There’s surprisingly little data about the number of female-identifying brewery owners or head brewers in the craft beer industry. Yet I constantly hear that ‘things are changing!’ Are they? How would we know? So last summer I set out to find out what the industry actually looks like so we might start actually charting this (generally assumed) change. Along with the help of two incredibly resilient research assistants – Molly Jones and Zoe Attwood — we literally hand-counted the male-to-female ratio of the owners and brewers-in-charge of all New Zealand and Australia’s craft beer brands. I’ve just published these findings for the first time in the August issue of Pursuit of Hoppiness, which you can read online for free. Special thanks to Zoe Attwood for translating our bean-counting into some pretty awesome visuals.
The findings are representative of research conducted between November 2020-January 2021. There are likely errors, changes and new additions to our findings, so these will be constantly updated.
How You Can Help:
I’ve made our spreadsheets publicly available on my website under the link to “Craft Beersearch”, which are open to public comments. For direct access, you can find New Zealand’s spreadsheet here and Australia’s linked here. I’ll be updating them as time and resources allow, but PLEASE feel free to list any additions or corrections, which I’ll absolutely incorporate if they can be confirmed. Any assistance is much appreciated as it’s an arduous, time-consuming and unpaid task for me, too. I’m no longer affiliated with a University, which means I’ve got no funds to hire research assistants! And – just to be fully transparent – academic publishers don’t pay authors for their research or offer signing bonuses! There might be some royalties down the line if I sell copies of the final book, but these aren’t guaranteed. (Fun fact: the royalties from my first academic book were less than I spent in a single night on a Brewer’s Pass at Beervana!).
A look at the numbers:
Kathleen M. Kuehn 