Business Anthropology’s Lens into Gender Equity: Assessing the Impact of ‘Smart Economics’ in the Coffee Sector

Abstract

This article investigates the impact of a smart economics-inspired women’s coffee program within a Oaxaca, Mexico coffee producer organization across four realms: economic decision-making and control over income; coffee land ownership and yields; organizational participation; and access to gender equity programs and services. I find that the program largely fails to substantively reduce gendered agricultural asset gaps or promote gender equity. However, it is correlated with an increase in women’s organizational participation, an openness to gender equity programs, and increased access to services such as agricultural trainings. In conclusion, the article demonstrates how the women’s coffee program not only fails to close the gender agricultural asset gap among Southern Mexican coffee producers, but in fact relies upon it by using targeted premiums to actively recruit individual women into gender-branded value chains. In so doing, corporations use the women coffee farmers to generate additional profits through higher prices, niche marketing and brand enhancement, yet do not equitably share these with women farmers. The article answers calls for business anthropology to more explicitly investigate social relations and systems of power when comparing social forms of business organizations and the diverse cultures that shape them.