When Danielle Schumacher attended her first convention of marijuana activists about 15 years ago, she could count on one hand all the women in a room of older men.

The lack of diversity struck the then-college student, who remembers feeling out of place but also determined to make her mark.

“That feeling just really stuck with me that this isn’t going to last. This is going to shift in my lifetime, and I want to be part of that,” said the San Francisco-based Schumacher, who in 2014 co-founded THC Staffing Group, a recruitment firm that encourages a more diverse cannabis industry workforce.

The trade publication Marijuana Business Daily surveyed 567 senior executives, company founders and those with ownership stakes in marijuana businesses, and found the percentage of women in executive roles fell from 36 percent in 2015 to 27 percent in 2017.

Women generally make family decisions on health and wellness, and women have an opportunity to design products that fit with their lifestyle, she said.

“We’re not necessarily interested in the largest bong ever built,” said Windy Borman, a Colorado-based filmmaker whose movie “Mary Janes: The Women of Weed” documents her evolution from skeptic to self-proclaimed “puffragette.” “We need products that fit into our lifestyle that are more discreet and they’re not going to be covered in Jamaican flags and big pot leaves and things like that.”

See the original article at Leafly