Why are 30 percent of today’s graduates from the Jamaican campus of the University of the West Indies (UWI) male whilst in 1948 the figure stood at 70 percent? Men make up 90 percent of professorial appointments and boys remain dominant in certain technical and vocational fields, notably engineering. Why is this the case? And why have girls challenged traditionally male fields such as medicine whilst boys have not done the same in traditional female fields such as nursing? Research at UWI suggests that these trends are the outcome of historical male privileging and that policies based on this perspective will produce better long-term results than those based on a notion of male marginalization.