Indulge me for a moment and take this easy, quick quiz: Read the statements below, and tell me what’s missing.
• “Brah, this weed is dank-o-rama.”
• “Hey man, you gotta try this sick ice hash.”
• “Dude, those dabs got me sooooo high.”
Pencils down, please. If you answered “any female pronouns,” you are correct.
They aren’t just missing from this quiz; they’re seemingly missing from the cannabis industry altogether. Oftentimes, when people think about women and weed, they simply… don’t.
While there are some mid-profile women many stoners know (Mila Jansen, inventor of the “Ice-o-Lator” hash making machine; Gertrude Stein’s partner Alice B. Toklas and her pot brownie recipe; Ms. Jill the seed breeder who developed the Jillybean strain), the majority of women who men associate with cannabis are clad in booty shorts and tiny tops—AKA dab girls, or Miss High Times, or any budtenders in schoolgirl attire. So how does the fledgling legal industry avoid “marijuana misogyny” and grow in a way that supports women?
An excellent first step is Women Grow. With chapters in 33 cities and growing, this for-profit entity, founded in Denver in 2014, has a mission statement to “connect, educate, inspire, and empower the next generation of cannabis industry leaders.” They’re accomplishing this with a series of monthly meetings to facilitate networking. It’s not a groundbreaking concept in most industries, but it is a crucial one for canna-business when you consider how many decades those in the field have had to operate in near secrecy.
