The Gendered Coffee Paradox: Mapping a Deeper Analysis of Gender Inequity | 25, Issue 23
Dr. ERIKA KOSS discusses her PhD research that focuses on the experiences of women coffee farmers in Kenya, and a problem she names as the Gendered Coffee Paradox.
I first met Dr. Erika Koss at the Women-Powered Coffee Summit, an annual event hosted by Bean Voyage. Several months later, Erika shared the draft for this piece, prompting me to reflect on the summit’s name: Women-Powered Coffee. Her feature—which is based on her recently defended doctoral thesis—serves as a powerful reminder that coffee is much more than women grown, women owned, women roasted, or women led. While these terms describe some of the ways that women contribute to coffee, none of them alone captures the breadth and depth of women’s labor and impact. Women power coffee in countless and complex ways—through a combination of paid and unpaid, visible and invisible labor—across the entire value system.
Yet, as women contribute expertise, win awards, and support coffee production through care work, many still receive an inequitable share of its value. As Erika explains, the coffee sector’s gender inequity is deeply rooted in patriarchal norms and colonial histories, which have alienated women (and other people who are marginalized by patriarchal systems) from the benefits of their own labor. In her studies on coffee and gender—which focus on, but are not limited to, Kenya and East Africa—Erika evidences a paradox: there is a contradiction between the immense value that women generate and the amount they receive.
This situation echoes the concept introduced by Daviron and Ponte, known as the “Coffee Paradox.” In this case, the paradox describes how coffee-consuming countries experience a “coffee boom,” marked by rising demand and high retail prices, while coffee-producing countries simultaneously endure a “coffee crisis,” characterized by low earnings for producers. Building on this idea, Erika introduces the “Gendered Coffee Paradox.” She sheds light on how women’s contributions—both locally and globally—continue to be systematically undervalued and overlooked, even as demand for specialty coffee (which is often associated with attributes like transparency or sustainability) grows.
As part of her doctoral research, Erika conducted over 150 interviews with coffee professionals in East Africa. Her extensive interview process highlights what we can learn by talking (and listening!) to women about their work in the coffee sector. For example, many interviewees highlighted how their personal experiences reflect broader historical or systemic barriers, giving us insight into how we can improve the entire coffee system or our own workplace. Alongside interview testimony, Erika grounds potential solutions in the writings of activists like Dr. Wangari Maathai and intersectional feminist thinkers such as Angela Y. Davis. Intersectional feminism may hold the key to transformational change. It examines how various forms of discrimination intersect, because women and the challenges they face are not homogenous. Drawing from this rich archive of feminist theory and the lived experiences of the women she interviewed, Erika offers a powerful and nuanced framework to address gender inequity in the coffee industry.
LAUREL CARMICHAEL (they/them)
Publications Manager
More than a decade after working as a barista in the mid-1990s in San Diego, I moved to Boston where, among other new pursuits, I started working on my second master’s degree in political science, focused on USA–Rwanda relations.
I had been in East Africa in 1994, where I heard first-hand testimonies about atrocities that would later be known as Rwanda’s genocide against the Tutsi.[1] Through my study of this turmoil—in part caused by the collapse of the International Coffee Agreement in 1989—I began to explore the relationship between the political and economic history of coffee in Rwanda and its relations to the genocide.
I scoured my university library for available books in English, reading dozens on the global political and social history of coffee. But the more I read, the more I noticed a glaring absence: I couldn’t find women’s accounts of their lives in coffee. In the context of English language books, I kept asking: where were the coffee-centered books written by female scholars from any coffee-producing country?
Yes, there were journal articles, but no books, no monographs. Such a striking omission fueled my desire to continue studying coffee in a doctoral program. Reading more broadly, I continued to search, questioning: where were women’s coffee stories, whether from farmer to barista, from miller to roaster?
By the time I began my PhD in 2017, a few exceptions emerged: Drs. Paige West and Catherine Tucker had published scholarly coffee books with sections that included some stories of women farmers in Papua New Guinea[2] and Honduras.[3] Most of all, Dr. Sarah Lyon inspired me through her book Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets and many articles expressing her lens as a feminist anthropologist.[4] Yet, despite these and a few other promising examples, the gendered silence spoke volumes to me, especially after I encountered a book called The Coffee Paradox, published in 2005.[5]
Figure 1. Coffee cherries photographed by Erika during her visits to women farmers.
The Coffee Paradox
The term “the coffee paradox,” created by two social scientists Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, describes the unequal political and trade relations of the coffee industry. By using the term “paradox,” they highlight a situation that seems to be a contradiction—in this case, referring to the reality that the global trade of coffee creates both prosperity and poverty, in large part based on geography. More specifically, they noticed that part of the paradox included a “coffee crisis” in producing countries—including increasingly low prices for commercial coffee despite trade liberalization—while consuming countries experienced a “coffee boom” through the growing desire, and ability to pay for high-quality coffee. As Daviron and Ponte observe, this dichotomy between who profits and who doesn’t is a key injustice embedded in global value chains, in coffee and in many other agricultural crops.
But too often, unjust social dynamics are ignored. During my PhD fieldwork in Kenya, I observed an additional coffee paradox, which Daviron and Ponte and other scholars have overlooked, one that originated under colonial rule in coffee-producing countries. Not only does an ongoing paradox exist due to international trade dynamics, but a paradox also exists in social relations through gendered inequities. This paradox is what I have named “the gendered coffee paradox.” One aspect of this paradox includes the way that intersections of gender, race, and class have led to particular types of discrimination and marginalization that some women experience.[6]
What is the Gendered Coffee Paradox?
The term summarizes the contradictions implied when the global coffee industry undervalues women’s labor and disproportionally rewards men. In my case study of Kenya, my research demonstrated that “coffee depends on women”—women’s labor in coffee is essential for Kenya as a nation, for communities, and for households. Yet, in the 21st century, coffee continues to “belong to the man,” a comment I repeatedly heard from Kenyans—both men and women—whom I interviewed for my PhD study. This reproduces inequitable relationships, not only between countries who produce and export coffee (because they depend on cash crops for their foreign exchange), but also between men and women. This is why I argue that an additional coffee paradox exists for some women in Kenya: Although women’s labor is essential to the very foundation of coffee production, women often remain alienated and undervalued, in part due to a gendered international or national division of labor, as well as gender-assigned roles in the domestic sphere.
The gendered coffee paradox is problematic for many reasons, especially in the ways it requires rural women to use their labor to produce and reproduce “value” through international markets under 21st-century neoliberalism. Capitalism is not favorable to women, especially women marginalized by race, class, nationality, education, or other factors.[7] The diverse challenges women face are oversimplified and obscured when the specialty coffee sector groups all women into a single category rather than recognizing them as individuals with unique attributes that shape their power and agency in different contexts. Consider land ownership as an example: according to a 2018 International Coffee Organization report, “up to 70% of labor in coffee production is provided by women” while only “between 20% and 30% of coffee farms are female operated.”[8] The gendered coffee paradox relies on women’s unpaid and underpaid labor—especially at the farm level—but also in other coffee jobs. The challenge remains: we don’t have data about the gaps for female traders, roasters, baristas, or more—yet another aspect of this gendered paradox.
Figure 2. Coffee plants photographed by Erika during her time visiting farmers in Kenya.
A Colonial Context: The Origin of the Gendered Coffee Paradox
The legacy of extractivism remains evident in coffee’s global supply chain. One ongoing, often-overlooked dimension is that gendered relations were restructured under colonialism, and are now, at times, perpetuated under neoliberal capitalism.
For example, the British colonial government enacted a violent agenda in Kenya that included the seizure of land and the separation of families. Historian Dr. Walter Rodney noted that, due to colonialism, African women’s “social, religious, constitutional, and political privileges and rights disappeared, while the economic exploitation continued and was often intensified.”[9] In her 2018 foreword to a reprinting of Rodney’s book How Europe Undeveloped Africa, Angela Y. Davis reflected on his arguments, arguing that “the impact of colonialism on labor in Africa redefined men’s work as ‘modern,’ while constituting women’s work as ‘traditional’ or ‘backward.’”[10]
This displays another key aspect of the gendered coffee paradox; namely that gendered discrimination persists in both spheres of labor: the productive and the reproductive. Women may be underpaid or inequitably paid in the “productive” sphere of cash crop agriculture, too often receiving no wages, or lower wages than men. In the “reproductive” sphere of care work for children, elders, or the sick, women are often unpaid despite the double workload. Cash crops, such as coffee—which in Kenya arrived in the 1890s via missionaries—fueled a gendered division of labor and women’s exploitation in both agricultural and social spheres.
A specific example can be seen through colonialism’s insistence on the requirement of a “title deed” for land ownership where an African male “head of household” was listed, not their wife (or wives). Title deeds shifted land relations away from community/family to individual ownership, ultimately disenfranchising women. Nobel laureate and founder of the Green Belt Movement, Dr. Wangari Maathai, regularly wrote about ways that the land suffered under colonial rule based on her own lived experience in Kenya. She remembered that colonial authorities “brought with them a concept of land ownership that was alien to much of the African continent.”[11] This shift also forced women to divert attention away from their subsistence crops to cash crops like coffee, creating a cash-based system where African women were paid less, if at all, compared to African men’s wages.
The diverse challenges women face are oversimplified and obscured when the specialty coffee sector groups all women into a single category rather than recognizing them as individuals with unique attributes that shape their power and agency in different contexts.
Gendered Challenges: Land and Wages
In addition to ongoing data gaps in both the historical record and contemporary accounts focused on women’s stories, my research—which included more than 150 interviews with people working throughout East Africa’s coffee sectors[12]—revealed many ongoing gender gaps. Women coffee producers expressed that their top two challenges were land and wages.[13]
When I asked women farmers in Kenya what the number one challenge for women in coffee was, their immediate response was “land.” A Kenyan woman in her 20s, Cynthia Nkirote Murthi, who grew up on her mother’s coffee farm, told me: “Some African men will not part their land, especially to their daughters.”[14]
When I visited the coffee farm of Hellen Ngetung, a widow in western Kenya with 10 children, she told me her age was “around 70” when we first met. I asked her, “What do you want me to tell people who drink coffee?” She paused for a moment, answering, “Tell them, it is hard work picking, processing, all the way up to when we wait for the money. Tell them all the facts. Tell them we women are willing to work hard, and we do.” As I took notes, she added, “But we need the goodwill of men to give us land.”[15]
Figure 1. Erika (left) with Hellen Ngetung, on Hellen’s farm in western Kenya.
She’s right: despite the 2010 Kenyan Constitution that women can legally own land, customary law is often otherwise, especially in rural areas. “Wives are begging their husbands for land for 50 or 100 trees,” said “Deborah,” who preferred to remain anonymous. Her friend “Ruth” confirmed: “the by-laws are not friendly for women” because “to join a cooperative, a farmer needs to own five acres of land, and this is only possible if a husband gives this to his wife.”[16]
Access to land ownership has a direct impact on earning wages. In Kenya, land ownership is required to be a member of a cooperative, and is often required to open a bank account, obtain loans or credit, or receive payment for coffee cherries. Women often lack control over the income generated by their own farms. Sarah Cherioch, a farmer, explained one of her motivations for continuing to grow coffee: “Coffee is money. It allows women to pay school fees and support their families.”[17]
Some interviewees noted that gendered exploitation is not just about limited access to money, but also about limitations to freedom to choose to spend it. An anonymous younger wife told me: “Coffee belongs to the man. Single mothers are lucky because they can keep the money and use it for whatever they need. But when you are married, everything is for the man.”[18] Regine Guion-Firmin highlighted why it’s crucial for women to have access to land ownership and wages: “Because otherwise that money does not come to the wife, but to the husband. But she is the one taking care of all the land. She does all this work for land that is not hers.”[19] This illustrates the gendered coffee paradox—where women perform much of the labor but don’t benefit equally.
Further Questions, Hope for the Future
As with many research studies, I leave with more questions than answers. Some may be cause for reflection and further investigation for readers of this summary.[20] While my research focused on gender gaps at the farm level in Kenya, I wonder: to what extent is this paradox evident in other coffee-producing countries, and how is the gender coffee paradox perpetuated after coffee leaves a farm in other supply chain roles?
Businesses and NGOs have made progress in closing some gendered gaps in areas of education or technical capacity, for example. In marketing, “women-produced coffee” may help to advance economic empowerment for some women, even as structural transformation is also needed to dismantle contemporary gendered barriers regarding land, wages, and time. Simply labeling a product as “women-produced” can drive some positive change, but it can obscure the fact that most coffee relies on both men’s and women’s labor, even as women’s labor may be invisible to consumers.
Gendered discrimination persists in both spheres of labor: the productive and the reproductive. Women may be underpaid or inequitably paid in the “productive” sphere of cash crop agriculture, too often receiving no wages, or lower wages than men. In the “reproductive” sphere of care work for children, elders, or the sick, women are often unpaid despite the double workload.
There is much cause for hope. A growing number of international and national groups are promoting women’s advocacy, sharing stories, building consensus, and advancing policy change. Such organizations would do well to promote all intersectionalities, including sexuality, religion, or migrant/refugee status. This approach reveals, as Kimberlé Crenshaw once said, “where power comes and collides, where it locks and intersects.”[21] Analyzing such power dynamics in specific cultural and geographical contexts is vital. As Mohanty emphasizes: “historicizing and locating political agency is a necessary alternative to formulations of the ‘universality’ of gendered oppression and struggles.”[22]
Despite all the challenges, coffee continues to connect and bring people together. Still, the entire coffee supply chain’s complicity in the Gendered Coffee Paradox is cause for further reflection. What role does each of us play in perpetuating inequality or advancing equity? As previously mentioned in an earlier 25 essay, rather than focus on “women’s empowerment,” "accompaniment" may be a more relational model for the Global North to work with partners in the Global South.[23]
Perhaps a key to addressing any social inequities was best summarized by poet Audre Lorde, who sought to “define and seek a world in which we can all flourish.”[24] May we take her words to heart and apply them to our work in coffee: to consider a future of coffee where all genders might not just survive but flourish. ◊
DR. ERIKA KOSS (she/her) lives in Nairobi, Kenya, where she is the founder of A World in Your Cup Consulting and an Authorized SCA Trainer.
References
[1] During that summer, an estimated 1 million people perished, and some 200,000 women were raped (cf.un.org/en/preventgenocide/rwanda/historical-background.shtml).
[2] Paige West, From Modern Production to Imagined Primitive: The Social World of Coffee from Papua New Guinea (Duke University Press, 2012).
[3] Catherine Tucker, Changing Forests: Collective Action, Common Property, and Coffee in Honduras (Springer Nature, 2008).
[4] Sarah Lyon, Coffee and Community: Maya Farmers and Fair-Trade Markets (University Press of Colorado, 2011).
[5] Benoit Daviron and Stefano Ponte, The Coffee Paradox: Global Markets, Commodity Trade and the Elusive Promise of Development (Zed Books, 2005).
[6] I recognize that any discussion of gender cannot be isolated from race, class, sexuality, ethnicity, Indigeneity, ability, age, religion, or nationality, especially among voices of women historically marginalized (including LGBTQIA+, racialized minorities, Indigenous communities, people with disabilities, people who are socioeconomically oppressed). When we discuss “gender,” the phrase should include men, boys, and other genders, but in the context of this essay and given the limitations of my doctoral study, this article focuses on “women.” I hope this essay provides a basis upon which other marginalized groups may analyze if the “gendered coffee paradox” is a useful term, or not, for them.
[7] This point is made by dozens of postcolonial feminist and critical race authors, including those quoted in my essay (Rodney, Davis, Lorde, Mohanty), as well as others such as bell hooks and Gayatri C. Spivak.
[8] International Coffee Organization (ICO), “Gender Equality in the Coffee Sector,” ICC-122-11 (2018),
ico.org/documents/cy2017-18/icc-122-11e-gender-equality.pdf.
[9] Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (East African Educational Publications, Ltd, 1972): 210.
[10] Angela Y. Davis, Foreword for How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Verso Books, 2018). You can read this foreword online on: versobooks.com/blogs/news/4127-walter-rodney-s-legacy-by-angela-davis?.
[11] Wangari Maathai, The Challenge for Africa (Pantheon Books, 2009).
[12] For my PhD study, I conducted 95 one-on-one interviews; 12 small group interviews (26 people included), and a focus group with 42 female farmers in western Kenya.
[13] Because of space constraints, I only highlight two issues here; female producers experience dozens of other challenges.
[14] Personal interview in Nairobi with Cynthia Nkirote Muthuri, May 23, 2019.
[15] Personal interviews in Nandi with Hellen Ngetung, January 13, 2020 and February 6, 2022.
[16] Duo interview in Nairobi with “Deborah” and “Ruth” (pseudonyms), two female farmers from Kiambu, December 10, 2020.
[17] Personal interview in Nandi with Sarah Cheroich, January 13, 2020.
[18] Focus group in Nandi, anonymous female farmer, January 12, 2020.
[19] Personal interview in Nairobi with Regine Guion-Firmin, January 15, 2020.
[20] This article functions as a summary of my 369-page dissertation, available for free download. For more background, examples, and solutions, please visit: library2.smu.ca/handle/01/31925.
[21] Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review 43, no. 6 (1991): 1241–1299.
[22] Chandra T. Mohanty, Feminism Without Borders: Decolonizing Theory, Practicing Solidarity (Duke UP, 2003): 107.
[23] Erika Koss, “The Limits of ‘Empowerment’: Towards Justice and Accompaniment,” 25, Issue 14 (2021),
sca.coffee/sca-news/25/issue-14/the-limits-of-empowerment-towards-justice-and-accompaniment.
[24] Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Crossing Press, 1984/2015).
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