More than 300 people gathered in Chicago Wednesday for the Alliance For Women in Beer’s inaugural in-person event.
The Alliance was formed in 2021 with members from all three tiers of the beer industry, united to “transform beer into an exciting industry of opportunity for women.” Thursday’s event – with the focus to “champion yourself and others” – sold out with 312 attendees, taking place the day after the National Beer Wholesalers Association’s (NBWA) 85th Annual Convention.
The NBWA, which formed its own women’s leadership group last year – the Building Relationships and Empowering Women (BREW) initiative – is serving in a “leadership role,” with the Alliance, according to NBWA president and CEO Craig Purser, who kicked off the event.
“This isn’t just about doing the right thing, this is smart business,” Purser said. “We need to make our workforce look more like a marketplace, and more inclusive management teams are critical to remain competitive.
While women make up just over a third of beer drinkers (37%), they are about half of beer shoppers in the grocery channel, according to Jenn Litz-Kirk, executive editor of Beer Business Daily and an Alliance subcommittee member, citing market research firm IWSR. Additionally, firms with more women in senior positions are “more profitable and more socially responsible,” according to a study by Harvard Business Review.
“The data is pretty clear across every industry: when leadership teams and workforces are more diverse, businesses just perform better and are more innovative and outperform their competitive set,” Mallika Monteiro, Constellation Brands’ EVP and chief growth, strategy and digital officer, said during one of the event’s panels.
“But at a micro level, what we’re seeing at Constellation is that our ideas are better.” she continued. “When you look at the innovation we’re bringing to market, the stories we’re telling in our brand marketing, they resonate better with consumers, because our company is starting to look like the communities that we’re trying to serve.”
Other speakers at the event included:
- Cari Coast, co-founder and managing partner of Accendo Leadership Advisory Group;
- Michelle St. Jacques, CMO of Molson Coors Beverage Company;
- Sarah Bettman, founder of Bettman Consulting Group;
- Ellie Preslar, VP of sales at Sierra Nevada Brewing Company;
- Tom Day, CEO of Reyes Beer Division;
- Amanda Tilley, VP of commercial insights and category strategy at Anheuser-Busch;
- JB Ryan, marketing and sales director for Molson Coors.
Women accounted for 23.7% of U.S. brewery owners in 2021, according to a survey of 500 breweries by Bart Watson, chief economist for the Brewers Association (BA). However, bev-alc consumption is increasingly growing more female, with women drinkers under 25 now outnumbering male drinkers of the same age.
Diversifying a workforce allows for expanded life experiences to generate ideas and innovation that couldn’t have been accessed before, according to St. Jacques, who joined Molson Coors the year it launched “The Official Beer of Being Done Wearing a Bra” campaign for Coors Light. An expanded workforce can also prevent a company from isolating or off-putting a demographic, such as the Coors Light twins commercials, St. Jacques said.
“Often in this business … it’s very myopic and very narrow,” Reyes’ Day added. “What we’ve been able to learn by working with some of our top female leaders in our organization – many of them are actually in the room with us today – they brought new ideas, new ways of working, new thinking. And it’s opened up doors that if we didn’t have them in that position, and didn’t have that kind of mindset, we wouldn’t be able to open up some of those doors.”
Creating a company that has a more inclusive workforce requires recognizing the systems that give some a head start – like a marathon, where Group A (the professional runners) gets to start a race first, while Group D (the amateur runners) don’t get to cross the start line until several minutes later, Bettman said.
“It’s just the reality of the situation, especially here in the United States, that the workforce when some of these systems were put in place was predominantly white and male,” Bettman said. “People say, ‘I had to work twice as hard to get where I got,’ they’re telling you their race started at the same time as everyone else, but they took 45 minutes to get to their own starting line and could start their race.”
And it’s not just men that can prevent the integration of women into leadership, according to Bettman. Oftentimes a “scarcity mindset” makes those that get to “the top” wary of bringing others up with them in order to protect themselves.
“We need to make those roles at the top not feel so precious,” Bettman said. “We can have an abundance mindset – there is plenty of room for all of us.”
Bettman encouraged individuals to look at the privilege they have – whether its gender, race, class, title, family name, education level, etc. – and see how that privilege plays out in the workplace, where resources or support may need to be given to create a more level playing field, and where structures may need to be torn down.
“You have to look at your organizational structure and the power dynamics,” Bettman continued. “Because frankly, it could be beer versus wine, sales versus marketing… night shift versus day shift… you have to look at those power dynamics.”