Explaining Gender Segregation in Craft Brewing: A Multi-Level Investigation of Market Inequality


Ethan Shapiro, University of Toronto; Emma Jennings-Fitz-Gerald, University of Toronto

The Canadian craft beer industry has recently faced a reckoning over gender-based harassment and segregation. Previous research on craft beer contextualizes this reckoning within the industry’s gendered occupational structure: craft brewery owners and operators are almost universally men whose work is often publicly valorised. In contrast, women typically occupy low-status positions in the industry, such as service and hospitality roles. While craft brewers insist that “good beer” should be for everyone, the class, racialized, and gendered resources required to enter this industry limit the product’s universality. The current research aims to clarify the processes through which existing gender inequalities shape (and are reproduced by) gendered experiences in the craft brewing industry. Drawing on 70 in-depth, semi-structured interviews with craft brewery owners (N=35, already collected) and workers (N=35, to be collected), the current research confirms that craft breweries are gendered organizations in which occupational positions and cultural conceptions of ideal workers privilege male market entrants and restrict female ones. These interviews show that women’s disadvantage in the craft beer industry is reproduced through a horizontally segregated organizational structure and the cultural valorization of men’s work. Following the feminist emphasis on the maintenance of gender inequality at the level of everyday experience (hooks, 2000), I conduct a multi-level investigation of niche formation that clarifies the role of gendered social stratification in cultural industries. I ask, (1) how do industry-level gender inequalities enable and constrain entry into emergent markets? and (2) how do people make sense of these inequalities at the individual level to construct feasible market action? To answer these questions, I seek to provide an account of the emergence of the craft beer sector – a prototypical example of a highly gendered lifestyle market. This study enhances current industry efforts to address exclusion and discrimination in the craft beer sector (Canadian Craft Brewers, 2020). First, it identifies key structural barriers to entry for women in the craft beer industry, and second, it highlights the agentic processes through which female entrants navigate and potentially alter unequal opportunity structures. Thus, the current research aims not only to advance sociological theories of market emergence, but to serve as a resource for empirically grounded diversity and inclusion practices in the craft brewing industry.

This paper will be presented at the following session: