It is hard to decide what is more troubling about Caribbean Examinations Council (CXC) Director of Operations Dr Nicole Manning’s declaration that “men are born leaders”: the statement itself or the fact that it came from a senior education professional whose career and academic achievements offer compelling evidence to the contrary.
Dr Manning, who heads Examination Services at CXC, made the comment on August 18 at the formal launch of the 2026 exam results in Anguilla, while discussing the growing disparity between female and male participation in regional examinations. Dr Manning quite reasonably argued that the issue deserved deeper examination and that educators must ensure boys receive the support they need to succeed. Then came her extraordinary statement: “For me, men are born leaders, and we have to respect that and help them to stay in that place.”
No qualification nor context can make that statement correct. It is wrong whether interpreted biologically, educationally, socially or historically. Leadership is not encoded on the Y chromosome, any more than submission, or followership is encoded on the X. To put it simply, any child – boy or girl – can become a leader if they have the right opportunities, education, experience, encouragement and support.
Indeed, Dr Manning’s own life is a rather powerful rebuttal of her assertion. According to the American Association of Collegiate Registrars and Admissions Officers website, she holds a Doctor of Education in Organization Leadership from Nova Southeastern University in Florida, a master’s degree in Computer Based Management Information Systems and a bachelor’s degree in Chemistry and Management from the University of the West Indies, Mona. She also has postgraduate qualifications in education and risk management and more than 20 years of regional and international managerial experience in fields ranging from test development and measurement to quality assurance and strategic management. Surely these are not accomplishments that materialised merely because a woman has been permitted to occupy a space created for men.
More importantly, the suggestion that men must be helped to “stay” in a place of leadership is one that is steeped in patriarchy. Even if it can be argued that the sentiment was subconscious, it points to a deeply troubling conception of leadership, implying that it is a position to which men are naturally entitled and that society’s role is to preserve their occupancy of it. There is a word for that and it is certainly not leadership, it is privilege. It is also 2026 and the world, for the most part, has moved beyond the presumption that boys should be consistently given greater authority while girls are taught accommodation, deference and self-effacement.
That being said, the most effective answer to Dr Manning’s comment is evident all around us. A case in point is Guyana’s latest prodigy Mary Ashley Gupta of Berbice High School, who at just 12 years old, passed five Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate (CSEC) subjects: Mathematics, English A, Chemistry, Physics and Human and Social Biology. The CSEC exams, as is well known, are normally taken by students several years her senior. In an interview with Kiskadee Watch, her father related that she had only months to prepare and had not formally studied most of the material.
This achievement occurred because she was given a challenge, which she embraced. Her family and school supported her. Granted, she had a teacher and tutor who invested time in her, but she also demonstrated extraordinary determination, discipline, curiosity and intellectual ability. Her father told this newspaper that she has since been accepted to study medicine and hopes eventually to become a neurosurgeon.
Mary Gupta’s story is particularly instructive because it demonstrates what happens when ability is recognised rather than constrained by expectations about what a girl should or should not be. Hers is hardly an isolated example. Girls and young women have repeatedly demonstrated exceptional academic, professional, sporting, artistic and entrepreneurial ability. Indeed, the examination statistics Dr Manning cited provide perhaps the clearest evidence of the changing educational landscape. Girls are not merely participating, they are outperforming boys in significant numbers and pursuing opportunities that previous generations of women were denied.
It is worth repeating here that serious attention has to be paid to the fact that boys are falling behind. But the answer cannot be to say that leadership belongs to them by birthright. They should not be bolstered on the fiction of inherent male entitlement to leadership. That is not support; it is indoctrination.
Leadership requires discipline, resilience, empathy and responsibility. Both boys and girls need to be taught that. In addition, both need opportunities to fail, learn, recover, lead and to understand that leadership is not domination or entitlement.
Modern leadership places enormous value on qualities such as self-awareness, self-regulation, communication, conflict resolution and the ability to motivate and collaborate with others. These are learned and developed through experience and practice. A person who cannot listen, understand different perspectives, regulate emotions or accept accountability cannot become a good leader.
History also offers a warning. For centuries, women were deliberately excluded from political office, education, professions, property ownership and positions of authority. The fact that men occupied most of the positions of authority was used to reinforce the idea that they were naturally suited to leadership. That was just a notion.
What is fact is that as leaders women have generally received less recognition and fewer resources than men. But they became leaders not because someone allowed them to occupy a place reserved for men, but because they demonstrated the qualities required.
Perhaps rather than being just unfortunate and untenable, Dr Manning’s statement will become the catalyst for the serious conversation this region needs to have about boys and men and the reasons so many are struggling educationally. The organisation in which she sits as a leader, exists at the centre of an educational system that is supposed to expand young people’s horizons, not narrow them according to stereotypes. Its message to every student should be that their future is determined by their capacity, effort, character and opportunities; not their gender.
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