The Corner Office Changes Hands: The Caribbean's Women Are Now Running Its Banks and Its Biggest Companies

A generation after the region's boardrooms were an almost entirely male preserve, women are taking the top chair at Caribbean banks and companies, four of Jamaica's major banks among them. This is a look at the trend, and a tribute to the women who earned it.

Walk into the head office of a Caribbean bank today and the nameplate on the top door is as likely to read a woman's name as a man's. That sentence would have been hard to write a generation ago, when the region's corner offices were an almost entirely male preserve. It is easy to write now, and it is worth pausing to celebrate why.

From a male preserve to a shared table

The shift is real and it is measurable. Globally, women held 34.0% of senior management roles in 2025, up from 19.4% in 2004, according to Grant Thornton's Women in Business report. That is not parity, and the same report cautions that the pace remains slow. But the direction of travel is unmistakable, and in parts of the Caribbean the change has come faster than the global average would suggest.

Nowhere is it clearer than in banking, long the most male of the region's corporate worlds. At Scotiabank Jamaica, the bank has said women hold more than 60% of its senior leadership roles. And across Jamaica's major banks, the very top job now belongs to a woman at four of them.

The women in the chair

Audrey Tugwell Henry rose from teacher to teller to the top office, and in 2021 became the first woman to serve as President and Chief Executive Officer of Scotiabank Jamaica, as the Jamaica Observer and the bank both recorded. Her climb, retold many times since, has become a template for what the journey can look like.

At the National Commercial Bank of Jamaica, Sheree Martin became the first woman to lead the bank in its history, taking the Chief Executive role on September 1, 2026 after serving as interim chief from January, the Jamaica Gleaner and Jamaica Observer reported. More than twenty years in financial services brought her to the chair.

Chorvelle Johnson leads Sagicor Bank Jamaica as its Chief Executive Officer, and has used the platform to urge women to lift one another in corporate spaces, as the Jamaica Observer reported in 2025. In September 2026, JN Bank named Luwanna Williams its Managing Director, bringing another of the island's major banks under a woman's leadership, per the Jamaica Gleaner.

The road was opened by others. In Trinidad and Tobago, Karen Darbasie served as the first woman to be Group Chief Executive of First Citizens, from April 2015 until she retired on October 21, 2025, as the Trinidad Guardian recorded. For a decade she was proof that the top of a major regional bank was a place a woman could stand. In Barbados, Carlene Seudat became the first female Managing Director of Republic Bank Barbados on July 4, 2024, arriving with more than two decades in risk management and corporate banking, Barbados Today reported.

Deserved, and not yet finished

None of this is charity, and none of it is tokenism. These are appointments won on track records in risk, in retail, in capital markets, in the hardest rooms of the business. It is right to celebrate them, and right too to name the women who came before and opened the doors, often without the recognition they were owed.

The work is not done. Thirty four percent is not parity, and the boardroom is not the whole of the economy. But the region can see clearly now what it once could not, that leadership was never a matter of who had traditionally held the chair. The Caribbean's women are running its banks and its businesses, and they are running them well. The Ledger salutes them.