Serving People Serving Coffee Since 2005
Issue link: http://baristamagazine.epubxp.com/i/686001
61 www.baristamagazine.com at all. And when I wrote that article [on Medium.com], I got a lot of responses. Some people said it sounded like whining." Here is my favorite line from her article about miniscule moments or things she has heard: "When are we going to stop talking about gender?" When I told someone I was writing about gender and authority in the coffee industry for a previously published article in Barista, I remember this very dismissive comment: "Well, my boss is a woman." Respectfully, this is very similar to refusing a climate change conversation by reminding everyone it still snows in Chicago. Language is a powerful thing. Language informs how we think, it informs the way we treat each other. There is a reason some parts of the world say female "genital mutilation" and others still want us to use the term "female circumcision." If there is one thing I want to make clear, it is this: I believe we are allowed to care about language, especially in the retail environment. In my experience, those who are not intentional with their language are the same people who say all this dancing around language and trying to be politically correct prevents the real conversations from happening. I think what prevents those real conversations from happening is blocking someone from expressing their opinion. It shuts people down when you tell them to stop caring or stop being sensitive to a customer or a fellow employee's remark. Where do you go from there? When you get angry with someone for expressing their opinion, assuming that by sharing it they are pegging you as the problem, where do you go from there? You don't go anywhere. When you ask someone to explain their opinion without an agenda to tell them why it's wrong, where do you go from there? You begin to understand them, and you begin to form your own opinions about how you want to treat others. So let's try something new. When women talk about their experiences in the coffee industry as baristas, retailers, competitors, etc., let's all just stop for a moment. What they're talking about is worth reflection. Next, let's think. Let's try to come up with solutions together. Without an agenda to disagree, we can work together to try to make the situation better. We can experiment, evaluate, try another solution. We may just arrive at a point where we don't hear daily that a woman in our industry is uncomfortable doing something or serving someone because she is a woman. "Managers can talk about what they value so employees can feel comfortable speaking up," says Jenn. Teresa adds, "As women I think we need to be encouraging people to see things from more sides. These things are complicated. Everyone has a different threshold of comfort, and sometimes it's OK to call me 'honey,' and sometimes it's not. It's confusing for us, too. I'm not suggesting we police speech, but it's not enough to recognize that in our industry small companies can tend to be liberal. The smallness allows fluidity, but usually they are not big enough to have clearly defined corporate discrimination policies." Liz Dean, director of retail for Irving Farm, says: "You need to build in support for issues like this. I think everyone, regardless of whether they're working in retail coffee as a career or a part-time position while they finish school, is deserving of a safe, comfortable, welcome workplace where they are heard. I do think that sometimes how those issues are handled can be a deterrent for people in further pursuing a career within the service and hospitality industry." Liz notes that female baristas are not the only ones who face discrimination. I myself can personally recall several moments where male baristas felt offended by their customers. Talking more about women, however, doesn't mean we stop there. Liz says that it's because of conversations about women that we have been able to go beyond that binary, too. Currently, she is working to train staff on not addressing people using gendered language at all in the workplace. "When you make things better for women, you make things better for others, too," says Trish. For her, that extends even beyond the counter. "We hired a small woman in the roasting room, so we equalized the space," Trish says. "My husband and I rigged up a hoist system so she wasn't hoisting bags all by herself or having to ask for help. People should just do that in general. Men shouldn't be throwing their backs out either." There are, however, issues that do, by and large, disproportionately affect some people over others in our industry. Colleen discussed safety as one of those issues—specifically as a non-heteronomative female traveling alone in origin countries plagued by conflict or sexual violence. This should give us some insight into the reality that there are spaces where hypermasculine, heteronormative men are preferred. Do we have those spaces in the Global North, too? Veteran barista and roaster Talor Browne, who will be opening her roastery, Talor & Jørgen, in the coming months in Oslo, Norway, wrote an article about equity in barista competitions, published at the end of March also on Medium.com, titled, "The Specialty Coffee Industry Has a Gender Problem." Talor quoted colleagues who have mentioned that this aggressive culture leaves out women, but also other men,