by Vesper Kula

In 2017, New Frontier Data, an informatics company focused on legal cannabis research, partnered up with Women Grow, a female-forward organization intent on connecting those in the cannabis community. Their joint report was released under the title “Diversity in Cannabis Report,” and offered a some pretty surprising results, both about the cannabis industry today, and about the direction people want it to go.

So, good news first! There are a lot more women in ownership and management roles than you might have expected! A whopping 57% of those surveyed reported that their companies had women in more than half of ownership roles, while 58% reported that women made up more than half of their company’s management, and 63% of the companies had more women than men employed.

Now, I don’t mean to harsh your high, but let’s put these statistics in context. The “Diversity in Cannabis Report” wasn’t a census, but an online survey with self-selected respondents from the Women Grow mailing list and the New Frontier industry list, with some social media outreach thrown in. 87% of the 1,742 respondents were women, and almost half were owners in the Cannabis industry, statistics that don’t seem entirely universal, and might account for some of those surprising results.  And even with a majority of managerial and ownership roles filled by women in this report, 33% of respondents knew of people in the industry who had been sexually harassed, and over half reported a wage gap similar to the economy as a whole, and half of all correspondents cited gender discrimination as an issue in the cannabis community.

But it’s not all bleak! The cannabis industry is still brand new, and with its first baby-steps into legality, it’s already leaps and bounds ahead of most established industries. And people are entering it for all the right reasons! 3 out of 4 respondents cited their ability to create change as the main reason for joining the cannabis industry, and the majority joined the industry despite pay cuts, lack of benefits, and long hours. Most people said that the cannabis industry should set targets to encourage greater racial and sexual diversity, and even that state governments should prioritize diversity when evaluating candidates for licenses.

The bottom line? Women make up a sizeable share of the industry, an industry that in its nascent phase is comprised of a passionate and deeply committed workforce. As businesses grow and become more and more mainstream, it will be up to industry workers and owners to plot a path of inclusion that prioritizes diversity and leaves the glass ceilings to the greenhouses. The cannabis industry so far has a better track record than almost any other, but why stop there? The rules haven’t been written, and the fate of the cannabis world lies in the practices and policies of the pot pioneers.

Follow @lipsmoke on IG for more cannabis news and product releases! 

Source: GreenRushDaily New Frontier Data

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