Girls belong in the grow
How misogyny by default and design permeates the marijuana industry
Cannabis revels in the beauty and destruction of the female form: the flowering bud of the unfertilized female plant is the coveted product. And yet, on the altar of weedbro culture, women like me have found themselves devoured and sacrificed by a marijuana industry that is steeped in sexism.
I spark a joint and inhale it slowly to kill the pain.
Back in 2014, when I began my career as a writer, I sold weed at a medical shop. A fifty- something- year- old man who owned the dispensary told me, “No women in the grow.” I cried. He then handed me a hundred dollars as an apology, the bill itself a visual reminder of all the structures that have excluded women. I am not proud of it, but I took the cash. I thought it was a kindness. What a gentleman.
Ten years later, I’ve learned that women are the true outliers in weed.
It’s my life’s work to document cannabis culture in America. Yet I’ve never written about this — the loneliness, the isolation that I feel as one of few women in the room. It breaks my heart to know that there are misogynists who grow cannabis.
On the heels of the # Metoo movement, there’s been a reckoning with sexism in Hollywood and Washington D. C. But since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v Wade, onethird of women in the U. S. of child- rearing age have lost their autonomy. Molly JongFast writes that women have watched conservatives roll back the biggest feminist wins of their lifetimes. My heart breaks to witness it.
Objectification of women’s bodies is interwoven into the very language of weed. From cultivar names to packaging, over- sexualized marketing, booth babes, and “trim bitches.” Strain names like MILF, Dirty Girl, and TITS have circulated the adult- use marketplace. No matter how well it’s grown, it tastes like violence.
Misogyny is the sleepwalking default setting of a malecentric cannabis culture.
In 2021, a well- known multi- state cannabis brand posted a photo of a woman being used as a table — with a rig, hash, and other accouterments placed on her back — to hundreds of thousands of consumers on social media. Had a woman been invited to the marketing table, she may have told them using the photo was a terrible idea.
In 2022, two former employees filed a lawsuit against a Los Angeles- based grow, alleging that the company discriminates against women. One plaintiff was told, “it’s called Jungle Boys for a reason,” and that women were not allowed in the grow.
In 2024, a recent lawsuit audaciously claims that social equity regulations in
New York — which have attempted to safeguard licenses for minorities, women, and those hit hardest by the War on Drugs — are discriminatory against men. Men hold the majority of C- Suite roles in weed. According to industry trade publication Mjbiz’s 2023 report called “Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in the Cannabis Industry,” 39% of cannabis executives were women, up from 22% the year prior.
Massachusetts welcomed a new dispensary earlier this year with a stripper pole in the center of the store. The store’s three male owners say the pole is “historic,” the space once operated as a strip club called the Magic Carpet. Yes, sexism is historic. That’s the problem. It’s the male gaze for me — the lighting is terrible, its footprint is clunky, and there’s no retail flow. Many people are coming to access medicine, not be gawked at.
This behavior grows from the same decaying root as
“no women in the grow,” the lie I was told a decade ago. The patriarchy bars women from certain arenas and then blames them for their lack of knowledge.
They’d rather use women as a table than offer them a seat at it.
Why are women who use cannabis judged so harshly? Weed consumers are predominantly men. Research from Headset market reports found that in 2023, women make up only 33.8% of the U. S. market for cannabis. By design or default, the industry isn’t “for” women in the minds of the men who run it, which is not only a failure of inclusivity and humanity, it is an enormous miss of market potential.
The most evident discrimination is tied to motherhood. One survey conducted by Miss Grass of 700 mothers who use cannabis found that 68% have experienced discrimination for it.
Jaqueline Kittel writes in Women in Weed: Gender, Race, and Class in the Cannabis Industry, that we should
The patriarchy bars women from certain arenas and then blames them for their lack of knowledge. They’d rather use women as a table than offer them a seat at it.
look to an argument first made by feminist author Susan Boyd: “Women face more significant social repercussions for consuming illicit drugs as compared to men due to associations of femininity with the sanctity of the home, mothering, sobriety, and morality that constrain women to behave ‘ appropriately’ or face major repercussions.”
Cannabis advocates once aligned with feminists and liberal revolutionaries. What happened?
Financial Times author John Burn- Murdoch calls it the “global gender divide.” Men and women born in the same generation have historically aligned viewpoints. Today, young men have become more conservative, while young women have become more liberal. The striking data found:
“Women aged 18 to 30 are now 30 percent more liberal than their male contemporaries. That gap took just six years to open up.”
How does one survive this traumatic gender binary?
Creating women- only spaces is what many women and non- genderconforming folks do. I don’t blame them for wanting to separate themselves from the prying male gaze. These spaces are empowering. Yet feminism does not strive to be the patriarchy: insular, isolated, and unbalanced. It seeks to destroy the hierarchal center and margin to step outside of the toxic power dynamic.
The healing potentialities of the marijuana plant transcend gender. The flowers we smoke are female, but they wouldn’t exist without the pollination of the male plant during propagation. We need each other.
It’s my goal to laser- focus on the sacred balance of feminine and masculine in the world. I try not to spotlight or buy weed from known abusers. How long will it take the industry to reckon with its internalized sexism? I don’t have an easy answer, but it’ll happen sooner if men stand up to their peers and if women continue to speak out.
In the meantime, I cultivate a sense of freedom that can’t be taken away — one that’s not given by limiting external forces. It’s a home- grown freedom. To be sovereign — a free woman smoking weed — is an act of survival.
Lindsey Bartlett is an author and photographer who has documented the evolution of the cannabis industry for the past decade. Born in Denver, today she resides in Los Angeles. Bartlett is a contributor at Forbes and Insider, a three- time judge at The Emerald Cup, and a cannabis media fellow alumni of the UVM Pace Plant Biology program.