And Another Thing
The Gender Pint Gap: Revisited - Reflection Piece #3 of 3
“..there are groups of beer-loving women having a great time but mostly running PR campaigns for breweries with little or no gains for themselves or for the wider cause.”
PHOTO: Ryan Walsh
The Gender Pint Gap: Revisited is a report from Dea Latis on women’s relationships with beer in 2024. I urge you to read it if you haven’t already.
It’s a follow-on from the 2018 study, The Gender Pint Gap, and it offers some important reading.
This is the third and final instalment in a series of three reflection pieces, as I digest the new findings alongside my own experiences and conversations across the beer industry over the last six years.
In this piece I want to take a look at one specific point that came out of this recent study, and also I share some of my thoughts on a certain high profile beer equality campaign that I’m worried might have lost its way.
The taste of beer is most important to women in the 45 to 54 age group.
Yes, older women drink beer too. I am one, in fact.
However, when you think of a woman in craft beer, I’ll bet that you visualise a young woman - maybe a 20-something student type, or a 30-something festival-goer or young professional.
In the report itself it states “A quick search of internet images showed young women beer drinkers being portrayed as '“cool”, whereas older women beer drinkers were portrayed as working class, don’t care about how they look and uninformed about their drink of choice.”
Women at the mid-to-older end of the spectrum are just not being represented at all in mainstream beer advertising; they are completely invisible. As a result, they are also not being marketed to.
Why does this matter? Well, women over 40 are driving 93% of consumer decisions. It matters.
In the 2019 census, women over 40 were shown to be earning more money than women under 40 for the first time ever.
In the words of Eleanor Mills, founder of Noon, a platform to empower women in midlife:
“That is huge because it used to be that women’s wages achieved parity with men in our twenties, but then we hit the maternity years, and our earning power fell back. What that statistic shows is that a whole generation of women has gone on working and earning and becoming more senior through and beyond their childbearing years (and indeed nearly a third of university-educated women DON’T have kids, 40% of those by choice) – so we are hitting midlife with our own financial powerbase as professionals. We are a new cohort in the world.”
When we think about the type of women who drink beer, we need to remember that it’s not just younger women. It would be remiss of any beer business to ignore the potential of marketing to women aged 40+.
PHOTO: Nicci Peet
International Women’s Day
When beer does champion and represent women in the industry, it usually does it on and around International Women’s Day.
Participation in International Women’s Day projects has become an annual staple across the beer industry, thanks to the efforts of Sophie de Ronde of Burnt Mill who established the genius International Women’s Collaboration Brew Day initiative back in 2014. The volunteer-led initiative has now taken a step back but efforts continue annually across the UK.
As much as I absolutely love the coming together of beer women and the innovation that comes from this magical collective of brewing projects, I’ve become aware of a few things recently that are a red flag. I’m concerned that IWD activities might have become something of a - if you’ll excuse the phrase - ‘women-washing’ project for the beer industry. It’s all too easy to present images of women in breweries for one day, and to then feel like you’re ‘doing your bit’ for beer equality. Box, ticked.
However, as The Gender Pint Gap: Revisited shows, despite the growing prominence of International Women’s Day activities over recent years, unless there are real commitments that sit behind this public display of feminism, it’s meaningless and nothing will change. I’m talking about efforts like charitable donations to women’s causes, internal advancement programmes for underrepresented people in our teams, apprenticeship schemes targeted at women, a promise to have leadership teams at 50/50 within the next 3 years - you get the idea.
As it stands, there are groups of beer-loving women having a great time but mostly running PR campaigns for breweries with little or no gains for themselves or for the wider cause. I have concerns about the free labour women give to the equality cause anyway - but I’ll save that for another article.
Personally, I’ve felt grateful for every opportunity I’ve been given to take centre stage for the day and gather together the army of women I’ve grown to know and love across the beer industry and wider equality landscape. Unfortunately it has, without exception over the past six years, left me feeling exhausted and unclear on any lasting impact or continued efforts.
Women need to drive IWD projects with male allies. I’ve all too often heard things like ‘it’s your day so I’ll step back and let you run with it’. Please don’t - women need you to step up more than ever. We need active allies and visible cheerleaders, not passive colleagues. When men in male dominated spaces open a door for women and then run away, it feels shallow and akin to the doorstep ‘clap for nurses’ in Covid times. It’s nice, but it’s not enough. We need more substance and a commitment to real change behind these acts, not token gestures.
Closing Words
The Gender Pint Gap: Revisited evidences yet again the fact that on the whole, women's attitudes towards beer have remained largely unchanged since 2018. All signs indicate this is because the industry is simply not trying change things with any kind of real commitment or plan.
We urgently need leaders across the industry to step outside of the beer bubble. So much of the beer world exists within a comforting echo chamber, but it’s not what’s best for the health and resilience of this industry. With pubs and breweries closing their doors at an astonishing rate, margins being squeezed all over and a workforce feeling burned out, with many walking away for good, this is not the time to continue resting on our laurels.
Over the past four years the world has gone through a period of astonishing change, and yet the beer industry has stood quite still. I fear for what the future holds if the industry continues to resist a real commitment to reaching beyond itself for engagement and diversification of new leaders and customers.
The view from outside of the bubble looks very different. Stepping out can unlock a critical new perspective and it will become clear what needs to be done to truly make the beer industry thrive in these modern times - and yes, it involves bringing in many more women to support and help drive this much-needed transformation.
Read The Gender Pint Gap: Revisited. It features a 10-point manifesto, offering a practical guide to drive change.
This article is a 3-part series.
Read part one - We Need To Rethink How We Talk About Beer | Read part two - Beer Workplaces Are Failing Women