Part 4 and final: Why IS beer so male?

Part 1: The customer is not always right * Part 2: Stop congratulating me for having ovaries * Part 3: Selling beer to women and other humans

Day 4. Are you tired of this topic yet? NOT HALF AS TIRED AS I AM.

It’s been an interesting week getting this stuff off my chest. I’m happy to report that no one has flamed me and I’ve had some good discussions online and off. Here are some things I’d like to state or restate:

1. Gender issues are important. I’m a feminist.  I’m still retiring this topic.
2. I’m not actually as pissed off about any of this stuff as I apparently sound, but a decade of minor beef can add up.
3. Sure, being a woman has helped me along the way. I’m sure it helped me get my first beer writing gig in 2002, and I’ve never gotten as many Twitter followers in one day as when The Beer Wench included me in a ladies of beer #ff. I look forward to the day when it doesn’t help because it doesn’t matter.
4. I got some pushback on my statement that women aren’t better tasters, despite citing science to the contrary. One friend found one article that mentioned without attribution that women have more taste buds. I’ll look into it. It’s interesting how many people (mostly men!) really do not want to let this one go.
5. I have plenty of women-loving male friends who would buy a dick joke beer with a cartoon package on the label because it would be hilarious. Love you guys.

Anyway, the final unanswerable question I am sometimes asked is some variation on “why is beer such a sausage fest?” I have two quick, flippant answers to this question: “I don’t know” and “it’s not.”

As I’ve said before, times are changing and younger women love beer. It may be too late for some female baby boomers or Gen Xers to change their ways, but I think we can stop worrying about this so much.

How about women in the beer industry? There are a ton of them. I once got assigned a Women in Beer(tm) article for the Yankee Brew News and my final product required them to put extra pages in the paper because my editor kept sending me more and more names of more and more women in the beer industry I was supposed to interview. And this was years ago. Ratios aren’t 50-50 yet, but the mere fact of being female in the beer industry is not a novelty anymore.

Now how about female beer business owners? The numbers there aren’t as good. But honestly, the numbers on female business ownership in general aren’t that good. This isn’t a beer problem, it’s a planet earth problem.

Female workers at specialty beer bars and taprooms? Again, it’s not 50-50, but there’re plenty of us. And if anything, being female….well, an attractive female anyway…can be a plus when applying for front-of-house work.

I think when a lot of people moan about the lack of Women in Beer(tm) they are really saying “there aren’t enough female brewers.” There aren’t. And I have no solution.

Homebrewing is both a hobby and a culture
It’s safe to say most professional brewers started as homebrewers. Meanwhile, homebrewing is still predominantly male.

Why? Beats me. But I think it may be relevant that when homebrewers started forming their communities there weren’t very many women in the game. Homebrewing used to be illegal, then, for years, it was simply hard to figure out how to do it right, so homebrew groups (formal and informal) were important for sharing information (and beer). Whatever your gender, it’s not easy to walk into a tight-knit community and try to work your way in.

That said, some homebrewers could make fewer assumptions upon seeing an unfamiliar woman at a homebrew event/meeting/store. Let’s treat them the same as you’d treat a man. That means:

• don’t ask “are you a brewer?”
• don’t get all excited if she is
• don’t ask if her husband/boyfriend brews

It’s a generalization but perhaps also worth mentioning that in my experience the homebrew culture sometimes devalues stovetop brewing (which some women may feel more at home with due to getting an unfair share of the cooking duties while growing up or in their relationships) and considers outdoor all-grain brewing — which often involves building and tinkering with a system — the end goal of learning to brew.

Where do pro brewers come from?
I don’t know what makes someone decide to brew beer for a living. But here is a list of facts.

• The brewing profession requires being comfortable around machinery, getting dirty, and doing physical labor.
• The brewing profession requires a certain amount of math and science.
• Women are socially conditioned from childhood to be less comfortable with all of the above.

I probably don’t need to spend much time addressing the fact that there are a lot of manual-labor, dirty-work fields that are predominantly male. But those aren’t groovy-sounding jobs like MAKING BEER DUDE, so we don’t care as much that there aren’t many women hauling ass at construction sites or fixing your car.

You don’t need a hardcore science background to work for a brewery — I’ve known plenty of guys with liberal arts degrees or no degree who became brewers. But there are a LOT of people in brewing who love science and engineering, and it certainly doesn’t hurt. I don’t think we can address the gender imbalance in brewing until we address the gender imbalance in the STEM fields in general, which is going to be much more difficult than breweries doing their best to hire qualified women. Whatever happens to turn women off to math and science in their childhood and adolescence is complicated and not well understood, despite people smarter than me spending a lot of time and energy on it.

I’d love a world where all girls and women (and all men and boys) are comfortable with math, science, tinkering with machines, and lifting heavy shit. That this world doesn’t exist yet is not the beer industry’s fault. I’m sorry there’s no magic bullet, but not as sorry as your average female engineer or computer hacker. More female brewers would be great.  So would more female chemists and auto mechanics.

And I’m done
Thus concludes everything I have to say about women and beer for the foreseeable future. Note that it’s everything I, Jen, have to say about the subject, not everything that there is to be said. As the Dude said, “well, that’s, just, like, your OPINION, man.” You think what you want to think, write what you want to write, and drink what you want to drink. Thanks to all you beer people of every gender, race, sexual orientation, etc etc etc. Cheers.

Credit: Steve Breen of The San Diego Union-Tribune

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