Calling In Caribbean Women: A March Action Plan

Note from the President

March is Women's History Month. The Association's women's membership is, today, thirty nine percent of the total. That is up from thirty four percent a year ago. Women hold four of the eight seats on our Board. Women lead five of our seven working groups. The numbers are moving in the direction we want, slowly, and not as fast as several of our members, in the polite and pointed letters they have sent me this year, would like them to move.

Aisha Mohan has written our feature this month. The piece is, in form, an action plan. It is the third in her informal series for this newsletter, after her September 2024 piece on AI in mental health and her June 2025 piece on the diaspora. The pattern in Aisha's writing for us has been consistent. She names a gap, she names the people responsible for closing it, and she gives them the work to do. This piece does the same. I have nothing to add to it.

Our Spanish language edition launched last month, with the Dominican Republic chapter taking the lead. The first issue had two thousand four hundred subscribers in its first week. The French language edition, with editorial leadership from Martinique and Haiti, launches in May.

Adrian Dunkley Founder and President, Caribbean AI Association

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Feature

Calling In Caribbean Women: A March Action Plan

By Aisha Mohan

I want to be plain about the purpose of this piece. The work of getting more Caribbean women into AI, into the building of AI products, into the policy rooms where AI is being shaped, into the senior management of the firms that deploy AI in our region, is work the Association has done some of, work the Association has not done enough of, and work that, in 2026, has to move faster. This is the action plan I am asking each of our member groups to commit to for the year.

The plan is organized by audience. If you are reading this and you are a Caribbean woman currently working in AI, the plan asks you for specific things. If you are reading this and you are a Caribbean institution that has, on paper, committed to gender equity in your work, the plan asks you for specific things. If you are reading this and you are a man in the Caribbean AI ecosystem, the plan asks you for specific things. Read the section that applies to you and, please, do the work.

To Caribbean women already in the field.

You are, by the most recent CAIRA membership data, approximately twelve thousand of you across the region and the diaspora. The plan asks you for four things this year.

The first is to be visible. I do not mean this in the abstract sense of building a personal brand. I mean it in the specific sense of putting yourself on the panel, accepting the speaking invitation, writing the article, sitting for the interview, and showing up at the event. The number of times in 2025 I heard, from a male colleague organizing a CAIRA event, the phrase "we asked her and she said no" was substantial. There are reasons women say no. The reasons are real. I am asking you, this year, to say yes more often than your default. We are visible to the next generation only if we are visible.

The second is to mentor. Each of you should have, before the end of this calendar year, at least one Caribbean woman whose career you are actively helping to advance. The mentee may be in your country or in another CAIRA country. She may be ten years younger than you or three. The mentorship may take an hour a month. The arithmetic is straightforward. Twelve thousand women, mentoring one each, is twelve thousand careers materially affected. The Association will run a structured matching programme for those of you who prefer one. We will not require it.

The third is to recommend other women. When a colleague asks you for a speaker, an author, a panel member, a board candidate, a consultant, a researcher, your answer should be the name of another Caribbean woman in the field, and the answer should be quick and unhedged. The most common reason qualified Caribbean women are not in the rooms they should be in, in our region, is that nobody in the room thought to suggest them. Be the person who suggests them.

The fourth is to take the work seriously. Caribbean women in this field have, historically, been over-represented among the people who do excellent technical work and under-represented among the people who claim credit for it. This is not, in our region, a coincidence. The plan asks you, this year, to do excellent work and to claim credit for it. Sign your name on the paper. Take the lead on the project. Apply for the grant. Negotiate the salary. The arithmetic of careers is unforgiving on this, and the women who do not claim credit do not advance.

To Caribbean institutions.

If you are a Caribbean university, a Caribbean ministry, a Caribbean bank, a Caribbean technology company, a Caribbean media organization, a Caribbean foundation, or a Caribbean NGO operating in the AI space, the plan asks you for the following.

Publish your numbers. The share of women in your technical roles, in your leadership, in your speaker line-ups, in your authorship, and in your funding decisions. Publish them annually. The Caribbean institutions that have made the most progress in the last year are, almost without exception, the ones that publish their numbers and let the public, their staff, and their funders track the trajectory. The ones that have made the least progress are the ones whose numbers are private.

Set the targets. Numerical targets, with timelines, for the share of women in technical roles, in senior leadership, and in your decision making bodies. Targets are not quotas. Targets are commitments. The institutions in our region that have set them, and reported on them, have moved. The institutions that have not, have not.

Audit the pipeline. The reasons Caribbean institutions under-represent women in technical AI roles are concrete and identifiable. They include the hiring practices that systematically under-rate the candidates of women returning from career breaks. They include the promotion practices that systematically under-rate the work of women who do not self-promote. They include the role designs that assume an employee whose family responsibilities are taken care of by someone else. Audit these things. Fix what you find.

Pay equally. The Caribbean is not exceptional in the existence of gender pay gaps in technology roles. We are, in some of our member countries, exceptional in the size of them. Run the audit. Close the gap. Publish the result.

Sponsor a Fellow. The CAIRA Fellows programme has, in its first year, placed forty seven Caribbean women technologists in working assignments with Caribbean institutions. The bottleneck on the programme is not the Fellows. The bottleneck is institutional capacity to manage the assignments. If your institution can host a Fellow for three months, write to fellows@caribbeanaiassociation.com. The work the Fellows do is substantive. The cost to the host institution is modest. The career impact on the Fellow is, in our data, significant.

To Caribbean men in the field.

This section is the shortest, and the one I have thought about the most. I want to write it carefully.

The Caribbean men reading this newsletter are, in my experience, men of good faith who have read enough about gender equity to be sympathetic to its goals and busy enough with their own work that the specific tasks of advancing it are easy to defer. The deferral is, in 2026, the single largest accelerant on the gap that the rest of this article has described. The plan asks you for the following.

When you are organizing an event, a panel, an authorship list, a hiring shortlist, a board nomination, ask yourself who is missing from the list, and add at least one Caribbean woman before the list is final. If you do not know who to add, ask. We will tell you.

When you are in a meeting and a Caribbean woman is making a point, listen, and where appropriate, support the point in your own words attributing it to her. The pattern in which a woman's contribution is, ten minutes later, attributed to the man who repeated it, is a pattern Caribbean professional life has not been free of. Notice it. Push back on it.

When a Caribbean woman tells you, gently or otherwise, that something in your professional environment is unfair, take it seriously. The default reaction of disbelief or minimization is one Caribbean women have stopped expecting men to overcome. The men who do overcome it are the men who, in the long run, build the careers of the women around them, and the women remember.

When you have the chance to recommend a candidate, a speaker, an author, a researcher, do what we are asking the women to do, which is to recommend Caribbean women. The bench is deeper than you think. If you do not know it, ask.

These are not, in any of them, large asks. They are the small, repeated, daily asks that make the difference between an ecosystem that advances Caribbean women and one that talks about advancing them.

To the diaspora.

The Caribbean women in AI in the diaspora are, by our count, approximately three thousand of you, mostly in the same metros our Diaspora Working Group has chapters in. The plan, for you, has one additional element on top of what the in-region plan asks. Your visibility, mentoring, and recommendation work has higher leverage than the equivalent work in any single Caribbean country, because you sit in the institutions that produce the senior career outcomes our region's young women have, historically, had limited access to. The Caribbean woman in Brooklyn who is a director at a major US AI laboratory has the power to bring a Caribbean woman in Kingston into the candidate pool for a remote role. The Caribbean woman in Toronto who is a partner at a major firm has the power to bring a Caribbean woman in Port of Spain onto the speaker circuit. Use this power. The plan asks no more of you than to do so consistently.

The Association's own commitments.

I would not write this piece without naming, in public, the work the Association is signing up to. The commitments for 2026 are these.

The Board will reach gender parity by the end of 2026. We are at four of eight. The plan is five of eight by July, with the next appointments.

Every Working Group leadership team will be at least forty percent women by the end of the year. We are at five of seven now. The two outstanding groups have transition plans in place.

Every Association-organized event with more than five speakers will have at least forty percent women speakers. We will publish the numbers on every event programme. The October Summit will, on the current line-up, exceed this.

The Fellows programme will host one hundred women in 2026, up from forty seven in the first year. The matching team has been expanded.

The CAIRA pay band review, conducted in February for our own staff, has been published in the member portal. The remaining gap is two point one percent. The plan to close it in 2026 has been signed off.

A closing word.

I have been organizing in our region for twenty three years. The lesson I keep relearning, in every issue our communities have tried to advance, is that the work is not the announcement, the work is not the policy, the work is not the slogan. The work is the patient, repeated, accountable work of doing the small things again on the next Tuesday, and the Tuesday after that, and the Tuesday after that, until the small things have accumulated into a different reality. The Caribbean women in this field have done that work, in less favourable conditions than this region currently offers, for generations. The plan for 2026 is to make sure that, this Tuesday and the ones that follow, the rest of us are doing the work too.

If you are a Caribbean woman reading this and you have not, yet, taken up a place in our community that reflects what you have to offer, this is the month to do so. Write to me directly at aisha.mohan@caribbeanaiassociation.com. I read every letter.

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Aisha Mohan organizes community programmes across the Caribbean and chairs the CAIRA Diaspora Working Group.

Originally published in The Monthly Intelligence Report, March 2026.