Laura Zastrow
Meghan McCormick of Heritage Tavern wears a bow tie — a real one — every day. She’s been wearing one daily since the end of high school and can tie it without a mirror. Along with discussions about alcohol, her bowtie is a common topic of conversation with her customers.
Her regulars even give her bow ties as gifts now. “It’s really sweet,” McCormick says. “When you wear a tie, everyone knows what to get you.”
While the tie enhances her appearance as an archetypal craft bartender, it doesn’t stop older male customers from occasionally addressing her as “sweet-heart” or asking her “if she knows how to make a Manhattan.” That bugs her, but she tries to ignore it. To keep it professional, she simply asks them what kind of whiskey they want in their drink.
The craft cocktail renaissance in America has brought vintage bowties back, but it hasn’t solved the problem of gender inequality in the profession. Though women make up the majority of bartenders nationwide, they still take home lower pay, according to a 2014 study by the Economic Policy Institute. Even in supposedly progressive Madison, women bartenders still encounter sexism, gender discrimination and unconscious bias.
Women bartenders are more culturally acceptable than they were 50 years ago, when half the states in the U.S. prohibited women from tending bar, for “social” or “moral” reasons. But cultural acceptance is not full inclusion. In Madison, a new organization called Spirited Women hopes to make the case for full equality — to its female members, their male allies in the industry and to the broader community.
Laura Zastrow
Mariah Renz (left) and Alison Scott. “The best thing women can do in this industry is to educate themselves,” says Renz.
The hobby that took over my life
Alison Scott was on the verge of getting her doctorate in botany — and preparing to start a postdoctoral fellowship on redwood genome sequencing — when she began bartending to earn money. Her academic interests transferred well: She came to the job with an extensive knowledge of the plants used to make spirits.
Scott describes bartending as the “hobby that took over my life.” Like many people in the craft cocktail business, she’s driven to excellence by her nerdy intellectual interest in the botanical derivation and production of liquor.
Despite continuing to pursue her career as a botanist full-time, she feels invested in the bar industry. She would like to open her own bar and restaurant one day and build its menu from her own greenhouse.
Scott, who until recently worked at Cento, says gender still comes into play behind the bar.
Despite the restaurant’s unisex blue oxford shirt uniform, for example, customers would periodically approach her when she was working to ask to “speak to a bartender.”
One customer who requested Laphroaig remarked that she looked “too young and pretty” to tell him anything about scotch. She encountered men who ogled her while she was shaking their cocktail. And she once had to rebuff a customer who followed her out of the bar, complimented her cocktail and tried to grab her by the waist.
Scott understands that it can be hard to “determine the line of bad behavior” in a bar, where bartenders are otherwise trying to cultivate a feel-good, customer-oriented space. But she wishes customers would respect her professional boundaries.
In her own customer service, Scott is inclusive. She won’t give a female customer the wine list without also providing the whiskey list. Like most bartenders, she tries to track whether customers are becoming inebriated, and pays particular attention to women who are receiving unwanted attention from a guy. She’ll interrupt a conversation, or return multiple times with a water pitcher.
Scott also brings her expertise into her work for Spirited Women, which was founded by Mariah Renz, former bar manager at Julep. Scott recently directed a workshop on the making of amaro, an herbal liqueur produced by macerating herbs, roots, flowers, bark and peels in alcohol, and her fellow bartenders reconvened a few weeks later to sample their creations with a social gathering.
Scott says the workshop created a “safe space” for women to learn from each other without having to compete with mansplainers.
Says Renz: “The best thing women can do in this industry is to educate themselves.”
Laura Zastrow
Working at a busy bar requires a strong, confident personality, regardless of gender, says Devan Friedl of Merchant.
An intense culture with a lot of yelling
Nationally the craft cocktail movement was pioneered primarily by men, and at least one survey, of New York bartenders, suggests that men are still overrepresented in the most elite, high-profile positions. A 2015 study by the Restaurant Opportunities Centers United found that “the greatest racial and gender wage inequality is in the highest-wage occupational categories — namely fine-dining server and bartender positions.”
Devan Friedl has beaten the odds and made it into an elite craft cocktail bar. She’s the only woman bartender at Merchant, which has been at the epicenter of the craft cocktail renaissance in Madison since it opened in 2010.
Friedl had a few years of bartending experience when she joined the staff, but still had to work as a bar-back for six months before getting promoted. This didn’t trouble her. Merchant has precise techniques and rigorous protocols, and Friedl had to learn the build for 40 or 50 menu classics.
Bartending is fiery and fast-paced. It’s an “intense culture with a lot of yelling,” says Friedl, noting that working at a busy bar requires a strong, confident personality, regardless of gender.
A former athlete and daughter of a gym teacher, Friedl loves the physical nature of bartending, likening it to a team sport: “You’re constantly moving.”
For now, Friedl likes the pay and being able to take unpaid leave any time. She recognizes that down the road, she’ll need more money and health insurance. But for now she is content to put her “energy into the service boom.”
Bar family
Amber Solow started bartending in her early 20s when she was planning to travel a lot. It was, she figured it, a job she could do anywhere.
She’s been bartending at Mickey’s for 15 years. She continues because it pays the bills and she can do art and photography during the day.
She loves the bar regulars, and says she can’t envision her life without her “bar family.” An ideal night for her is when there’s a good band playing, the crowd is happy and her work is steady but not slammed.
And it’s better than the old days, when she worked as a cocktail waitress.
She says she felt little recourse then when male customers would slap her ass or and say inappropriate things. Now, she finds working behind the bar helpful — it’s a physical boundary. That’s just one reason why hiring women as bar-backs, not just as servers, is a positive change for women in the industry. It’s also a more direct route to bartending, she says.
Not long ago, she threw a male customer out after he reached across the bar and touched her pigtail. A more typical show of disrespect is when men stare or address her as “honey.” In response, she always introduces herself and insists they use her actual name.
Says Solow: “These sorts of guys don’t like to be called out on stuff.”
Laura Zastrow
Vanessa Shipley of Maduro plays the role of traditional bar matriarch and doles out advice.
Control the space
Vanessa Shipley started working at Maduro, the cigar bar in downtown Madison, almost two decades ago as a cocktail waitress. She learned all the drinks within a year and convinced management she’d be more valuable behind the bar. Sometime in her early 30s, she decided that the schedule and flexibility of bartending made it an ideal job for her; she says she “couldn’t think of another job that paid well, had time off and had good hours.” She works 40 hours a week, crunched into long shifts; it fits her lifestyle. Now she’s in the process of buying into the business with its owner, Brian Haltinner.
Shipley’s role is a bit reminiscent of a traditional bar matriarch, those much older ladies who are tough and engaging, run the country bars and know all the neighbors. One of her nicknames is “Mama V,” which the regulars use as a verb (i.e., “you just got Mama V’d”) when she’s doling out advice. Shipley corrects men when they refer to her as “honey” or “sweetheart,” but she also finds it funny, since they’re often younger than she is.
Shipley prefers working behind the bar alone and says that experienced bartenders can “do it in their sleep,” partly because they know how to catch problems before they escalate. Age and experience, she says, “help control the space.”
If some dude is being vulgar and bothering other customers, she’ll ask him to tone it down. If someone starts playing with matches, she’ll walk out and tell him to stop. She’s never encountered a situation she couldn’t handle.
Shipley waves off customers when they offer to help since they will punch each other but not her. Drunk men, she says, are more likely “to transfer their macho stuff to another man.”
Laura Zastrow
Supportive female co-workers Alex Kjell (left) and Meghan McCormick of Heritage Tavern.
Drinks on the menu
Meghan McCormick got her first drink on the menu at Heritage Tavern a few months ago — it’s called Gourds Galore. It was inspired by Brian Haltinner from Maduro, who came in one night and challenged her to make something with rum and sherry; the drink is based around roasted squash and flavored with star anise.
She loves the creative process, which is a good thing. Heritage values local and seasonal ingredients, and because squash is no longer in season, McCormick has been going into work early to experiment with a new cocktail that uses carrot.
McCormick wants to be a filmmaker and works on that during the day; she’s even making a film about the Spirited Women group and women’s empowerment. If not for her love of filmmaking, she’d think more seriously about running her own bar someday.
Of the many things she likes about tending bar, one of them is having a supportive female co-worker: Alex Kjell. At one time, women were in the majority behind the bar at Heritage; McCormick jokingly refers to that time as their “glory days,” but she says she has learned a lot from her female colleagues.
“Alex has always told me that there is no dumb question,” says McCormick.
Kjell bartends “for a combination of reasons” — mainly because “everyone needs to work.” But having found a restaurant and bar program that she likes, she sticks with it because she loves the creative process. She’s created several drinks for Heritage over the years, including an epic summer cocktail made with sweet peas.
Community spirit
After appearing on a Madison Cocktail Week panel in February with Liz Henry of J. Henry & Sons, the bourbon distillery located in Dane, Wisconsin, Mariah Renz decided that women in the business needed a regular venue for addressing gender-specific concerns in the industry.
Spirited Women has already boosted women’s participation in the newly formed Madison chapter of the United States Bartenders’ Guild. Although the guild has no women in any of the leadership positions (and none ran for the positions), the last meeting was almost balanced in terms of gender. And Renz (the only woman currently on the Madison Cocktail Week committee) hopes the group will also help to expand the purview of cocktail week.
Like many of the women in the group, Renz has been part of the bar community in Madison for a long time, and she values its cohesion. Occasionally men aren’t receptive to her input, but she always feels confident that she can break through to them. “I just throw some ego into it,” she says, and convinces them she knows more about spirits than they do.
Spirited Women has also recently become involved in community outreach. In April, the group sponsored a fundraiser for the Dane County Rape Crisis Center. Held at Robinia Courtyard on East Washington Avenue, the fundraiser featured DJs who promote safe dance spaces, a raffle for donated prizes, and bartending lessons given by group members. The event raised more than $5,500 and inspired ongoing workshops on assault prevention for bartenders and managers, called the Safer Bar Bystander program.
Also upcoming: The amaro produced by the group workshop earlier this year may go commercial in a partnership with the forthcoming Imaginary Factory craft beverage facility on Madison’s east side.
The members of Spirited Women are looking forward to having more discussions and doing more community outreach for the benefit of everyone in the industry. They aren’t getting together to “bash a boys’ club,” Alison Scott says, but to “open a dialogue about how to be fully included in the club.”
