**7.2 Women's participation in the process of coffee production**

Coffee commercialization is gender-related working culture that required women participation in farm production in particular work positions including seedling, weeding, fertilizing, harvesting, and processing. Women take most part of the seedling work including prepare seed box and nurturing. Weeding of coffee trees by using traditional tools such as knife to clear grassed out of farm is also carried out by women, while men use machine grass cutter. The coffee cultivation activity requires weeding several times throughout a year which provide employment opportunities and wage earning for women. Women also take part in another activity of the farm, that is fertilizer application. Women participate in harvesting, particularly for Arabica Cartimor coffee which requires soft hands to take care of the young cherries while picking. Women are good at these techniques. The coffee cherry of Arabica variety is not ripened at the single time. Therefore, only red ones are allowed to be plucked. During the booming of the red coffee, cherry need to be picked; otherwise, the red cherry falls and wastes.

Although, women and men spend similar time-use in coffee cultivation together, some tasks of coffee cultivation are gender-based. The tasks require energy (e.g. weeding by using the machine, fertilizing, pruning, washing, and heavy lifting) are men's task, while women take the time-consuming and light work such as harvesting, manual weeding, and sun drying. Furthermore, labor hired on coffee cultivation reflects gender role. There is more female labor than male labor on both manual weeding and harvesting tasks. The harvesting and manual weeding are considered as time-consuming work and tedious tasks. Men prefer to do a task that wastes energy in a short time.

The gender and seasonal employment reveal that gender of hired labor is significantly correlated with employment activity including wage, work hour, benefit, working day, and worker with children at work at the 0.05 and 0.01 level. Female workers also mainly involve in the processing factory for the task of filling and packaging coffee sack. In conclusion, women's role in coffee commercialization is involved with the household or company production levels, particularly for the light and time-consuming works (**Figure 2**).

**Figure 2.** *Coffee commercialization (illustrated by authors).*
