Our Annual Feminist Screed/Love Letter to the Lady Bros in Honour of International Women’s Day
Nothing makes me prouder than working with this team to create a work life that is, as much as we can make it, fair, comfy, and rewarding. A core piece of me and Jenna’s feminist project will always be not making a group of women’s lives worse in all the ways a bad workplace can.
Salaries, health benefits, and opportunities for growth are core to that. But it’s the other stuff that feels so powerful to me: the seeing one another as whole people and doing our best to accommodate and support one another. These women show up and do right by our customers, right by each other, and right by P&L every day. They are the backbone and the heart and we’re so grateful to them.
The consistent underestimation we and our entire female staff experience might be funny if it weren’t quite so constant. We’re all retail-hardened ladies, so we handle our business, but do we get spoken down to and/or sexually harassed many days of the week? Oh hell yeah. The experience of being approached by male business owners/representatives who want/need our business, but can barely disguise their seething hatred of working with women… WILD. But that’s business, baybee!
It is, at least, lessening inside the shop, I notice. A few years in and people (men) are getting used to us holding some expertise, to running this operation, to being the only option if you want help pushing your car out of a snow drift out front.
The moments and even the structure of misogyny feel like a hurdle worth jumping for the opportunity to do what we get to do here. Becoming more and more capable in our craft, increasingly proud of the integrity of the work we do, and proud of how many women are out of the woodwork, consuming unashamed and informed, doing the work of destigmatizing in their circles. That is no small thing, and it’s nice to reflect on sometimes.
But, as Audre Lorde said, “I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. I am not free while any woman is unfree, even when her shackles are very different from my own. And I am not free as long as one person of Color remains chained. Nor is anyone of you.”
We know legalization in this country has not been equitable or even ethical by looking around us. A literal sea of dudes, specifically of the massive corporation variety. Out of the hundreds of products we carry, we have ‘Woman Owned’ stickers up on 5 cannabis products. And you KNOW we try to bring them all in . The list of women-owned Licensed Producers that are being picked up by Ontario wholesaling is like… fewer than 10? And those are largely white women. There are a lot of reasons for that, but the high cost of doing this business legally is a big one. So many amazing pre-legalization growers, pressers, makers, DEALERS, locked out of the game.
Being a woman owned business in cannabis feels like being an island sometimes, but that’s just a sign to build bridges. So that’s our project this day and forever, to build and work with integrity with other women’s businesses and organizations to create the industry we want to see for all women. To help other women take care of their business babies until this landscape looks totally different.
ANYWAY, feminist screed over. I’m proud of every woman who reads this. Happy international women’s day.