission on the Status of Women which acted as the Preparatory Committee for the UN Special Session on Women at the United Nations headquarters in New York in March 2000.

She was also consultant to the United Nations Development Fund for Women (UNIFEM) charged with the responsibility to develop and implement a curriculum for a regional gender training programme and to evaluate and publish a set of training modules.

She was also Member of CARICOM's Gender Mainstreaming Task Force in 2001 and served on the Regional Advisory Committee on Gender Matters.

Her research interests include educational attainment and performance, gender-based violence, gender disparities within the CARICOM Single Market and Economy (CSME), micro enterprise development, gender ideology and pedagogy including feminist pedagogical theory.

One of her most critical pieces of research is Gender Differentials in Education that examined the less than optimum participation and performance of boys in education. It aims at improving the understanding of gender and its impact on the educational process and education outputs. The research earned Professor Bailey the Vice-Chancellor’s award

Professor Bailey’s work has in no small way assisted Caribbean countries to achieve national and international development goals, including their commitments to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of

Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), the Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC), and the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), especially promoting gender equality and the empowerment of women.

In 2008, she joined an elite group of select women who have made significant contributions at the national and regional level in various fields of endeavours that have impacted the social and economic development of the Community, to earn the CARICOM Triennial Award. The award to Professor Bailey was presented at the Opening Ceremony of the Twenty-Ninth Meeting of the Conference of Heads of Government of the Caribbean Community in Antigua and Barbuda on 1 July 2008.

In 2008, Professor Bailey was the national honour of Commander of the Order of Jamaica.

Also, in 2008, Professor Bailey was elected to the Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), Committee; on which she served until 2016. During her tenure on the Committee, Professor Bailey was, among other things:

• Appointment as Rapporteur from October 2013 to December 2014.
• Assigned as a Member of the Working Group developing General Recommendation on Rural Women to be adopted at the 63rd Session, February 2016.
• Appointed Vice-Chair of the Working Group G - Task Force on Inquiries, October 2011 to July 2015.
• Appointed Chair, Working Group established at the 52nd session, July 2012 to develop a General Recommendation (GR) on Women’s and Girls Rights to Education. The GR, which was intended to provide authoritative guidance to States parties on the breadth of issues that must be considered if girls are to enjoy the right to education, rights within education and rights through education. The General Recommendation was approved in 2017.

In 2016, Professor Bailey, in collaboration with Professors Elsa Leo-Rhynie and Joycelin Massiah published “The UWI Gender Journey” which carefully documents the visionary commitment and struggles for recognition and respect of a relatively small cohort of dedicated feminist scholars, each of them powerful academics and leaders, as they collaborated to institutionalize gender and development studies at the University of West Indies.