Coffee Beans Are Feminist

Imagine you’re in a meeting: the room is hot and fuggy, the cooling fan moves from right to left and from left to right so that you need to hold your sheets down to the desk every eight to ten seconds, and you try to concentrate for long enough to deal with the new complex projects that need to be prepared. On the side, you also keep in mind that your next appointment begins in one hour, your kids need to be picked up from school and you certainly mustn’t forget to call your mother-in-law to thank her for the lovely birthday present.

The thing you want, need, crave for is coffee. Whether its caffeine reaches you in the form of a cappuccino, latte macchiato or espresso doesn’t matter. Making it through the day is all you want, and coffee has been you’re ally whenever you needed a concentration-boost. Because that’s what coffee does, isn’t it?


As it turns out, however, coffee beans do not treat all of us equally. Those ingenious little things, which have been praised for their effects on our concentration and alertness, are actually covert feminist when it comes to increasing someone’s concentration. Well, that’s really bad news for all the men out there who rated coffee as their number-one smelling salt.

Now, I’m sure, you want to know who the discoverer of this terrible news is: a psychologist at the University of Bristol’s Department for Experimental Psychology (this sounds really cool, actually) called Peter Rogers. The harbingers of the news? The Telegraph, Daily Mail and The Times.

So, here’s how the study was done: It tested the effect caffeinated coffee had on people who had to work under stressful situations. They had two groups, one that was provided with caffeinated (real!) coffee and one with decaffeinated coffee.

Both groups then needed to work under stressful situations and were given the coffee. The efficiency of their work and their concentrations levels were then monitored and women were shown to work much more efficiently than men after they had been given caffeinated coffee. In fact, men’s alertness did either not change or even decreased after consuming coffee.

Well, now we know that coffee does raise women’s efficiency but has no effects on men’s alertness whatsoever. And when we now think about the fact that most leading positions are held by men – who send their secretaries to send them coffee – we should ask ourselves whether it might really be better to let more woman be the ones ordering the coffee in the companies. Just image, those die-hard feminists would finally get their way and important decisions might be made by enormously concentrated females.

Still, if drinking coffee had absolutely no effect on the alertness and concentration of about fifty percent of the world’s population, someone must have noticed that before, right? And many men will now say that they do feel more alert after a cup of coffee, no matter what the science says. Here we need to keep in mind that the well-known placebo-effect might play a big role. Scientists have proven before that the mere belief that something works is enough to actually feel some kind of effect, like with pain killer, or apparently, coffee.

So, coffee-beans are slightly sexist. But that isn’t really a problem as long as we can still rely on the good old placebo-effect. Also, maybe there will soon be a study that proves the exact opposite – as it often happens – and then we can all celebrate those lovely, little beans again. Either way, coffee will remain one of the most-consumed legal drugs everywhere and everyone will continue to enjoy his or her cappuccino, latte macchiato or espresso.