The pouring rain floods over the windows of Peace Tree Brewing. Market lights that hang outside on the empty patio shimmer under the water droplets in the unreasonably dark afternoon sky. The bar is quiet. Two people in the corner hold a quiet conversation over a pale ale. A bearded bartender stands perched by the cash register on the phone. He wraps the cord around his finger as he fills a glass full of raspberry gose kombucha and takes a sip, laughing into the receiver.
Every man in the bar has a full head of hair. Either on their chin or pulled into a long winding ponytail down the back of their head. They walk around chatting with each other at the bar with Peace Tree shirts on, or throwing their heads back in hearty laughter. This isn’t your trendy-attract-hipsters-kind-of-hip bar. It just is hip. Naturally. No intentional motive to make it something its not. They just brew good kombucha and good beer, and good people seem to flock to it.
I happen to run in out of the rain, toss a quick smile at the cashier still on the phone, who, mind you, also has a beard and ponytail, and take a seat at the bar. I don’t see Megan yet, but I can hear a woman’s laughter from behind the kitchen doors out of the sea of low, manly voices. Another tall, bearded man walks out of the kitchen wearing a red flannel and what are probably Levi’s. Following the flannelled man, is the owner of Peace Tree Brewing, Megan McKay.
Her short, curly hair bounces as she walks. Almost with the same energy as her laugh. She follows the bearded man to a table, finishes their conversation with a joke and makes her way to the bar to talk to the cashier.
As an Iowan native, she feels right at home here. What started as a family feat has fallen almost exclusively into her own hands after her father started the company in Knoxville, Iowa, and is now a successful, thriving brewery across the Midwest.
What I imagined happening when I sat down with her to talk about her life, the brewery and hopefully grab a sample or two, was hear how she’s overcome the obstacles of being a woman in a male dominated industry. And to be frank, she hasn’t.
She doesn’t deny it’s there. It is, and that’s what makes it so much less significant. She doesn’t deny that the industry isn’t harder for women to succeed or that people don’t take her less seriously than they do her male counterparts. She knows those aspects exist and that unfortunately, for the time being, they will - but she isn’t letting them define her or her business. Present and future.
What McKay does, is take advantage of this situation. While only two percent of all brewery owners in the U.S. are women, she has a chance to pack a bigger punch in the beer scene.
“She hasn't let that get in her way at all”, says Hans Decker, a bartender at Peace Tree.
“She’s the CEO, but she’s also everyone’s colleague and friend and that’s why she’s so successful’. While she discovered there were going to be a few obstacles, she wasn’t going to let the fact that she was a woman be one of them. “I can either worry about that, or I can just brew good beer and not worry about fitting in with that ‘bro’ culture”, McKay says.
“I’m not going to say things aren’t stacked against us a little bit, but on the other hand - we cannot hold ourselves back”, she continues. Bridget Brennan, founder of Chicago consulting group, Female Factor, says in her book, Why She Buys, that women are the ‘engine of global consumer community’. AKA, they hold all the spending power, or at least eighty percent of it. Not only do women have room to grow and thrive in this industry, they have an incredible market to sell to.
According to a recent Pew Research Center study, women in top C-Suite offices are on the rise and growing at an incredible rate (read: Stitch Fix CEO Katrina Lake who is on track to make $1.2 Billion this year). By finding these incredible role models in our life we can continue to bring those numbers up.
Like McKay says, “I like a good challenge. I’m artistically challenged here. If I want to crunch the numbers I can do that. If I want to drink a beer I can do that. But every year I get the chance to grow and progress as a person in a company that I really love”. Forget Wonder Woman. These are the women I'm following to the top.
Xoxo,
S
Samantha Miller (@samantharachelmiller) is a freelance writer from Chicago. She prides herself on her occasional wit, her keen eye for design and her undying love for iced almond milk lattes.
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