A couple years ago, I was visiting a coffee roaster in Odense, Denmark when I encountered a bag of beans titled simply, “Women’s Coffee.” This was the only bag from six to eight roasts named after something other than local neighborhoods in the city. “What’s ‘women’s coffee’?” I asked them. As it turns out, the roaster sourced these coffee beans from a women’s cooperative. Still, I began to suspect that lofty phrases like “empowering women in coffee” rely on certain abstract ideals—things we collectively believe we understand, but which we haven’t clearly defined or discussed enough.
According to the 2018 International Coffee Organization report “Gender Equality in the Coffee Sector,” women perform around 70% of labor in coffee production. The latter figure varies by region: from 50-80% in Vietnam, to 65-70% in Ethiopia, and 75% in Colombia. At the same time, between 20-30% of coffee farms are female-operated.
Women’s outsized contributions in the male-dominated trade of coffee reflects the phenomenon researcher Dr. Erika Koss calls the “gendered coffee paradox.” Deeply-ingrained gender roles hinder how women view their own value, says photographer and storyteller Lucía Bawot. She visited 62 women for her 2023 book “We Belong: An Anthology of Colombian Women Coffee Farmers,” which aimed to make women’s invisible labor, visible. “They’d tell me, ‘My story is not really important. Do you want to talk to my husband?’” Bawot says. “They didn’t feel capable.”
From roastery websites to coffee conferences to the’ Instagrams of coffee farmers like Rituales Café and Java Halu Coffee, there is a growing movement that aims to “empower women”—but how much of it is just talk?
Women coffee farmers
Ana Maria Donneys, owner of Café Primitivo, is a fifth-generation caficultora (coffee grower) in Armenia, Colombia. “Men always managed the farms in my family,” Donneys says. “Because my grandfather had two daughters and I was his only grandchild, only women could continue, if we wanted to.”
Other male farm owners expected her mother and aunt to sell the land—so at 26 years old, Donneys decided to take over management of six farms. But the male farm workers were resistant to her desire to shift production to value coffee quality over quantity. “I couldn’t walk alone in the fields because they would start whistling,” Donneys says.
Now 30, Donneys is a Q Grader finishing her Master’s in Coffee Agribusiness. Before Primitivo had a coffee lab, she’d invite male employees to the (literal) cupping table—and once the coffee won higher prices, they realized she’d been right. “I needed results to earn their respect,” she says.
Donneys believes she entered coffee at a time when there are many more opportunities for young, English-speaking women, accompanied by the education to create a brand around their coffee. But it’s still uncommon for women to have this level of decision-making power.
Women perform various often-overlapping roles on coffee farms, including planting seedlings, weeding fields, picking ripe cherries, and preparing them for storage and transport. Ethiolatin research found that Ethiopian women contribute 81% of sowing, 100% of harvesting, 98% of land preparation, and 92% of transportation—much of which has historically, and uncharitably, been called “unskilled labor.” That extends to the particularly undervalued work of kitchen staff on farm dynamics: both women and men told Bawot they choose seasonal farm labor based on the cafeteria’s food quality.
Historically, gender roles have been shaped by disparities in land ownership laws. “Many women aren’t seen as coffee farmers because they can’t sell the coffee under their name,” says Bawot. Some women inherit farms after male relatives die naturally, as in Donneys’ case. In countries that have seen violent conflict like Rwanda and Colombia, women have inherited farms after male relatives were killed. In Kenya, where women provide 80% of agricultural labor, they own only 1% of land with a single title, compared to 18.6% in neighboring Rwanda and 36% in Colombia.
Many countries are introducing land-policy reforms to address gender inequality—but it’s not an automatic fix. When Costa Rican coffee producer Marianella Báez Jost and her American husband bought Café Con Amor in 2013, she says, “I had to shop for a farm with my brother and dad […] Men are the negotiators in the eyes of this society.” She later joined the Board of Directors of the local International Women’s Coffee Alliance (IWCA), an organization with a stated vision to “be the leader of empowerment and equity for all women in coffee.”
She’s one of many women committed to pushing progress. Yellow Rooster Coffee Imports Relationship Manager Sara Bedoya co-founded the IWCA Colombia chapter in 2021, and later started what she calls an Antioquía sister association in 2023. She now advises 60 women on branding and potential clients alongside her full-time job.
Although their husbands are the main landowners, the women find space to advance. “They went from working in the kitchen to going to school to learn about management, marketing, and sales,” Bedoya says. “I see myself as a bridge for them.”
How we view “empowerment”
From the US to Colombia and Ethiopia, the perception of “empowerment” varies between cultural contexts. Bedoya says it feels stronger in Spanish, whereas it’s been watered down in English. “It’s like, ‘This latte empowers me to go about my day,’” she jokes. “Latin culture is very machista, so when I say I empower women, and other women empower me, it’s like we are making a difference in history.”
“In Ethiopia, making women equal participants in coffee would be like an oxymoron because they’re the dominant participants,” says Dagmawi I.E., CEO of Eshi Safaris LLC and director of programs for Grounds for Health, which has provided women’s health programs in coffee-growing communities since 1996. His wife owns a roastery in Addis Abeba. “But the support they need for equitable participation is very different.”
Although motherhood is still Ethiopian women’s biggest leverage to influence discourse, they don’t see themselves as “victims,” he says. “As a society, we’re increasingly aware that I should get access because of me, not because of my husband.”
Essentially, empowerment is about how we wield it: There is a big difference between whether women are empowered, or whether they empower themselves.
“The agriculture industry has an interest and a role supporting greater levels of female autonomy, agency, and empowerment,” says Greg Meenahan, strategic advisor and program developer at Equal Origins. Doing it right, however, takes concerted effort. “We have to involve men and boys in these conversations, but they don’t have the right to give or not give empowerment,” says Meenahan. “Empowerment is when women with agency and knowledge take part in decision-making [while] not restricted by time poverty.” In fact, women’s time is spread so thin across agricultural and domestic responsibilities that they often don’t have time to participate in initiatives aiming to empower them, he says.
Promoting gender equity means moving beyond programs to improve coffee yield or quality towards a holistic understanding of the factors affecting women—which is why Equal Origins developed the Gender Equity Index (GEI) for use in the coffee and cacao supply chains. The tool assesses participating coffee businesses across five granular categories, and rates their performance against industry benchmarks. It’s based on the “Reach, Benefit, Empower, and Transform” framework that lays out a roadmap for scalable impact, from efforts to include women at a basic level; to meeting their health, income, and other needs for well-being; to strengthening their decision-making abilities and participation; and finally to shifting gendered attitudes at a community level.
“The teams we work are predominantly men,” says Meenahan. “Using the GEI, teams shift gender equity from being someone else’s job, to being clearly defined within the context of each member’s role, duties, and responsibility on the team.”
Marketing empowerment
Coffee companies have different methods for supporting women coffee producers. “We’re doing the bare minimum [and] using our purchasing power as roasters and retailers to shift the narrative in support of women,” says Jenny Ulbricht, who founded East View Coffee Company in 2020 with women’s empowerment in mind. “Coffee value is more than a number on a tasting notes sheet. There are people behind that number and the truth is, most of those people are women,” she says. East View now sources 90% of coffee from women producers—including Marianella Báez Jost—up from an initial 50%.
Meanwhile, Kahawa 1893 has adapted a Kenyan “table banking” model that allows consumers to directly tip women producers during checkout and/or via QR code on the coffee packaging. Founder Margaret Nyamumbo says the company has raised $90,000 since 2017 by matching $45,000 in customer tips.
Today, says Meenahan, “women owners are among the most visible women in the supply chain, especially compared to the women who co-farms with her husband.” The coffee industry’s complicated dynamics, however, lead him to caution that “a woman-owned farm doesn’t necessarily mean that the farm is more or less gender equitable than any other farm.”
In addition, the marketing around empowerment concerns some producers. “In my opinion, it doesn’t matter if you’re buying directly from a female-owned coffee farm if you’re not paying attention to the damage caused by climate change in coffee-producing regions and consistently low prices,” which often don’t cover cost of production, says Karla Boza, a coffee producer and Q Grader at Finca San Antonio Amatepec in El Salvador.
The empowerment that women need
The industry must urgently ensure coffee farming remains environmentally and financially sustainable for farmers. When asked about the support they need most, women most commonly mentioned access to credit.
Amanda Bravo co-founded Rituales Café in Medellín, Colombia, as a social impact venture in 2017, when she was frequently mistaken as her male co-founders’ employee. Bravo says she’s since broken the paradigm: Customers are now more accepting of women in management. Rituales now employs 80% women, but still faces challenges. “Finding banks that finance women’s businesses in Colombia isn’t easy, nor does the government offer much aid,” she says.
Microfinance programs have shown promise. “Microfinance just isn’t a sexy thing to talk about, but it has a huge impact,” says Amaris Gutierrez-Rey, VP of Coffee at Joe Coffee Company.
Women also want opportunities to share knowledge with other women, like Bean Voyage’s Women-Powered Coffee Summit where Bawot and Koss connected, or through the IWCA network that connects 14,000+ women across the value chain, including Bedoya and Donneys. “Empowerment is having a community,” Donneys says. “It’s how I feel strong.”
Empowerment for everyone
Despite coffee’s unambiguously inequitable colonial history, Nyamumbo, Dagmawi I.E., and Meenahan have all called it “a tool for impact/empowerment.”
Today, smallholder coffee farmers continue to live in poverty. Research shows coffee’s current economic model is unviable for farmers, partially because family labor isn’t properly accounted for. (It also shows there is enough value in coffee for everyone, if we change the model.)
Far from overshadowing the need to pay everyone in coffee production at least a living income, women’s empowerment is key to the solution. “Any conversation about equitable value distribution needs to incorporate gender equity,” says Gutierrez-Rey, adding, “No sustainable climate solutions are without gender equity in the equation.” The conversation is stifled, however, by a persistent lack of current gender data, which Gutierrez-Rey highlighted through the Women in Coffee Project.
As for “empowerment,” Dr. Koss suggests “accompaniment,” or “walking alongside,” as an alternative. But not everyone will agree on the language, or the right way to do it.
“Women are not a monolith,” Bawot says, and she’s right—even the women in this article differ! Bawot herself says she will no longer buy coffee marketed as produced by women—because coffee is inherently produced by women.
“I think we need to stop putting the value of women coffee farmers in their gender,” she says. Then, she channels the future she’d like to see: “You should be helping me because I’m a capable farmer, just like my husband, my cousin, and my uncle—and pay me for the labor that adds value to that coffee.”
Chloé Skye Weiser is a freelance sustainability and food writer from NYC and based in Denmark. Read more from Chloé Skye Weiser on Sprudge.