Grounds for complaint: female baristas struggle to change cafe culture
Women are barely visible in barista competitions and remain outnumbered by men behind the coffee machines. Do cafes have a gender problem?
Visit enough specialty cafes in Melbourne and Sydney and you will notice a few recurring themes: blond wood countertops, Edison lightbulbs, leather aprons ... and a distinct lack of women making the coffee.
Like science, technology and engineering, the coffee industry has a pronounced gender gap, and it’s apparent not just in the inner city.
In the competitive coffee world, women are barely visible, relegated to behind the scenes work. Nine of the 10 staff who run the Ireland-based World Coffee Events are women; but in the 15 years the organisation has run the World Barista Championship (WBC), it has never been won by a woman. In the world latte art championships, also run by WCE, only five of this year’s 36 finalists were women.
It is a problem that has baffled the industry for years. Gwilym Davies, the 2009 world barista champion, dressed in drag to discuss the competition’s gender imbalance at an event in 2011. Weary and wearing red lipstick, he said the over-representation of men did not reflect the English cafe culture he grew up in. “I think the lack of females that are reaching the top end of competition is bad for us as an industry,” he concluded.
Emily Oak, who was on the board of the WBC from 2002 to 2012 and who now works as NSW operations manager for St Ali coffee roasters, estimates that 80% of competitors at WBC are men.
The lack of visibility can have a trickle-down effect. Eileen Kenny, a barista in Adelaide who has worked at many of the top cafes in Melbourne and as a photographer at the WBC, says the “lack of women in the WBC finals may contribute to creating a vicious cycle where women feel it’s not worth entering the comps”.
Helena Holmes has witnessed sexism from both sides of the counter while working as a barista in Brisbane and Melbourne. Over the past six years she says she has seen inexperienced men given shifts over more highly skilled and experienced women, management hiring more male baristas instead of training the existing female staff, and cafes with an all-female floor staff. “It blew my mind how much of a divide there was,” she says.
Holmes says this adds to Australia’s gender pay gap, as “many cafes in Melbourne pay their baristas a higher hourly wage – maybe a dollar more” than floor staff.
A study using data from the Australian Tax Office found that 58% of “bar attendants and baristas” were women, but men were 2.5 times more likely to reach the highest tax bracket in that occupation. As baristas typically earn more than servers (or “attendants”), this suggests men are more likely to be given the barista jobs.
Female baristas contacted by Guardian Australia say they earn from $19 to $25 an hour. But most seem more concerned with a lack of recognition than remuneration, citing a public misconception that men were more qualified coffee makers. Holmes is not the only barista who says that “nine times out of 10” customers bypass her when she is standing behind the coffee machine to congratulate her male co-workers on the coffee. Kenny regularly has the same experience, saying it makes her “super aware” of her gender and the assumptions many people have about her capabilities.
Elika Rowell, who recently departed as head barista at Melbourne celebrity favourite Top Paddock to become part owner and head roaster at Square One, also cites public perception as problematic. “If I had a dollar for every time a customer has asked for a man to make their coffee, or to speak to ‘that guy’ because of the assumption that they are the manager, I’d possibly have enough money to buy myself a nice, new, pretty pink dress – because that’s what women do with their money, right?”
The lack of recognition in cafes may begin to explain what Davies describes as the competitive world’s “sausage fest”. But Oak believes women’s visibility in cafes has begun to improve. “Certainly historically it has been a male-dominated industry and baristas as a profession are a relatively new concept,” she says. “[But] in the last five years or so there has been an emergence of more women working as baristas and in the coffee industry in general.”
Nevertheless, barriers remain. Rowell says: “There are some places in Melbourne that do have a hyper-masculine environment that may encourage more men to apply to work there. But I truly believe that this comes from the top. Creating a comfortable environment for both men and women will take you far.”
In the meantime, she says, women need to keep demonstrating their ability. “The only way we can progress is by doing what we do, and doing it really well.”
Source: The Guardian, Sarah Gooding, 19th August 2015
Originally published as: Grounds for complaint: female baristas struggle to change cafe culture
