Why Women Matter in the Tea Industry

The Tea Industry’s Invisible Hands: Why Empowering Women Is the Future of Tea

By Lorna Owens

The world loves tea for its promise of calm. We see it in marketing campaigns—gentle steam rising from a porcelain cup, an image of timeless serenity. Yet what these images never show are the real hands behind the ritual. They are not porcelain, but brown and calloused. They belong to women, tens of thousands of them, bending under sun and monsoon, plucking two leaves and a bud with astonishing speed.

In nearly every tea-producing country, women dominate this labor. Their fingers are the gatekeepers of quality. Their bodies bear the brunt of long hours in unforgiving weather. And yet, they hold little land, own few factories, and occupy a tiny fraction of leadership positions in the $200 billion global industry they sustain.

This is tea’s original contradiction: a beverage marketed as peace and balance, built on the imbalance of women’s lives.

The Cost of Silence

For decades, this inequity has been hidden under the canopy of tradition. Wages are often paid by the kilo, keeping incomes low and unstable. Promotions to supervisory roles or factory positions typically go to men. Without land titles, women farmers can’t access bank loans or even inherit plots they’ve worked for years.

Now climate change is amplifying these burdens. In India’s Assam, soaring temperatures and erratic rains have destabilized the prized “second flush” harvest. In East Africa, prolonged drought is cutting yields, reducing incomes further. It is the women in the fields, with the fewest safety nets, who feel these shocks most sharply.

If the tea industry wants a future, it must address the inequity at its roots. Because when the women falter, so does the cup.

Signs of a Different Future

The good news? The solutions are already visible.

In India’s far-east, women at the Donyi Polo Tea Estate have taken control of their destiny by producing small-batch, hand-crafted teas that command record prices in the specialty market. In Japan, Ayumi Kinezuka of the NaturaliTea collective has become an international voice for organic, community-first farming, reshaping how Japanese tea reaches the world. In Kenya, women’s cooperatives working with JusTea are crafting purple-leaf and herbal teas that create new income streams outside the commodity system.

These examples are more than anecdotes. They are working models of what happens when women move from invisible labor to visible leadership.

Specialty Tea: A Space for Women to Shine

Unlike bulk tea, where margins are razor-thin and anonymity is the rule, specialty tea thrives on craft, story, and provenance. It rewards the artisan’s hand—the careful plucking, the nuanced processing, the storytelling that connects a tea drinker in New York or Nairobi directly to a farmer in Nandi Hills or Shizuoka.

This is where women can—and must—shine. The specialty market is growing faster than bulk exports and pays higher premiums for micro-lots and unique cultivars. But to fully access this opportunity, women need training in tasting, agronomy, and micro-processing. They need affordable credit to build small factories or shared processing hubs. They need contracts that guarantee not just a buyer, but a fair premium.

Specialty tea is not just a niche. It is the industry’s best chance to reward skill over scale, to put names and faces—often women’s—back into a trade that has long erased them.

Breaking the Barriers

The barriers are clear, and so are the steps forward:

• Wages and Recognition. Companies should commit to gender pay equity audits and publish the results. Buyers must be willing to pay a “gender equity premium” for tea sourced from estates and cooperatives that prove progress.

• Land and Credit. Governments must enforce women’s inheritance and land rights. Without legal ownership, women remain locked out of finance. Banks and microfinance groups should create lending products designed for women tea producers.

• Training for Power. Establish regional “Women’s Tea Academies” to train women in tasting, processing, and entrepreneurship. These programs should include paid leave from plucking so women aren’t penalized for advancing.

• Climate Resilience. Channel climate adaptation funds directly to women’s cooperatives for shade planting, irrigation, and protective gear. This isn’t charity—it’s quality insurance.

• Visibility. Put women’s names and stories on the packaging. Consumers respond to authenticity, and recognition builds value that flows both ways.

Why This Matters Now

Tea companies often tout heritage and tradition, but tradition cannot excuse inequity. In an era when younger consumers want ethical sourcing and transparency, hiding the reality of women’s labor is not just morally wrong—it’s bad business.

Empowering women is not about charity or optics. It is about unlocking the very resilience the industry needs to survive. Communities where women control income show higher rates of education, better nutrition, and greater environmental stewardship. In tea, that means stronger farms, higher quality, and a more stable supply chain.

The tea industry likes to market itself as timeless. But unless it changes, its future is anything but guaranteed. The women in the fields are the past, present, and future of tea. This time, they deserve the profits, the leadership, and the power.

A cup of tea is one of life’s simplest pleasures. It should never be steeped in the inequality of those who bring it to us.