Women in coffee: The history, the gap, and the Burundi women closing it

In Burundi's northern hills, a coffee harvest has traditionally ended the same way. Women pick the cherries, sort them, and carry them down the slope. Then a man takes them the last stretch to the washing station, hands them over, and gets a paper ticket in return. That ticket is the payment. Whoever holds it decides what the season's work was for.

It's a small moment, easy to miss. But it explains more about women in coffee than almost any statistic, and it's the moment a Burundian-born coffee exporter named Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian decided to change.

That's the story behind Volume 10: Making Room. Before we get to it, though, it helps to know how we got here.

The short answer: Women do an estimated 70% of the labor in coffee production worldwide, from planting to picking to sorting, but operate only about 20–30% of coffee farms and own even less of the land. That gap, often called the "gendered coffee paradox," means the people doing most of the work rarely control the money it earns. Groups like the International Women's Coffee Alliance and exporters like JNP Coffee in Burundi are working to close it.

A short history of women in coffee

Women have been at the center of coffee for as long as there's been coffee. They just haven't always been in the history books.

Ethiopia, where it started. In coffee's birthplace, the traditional coffee ceremony is usually led by women: roasting green beans in a pan over coals, grinding them by hand, and brewing three rounds in a clay pot called a jebena. It can take the better part of an hour. It's less about caffeine than about who's sitting in the room, which, frankly, is a pretty good definition of coffee done right.

London, 1674. As coffeehouses spread across Europe, a pamphlet called The Women's Petition Against Coffeecomplained that the "newfangled, abominable, heathenish liquor" was keeping men out of the house and talking nonsense all day. It's often told as an early feminist protest, but historians think it was probably political satire aimed at making coffeehouses look bad. The more interesting detail is what it hides: women were quietly running some of those coffeehouses, often as widows who'd inherited the business, and working behind the counter at others.

Dresden, 1908. A homemaker named Melitta Bentz got tired of gritty, bitter coffee, poked holes in a brass pot, and lined it with a sheet of blotting paper from her son's school notebook. She patented the paper coffee filter that same year. If you've ever made a pour-over, you've used her idea.

New York, 1919. Alice Foote MacDougall, a widow with three kids to support, started a coffee roasting business in 1907 and later opened The Little Coffee Shop in Grand Central Terminal. By the 1920s she was running a string of popular coffee shops and had written a cookbook, Coffee and Waffles. She did all this, curiously, while being publicly opposed to women's suffrage. History is rarely tidy.

San Francisco, 1974. Erna Knutsen started as a secretary at a coffee brokerage and spent years fighting her way into the all-male cupping room. Once she got in, she started selling small lots of exceptional beans that the big buyers ignored. In a 1974 trade journal interview, she gave them a name: specialty coffee. Every 86+ point coffee Folk has ever shipped owes her a small thank you. She later bought the company outright and, as she put it, fired the men who hadn't thought she deserved a break.

2003, worldwide. A group of women from coffee producing and consuming countries formed the International Women's Coffee Alliance (IWCA) to push for women's access to land, credit, training, and fair pay. It now has chapters across Latin America, Asia, and East Africa, including Burundi.

The gendered coffee paradox

Here's where the story gets harder.

For all those famous names, the biggest group of women in coffee has always been the least visible one: the farmers. And the numbers behind their work don't add up.

• Women do most of the work. The International Coffee Organization estimates women provide around 70% of the labor in coffee cultivation and harvesting.
• They run a small share of the farms. Only around 20–30% of coffee farms are operated by women. In Burundi and Rwanda, women head roughly 20–32% of coffee households.
• They own even less of the land. In Kenya, where women provide about 80% of agricultural labor, researchers found they held only about 1% of land titles in their own name, according to reporting from Sprudge.
• They get less help. Women farmers are less likely to receive agricultural training, have a savings account, or qualify for credit, which makes it harder to improve a farm even when they're the ones running it day to day.

Researcher Dr. Erika Koss calls this the "gendered coffee paradox." It isn't only unfair. It's inefficient. The UN's Food and Agriculture Organization estimates that giving women farmers the same access to resources as men could raise total agricultural output in low-income countries by 2.5–4%. That's more coffee, better coffee, and more money staying in farming communities.

Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian and JNP Coffee

Burundi is one of the places where that paradox runs deepest. Almost all of its coffee comes from smallholder families working small hillside plots, and women do much of the picking and sorting. (For the bigger picture on the country, its hills, and its bright, juicy Red Bourbons, see our Burundi origin guide.)

Jeanine Niyonzima-Aroian's family grew coffee in Burundi's north, and that coffee is part of how she got an education. She went on to study in the U.S., earned an MBA, and spent two decades in international business before coffee pulled her home. In 2012, she started JNP Coffee, an exporter built to put Burundi's best lots in front of specialty buyers and send more of the money back up the hill. She's also a licensed Q Grader, the same certification our founder holds.

Her fix for the paper-ticket problem is refreshingly practical. JNP encourages women to bring their own cherries to the washing station, so the sale is recorded in their name. Once the coffee sells abroad, farmers get a second payment through a premium program called Dushime, Kirundi for "let's be thankful." Women meet weekly in small savings circles, pooling money, lending to each other, and splitting the pot at year's end. In an interview with Blue Bottle, Jeanine pointed to those savings circles as the work with the biggest impact.

You can see why. In 2019, seven women from those circles combined their savings and opened Turihamwe (Kirundi for "together") in Ngozi, Burundi's first women-owned washing station. Washing stations are where cherries get weighed, priced, and processed, and they've almost always belonged to men with capital. Owning one means these women decide how the coffee is handled, who buys it, and where the money goes. That's what making room looks like: not a label on a bag, but a seat where the decisions get made.

It's also why we built Volume 10: Making Room around women-led coffee from Burundi, sourced through JNP.

How you can support women in coffee

You don't have to fly to Burundi. A few small habits go a long way:

1. Ask who grew it. Good roasters and importers can tell you the farm, the washing station, or the cooperative. If nobody knows, that tells you something too.
2. Look for women-produced labels, but read the fine print. Programs from the IWCA, Café Femenino, and exporters like JNP separate women-grown coffee and pay premiums for it. The best ones explain where the premium goes.
3. Favor traceable, specialty coffee. Traceability is what makes direct premiums possible. A blend of hundreds of anonymous farms can't pay anyone in particular.
4. Expect to pay a little more. Fair prices for farmers are part of what a great cup costs. It's still cheaper than most glasses of wine, and it does a lot more good.
5. Share the story. Brands pay attention to what customers ask about. The more people ask who grew their coffee, the more the answer matters.

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Want to taste the story for yourself?

Folk sends two rare, Q Grader-selected coffees scoring 86 points or higher every month, each one chosen to tell a story like this one. New to the terms? Start with our guide to single-origin coffee or how processing methods shapes what ends up in your cup.