By Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today

From the high plains of North America to smallholder plots in East Africa and trial fields in Scotland, more women are now at the centre of potato breeding decisions – and the crop is changing with them.

Setting the stage – from under-representation to overdue visibility

For most of the past century, the mental picture of a potato breeder was remarkably uniform: a man in a field or lab, deciding which lines to keep and which to cull. That image never told the whole story, but it reflected a real imbalance.

Globally, women now earn roughly half of all PhDs in fields like plant science, yet they still hold only around 30 % of research posts and as few as 12 % of academic research jobs. In agriculture, the gap is even more striking: in many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, women make up more than half of the agricultural labour force, but have less access to land, credit, extension – and to research and breeding leadership roles.

Over the past decade or so, that picture has begun to shift in potatoes:

• Public breeding programs are actively recruiting and promoting women into senior breeder and program-lead roles.
• CGIAR and national research systems have launched gender-responsive breeding initiatives to ensure that women farmers’ needs are explicitly built into trait profiles, not treated as an afterthought.
• Training programs such as GREAT (Gender-responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation) have equipped dozens of breeders in Africa with tools to close gender gaps in crop improvement.

And increasingly, this shift has visible anchors. One recent example is the Women in Potato Breeding initiative and website (womenpotatobreeders.com), launched as a global platform to recognize and uplift women who contribute to potato breeding – from field selection and seed systems to molecular diagnostics and climate resilience research. The site describes itself as a community-building project aimed at visibility, connection and mentorship for women in this space.

What used to be a quiet minority is slowly becoming a visible, vocal part of the profession. In potatoes, that shift is embodied in a growing group of women whose work ranges from farmer-facing variety design to cutting-edge molecular genetics.

Different perspectives, different priorities – how diversity changes the trait conversation

Diversity in breeding teams is not simply a matter of fairness; it changes which traits are considered must-have and which are allowed to fall through the cracks.

Research from the International Potato Center (CIP) and its partners shows that men and women farmers often value different aspects of the same variety. Men, who more often control sales, tend to stress yield, uniformity and storage or shelf-life. Women, who frequently manage cooking and household food provisioning, may prioritize early maturity (for food gaps), taste, texture, cooking time, and whether a potato holds together in local dishes.

Gender-responsive studies of boiled potato markets in Uganda, for example, found that women emphasized traits like:

• Ease of peeling and preparation.
• Meal stretching capacity – how filling the potatoes are.
• Sensory qualities – aroma, mouthfeel, appearance on the plate.

When more women sit at the breeding table, those kinds of traits are less likely to be dismissed as soft or secondary. Instead, they become central to product profiles, alongside agronomic performance.

The same logic applies to:

• Nutrition: Women breeders involved in biofortified potato work at CIP and national programs are often explicit about links between variety design, child nutrition and women’s workloads.
• Labour: Traits that reduce drudgery – fewer operations, easier weeding or harvesting, better suitability to mechanization – matter for women farmers, who frequently carry a disproportionate share of manual work in smallholder systems.
• Risk: Women in breeder and geneticist roles are often at the forefront of discussions about how varieties perform for resource-constrained farmers who cannot afford “insurance” in the form of high input rates or multiple sprays.

None of this means there is a female or male way to breed potatoes. Many men in breeding have championed the same concerns for years. But when teams are more diverse – and when women are in decision-making positions – trait portfolios tend to widen to reflect more of what actually happens in households, not just in markets.

Networks, mentorship – and a new home online for women potato breeders

For a long time, many women in potato breeding report a similar experience: being one of very few women in their department, or the only woman in the room at technical meetings.

That is starting to change as networks grow:

• The CGIAR Gender and Breeding Initiative and its G+ Tools have created spaces where breeders, gender researchers and social scientists jointly define product profiles, rather than working in silos.
• The GREAT training program, coordinated by Cornell University and partners, has trained scores of African breeders – many of them women – in gender-responsive methods, explicitly aiming to close gender gaps in breeding programs.
• Professional societies and conferences, from the Potato Association of America to regional platforms in Europe and Africa, increasingly feature dedicated sessions on gender, inclusion and mentoring in breeding.

Alongside these institutional efforts, more informal and independent platforms are emerging. The Women in Potato Breeding website is one of them.

The site presents itself as a new global initiative to recognize and uplift women who help shape the future of the potato crop. It:

• Explains why women’s contributions matter at every stage of breeding – from crossing blocks and lab diagnostics to seed systems and on-farm evaluation.
• Hosts a Global Directory where women working in potato breeding can be profiled, making it easier for event organizers, collaborators and students to find them.
• Offers sections such as Celebrating Women in Potato Breeding, The Role of Women in Potato Breeding and Resources & Further Reading, positioning itself as both a storytelling hub and a signpost to technical literature.
• Invites women breeders – or colleagues who want to nominate them – to submit profiles directly, with contact details for follow-up.

The initiative originated from a conversation between two long-time potato industry colleagues who saw the need for a dedicated platform to showcase and connect women in this niche. What began as an idea to profile a handful of inspiring breeders has grown into a project with global ambition – built on a simple belief: that visibility fosters opportunity.

Mentorship now runs in both directions. Senior scientists provide role models – proof that careers in high-level science, program leadership and industry-facing breeding are possible. At the same time, younger breeders push older institutions to move faster on issues like flexible work, inclusive hiring and credit for team science, and are increasingly using platforms like womenpotatobreeders.com to find each other and be seen.

What this means for the potato industry

For farmers, processors and the wider supply chain, the rise of women in potato breeding is not a feel-good side story. It is a structural shift in who decides what future varieties look like.

A few concrete implications:

Closer alignment with farmer realities
Gender-responsive studies in potatoes and other crops show that when breeding teams deliberately integrate the needs of both women and men farmers into product profiles, adoption rates rise and varieties stay in the system longer. That is because varieties are less likely to fail on “invisible” criteria – the way they cook, how often they have to be sprayed, or whether they fit within the time and labour constraints of real households.

Better fit with consumer and nutrition trends
From biofortified potatoes in the Andes and East Africa to beetle-resistant lines in Canada and climate-ready hybrids in Europe and Africa, many of the programs led or heavily influenced by women are directly linked to evolving consumer and policy concerns: nutrition, pesticide reduction, climate resilience.

More robust, diversified pipelines
Teams that combine field experience, molecular genetics, social science and gender expertise are starting to design varieties with multiple wins built in: not just yield, but resistance packages, cooking traits, nutrition and reduced labour. Evidence from across CGIAR suggests that breeding programs that integrate gender and social targeting become more strategic and more explicit about which farmer segments they are serving.

Industry reputation and licence to operate
As public and private breeders come under greater scrutiny on issues like inclusion, equity and the social impact of agricultural innovation, having visible women in leadership – and credible efforts to make breeding more gender-responsive – strengthens the industry’s legitimacy. That matters when making the case for investment in breeding to governments, donors and the public. Dedicated platforms like Women in Potato Breeding give these efforts a public face and an accessible entry point for the wider potato community.

Examples from the field – women breeders shaping tomorrow’s varieties

The shift described above is not abstract. It is embodied in the day-to-day work of many women across public institutions, CGIAR centres and private breeding programs. The following short snapshots highlight a few such breeders from different regions and institutional settings. They are illustrative rather than exhaustive – examples chosen because they help show the range of contributions women are making to the future of the potato crop.

Asunta “Susie” Thompson – Dakota lines and a grower-backed chair

In the Northern Plains of the United States, few names are as closely tied to modern potato varieties as Asunta (Susie) Thompson of North Dakota State University (NDSU). Since 2001, Thompson has led the NDSU potato breeding program, with a portfolio that now touches nearly every segment of the industry.

Her team’s releases include a suite of Dakota cultivars that growers in the region know well:

• Dakota Pearl, Dakota Diamond and Dakota Crisp – white-skinned chipping cultivars selected for high yields and good processing quality after cold storage.
• Dakota Trailblazer – NDSU’s first French-fry cultivar, a dual-purpose russet suitable for frozen processing and fresh markets.
• Dakota Russet – the variety that caught global attention in 2022 when it was accepted by McDonald’s for its flagship fries, the first new fry variety approved by the chain since 2016.

The breeding logic behind these lines is unapologetically practical: potatoes that yield reliably under Northern Plains conditions, resist issues like cold-induced sweetening and sugar ends, and deliver consistent fry colour and texture out of storage.

In early 2025, growers in North Dakota and Minnesota endowed a professorship in potato breeding at NDSU – naming Thompson as the inaugural holder. They explicitly linked the endowment to the impact of her varieties on regional farm incomes and processing contracts.

Behind the formal titles is a quieter reality: Thompson spends much of her time talking directly with farmers about how varieties behave in their storage sheds, their fry lines, and their soils. That grower-facing habit – listening first, breeding second – is increasingly characteristic of many women in the profession, and Susie has set an outstanding example over many years.

Shelley Jansky – from wild species to hybrid potatoes

If Thompson’s work has reshaped what goes into North American fryers, Shelley H. Jansky’s career has helped reshape what breeders can put into their crossing blocks.

For decades, Jansky – working with the USDA-ARS Vegetable Crops Research Unit and the University of Wisconsin–Madison – described herself as a pre-breeder: someone who pulls traits from wild potato relatives and moves them into usable breeding lines.

Her contributions include:

• Introgressing strong resistance to cold-induced sweetening from wild species into cultivated potatoes – a key step toward chip and fry lines that still perform after months of cold storage.
• Developing germplasm such as the diploid line M6, a self-compatible inbred that has become a workhorse for genetic mapping and the design of hybrid breeding systems in potato.
• Helping articulate and popularize the concept of converting potato from a clonally propagated tetraploid crop into a diploid, inbred-line-based hybrid crop – a shift that promises shorter breeding cycles, more predictable gains, and easier deployment of complex trait packages.

Jansky’s work sits mostly behind the scenes of commercial variety releases, but it underpins much of the current excitement around hybrid potatoes, from public programs to private companies. The varieties that farmers will plant a decade from now may owe as much to this kind of foundational, often invisible work as to the names on variety labels.

Helen Tai – climate-smart, beetle-resistant potatoes in Canada

In Fredericton, New Brunswick, Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada (AAFC) scientist Helen Tai is tackling two of the most stubborn constraints in potato production: climate stress and the Colorado potato beetle.

Tai leads a multi-partner genomics project titled “Revolutionizing potato variety development for climate smart agriculture”, funded under Canada’s Genomics Research and Development Initiative. The work aims to develop varieties with higher tuber quality and yield, better adaptation to climate change and improved environmental sustainability – explicitly linking breeding to Canada’s fast-growing processing sector and the need for a more robust supply chain.

In parallel, Tai has spent years working on natural resistance to Colorado potato beetle (CPB):

• Drawing on wild relatives whose leaves beetles refuse to eat, her team identified the chemical signatures associated with beetle resistance and introgressed those traits into breeding lines.
• Canadian media reported in 2018 that new CPB-resistant potatoes – developed over roughly 30 years of work – had entered breeding programs and were available for industry trials.

The combined effect is a pipeline that targets reduced insecticide dependence, better performance under weather volatility, and varieties that still align with processor and retailer quality demands. It is a textbook example of how a breeder’s agenda can connect pest management, climate resilience and market realities in one program.

Hannele Lindqvist-Kreuze – public-good genetics at global scale

At the International Potato Center (CIP) in Lima, Hannele Lindqvist-Kreuze leads the global breeding program for both potato and sweetpotato.

Her mandate is unusually broad:

• Steer breeding programs spanning at least six countries in South America, Africa and Asia.
• Deliver improved varieties that smallholder farmers can adopt quickly, with clear gains in yield stability, disease resistance and nutrition.
• Modernize CIP’s breeding operations through genomic selection, digitized data management and closer alignment with national partners.

Under Lindqvist-Kreuze’s leadership, CIP’s potato breeding emphasizes traits such as:

• Resistance to late blight and viruses – still the biggest threats in many highland systems.
• Biofortification, including iron- and zinc-rich lines designed to combat hidden hunger in Andean and African diets.
• Climate resilience – heat and drought tolerance, and better performance under low-input conditions.

CIP has also become one of the focal points for gender-responsive breeding in roots and tubers. Its G+ Tools help breeding teams map how men and women value traits differently – for example, men often prioritizing yield and market shelf-life, while women farmers place greater weight on early maturity, taste and cooking qualities that reduce fuel and labour burdens.

In practice, that means a woman leading a globally influential breeding program is also at the centre of efforts to redesign how traits are chosen in the first place.

Vanessa Young – decoding resistance for UK and EU seed systems

In Scotland, Vanessa Young serves as Head of Molecular Diagnostics and potato breeder at James Hutton Limited, the commercial arm of the James Hutton Institute.

Hutton has a long track record in potato: more than 110 commercial cultivars and stewardship of the Commonwealth Potato Collection, a key genebank of wild and cultivated germplasm. Young’s work sits where that diversity meets modern molecular tools:

• She co-authors work on SMRT–AgRenSeq-d, a method that combines long-read sequencing, association genetics and targeted resequencing to identify disease resistance genes – such as those effective against late blight – directly in established tetraploid varieties.
• Her group validates DNA markers for resistance to potato cyst nematodes (PCN) and other pathogens, turning them into routine services for breeders and seed companies.

The practical outcome is that seed and breeding programs can now stack and track specific resistance genes more precisely, helping protect UK and EU seed systems from PCN and late blight pressure – and giving growers a better chance of staying ahead of regulatory and market demands for reduced pesticide use.

These profiles are just a small sample of the women whose work is shaping future varieties. Many more – in national programs, CGIAR centres, private companies and early-career roles – could have been included. The central point is that the “quiet revolution” in potato breeding already has names, faces and varieties attached to it.

A quiet revolution, and a standing invitation

The presence – and influence – of women in potato breeding has grown significantly in the past two decades. Today, women lead national and international breeding programs, anchor global efforts to modernize genebanks and genomic pipelines, and drive some of the most ambitious initiatives on climate-smart and gender-responsive potatoes.

Yet the overall numbers still tell a sober story. Women remain under-represented in senior research posts and program leadership in many countries. In some systems, they are concentrated in “support” roles rather than in positions that control budgets, trait priorities and release decisions.

The quiet revolution in potato breeding is therefore best understood as a work in progress:

• It is visible in varieties like Dakota Russet, CPB-resistant Canadian lines, PCN-resistant UK material and biofortified Andean potatoes that trace back, directly or indirectly, to women’s decisions in breeding programs.
• It is embodied in institutional tools like CIP’s G+ framework and GREAT’s training model, which force teams to ask who their varieties really serve.
• And it is quietly changing the way the industry thinks about what makes a good potato – not only yield and processor efficiency, but also nutrition, drudgery reduction, resilience and the lived reality of the people who grow, cook and eat it.

For growers, processors and policymakers, the takeaway is straightforward: when you ask about the next variety you plan to plant or contract, it is worth asking who was at the table when that variety was designed – and whose needs they had in mind.

And for women already working in breeding, or young scientists considering a future in this field, there is a standing invitation: networks, programs and now dedicated platforms like Women in Potato Breeding are actively looking to make your work visible. The future shape, colour, flavour and resilience of the world’s potatoes will increasingly reflect your insights, priorities and lived experiences – not as an exception, but as the new normal.

Further reading – G+ tools and GREAT, in plain language

G+ tools – helping breeders ask “who is this variety really for?”

The G+ tools are a set of practical checklists and templates developed by CGIAR and the International Potato Center to help breeding teams design varieties for real people, not abstract “average farmers”.

In plain language, they help breeders to:

• Map out who will actually use a new variety – women and men, smallholders and larger farmers, processors, traders and consumers.
• Decide which traits matter most to each of these groups – not only yield and disease resistance, but also taste, cooking quality, storage behaviour, labour demands and fuel use.
• Turn this into a written product profile that guides the entire breeding pipeline, so important “soft” traits are not quietly dropped when trade-offs appear.

In practice, teams use G+ tools in workshops and planning sessions to stress-test their variety ideas. The goal is simple: fewer varieties that look good in official trials but fail in farm kitchens or local markets, and more varieties that fit into the daily lives of the people who grow and eat them.

Key starting points:

• G+ tools overview: https://www.cgiar.org/innovations/g-tools-for-gender-responsive-breeding/
• CIP innovation page: https://cipotato.org/cip-50/innovations/g-tools/

GREAT – giving scientists the skills to make breeding genuinely gender-responsive

GREAT (Gender-responsive Researchers Equipped for Agricultural Transformation) is a training program led by Cornell University and partners that works with breeders and social scientists in Africa. Its purpose is to help research teams build gender into their day-to-day work, not bolt it on at the end.

In straightforward terms, GREAT courses:

• Bring together breeders, economists and gender specialists from the same projects.
• Show them how to talk directly with women and men farmers, traders and processors about their needs and constraints.
• Help teams redesign their breeding goals, fieldwork and data analysis so that new varieties actually serve groups who are often left out – especially women farmers.

Graduates of GREAT have gone on to change how breeding projects are run: introducing separate interviews with women and men, adjusting trait priorities, and making sure that “target users” are clearly defined instead of assumed.

Key starting points:

• GREAT program homepage: https://greatagriculture.org/
• Overview of the training model and outcomes (FAO feature): https://www.fao.org/family-farming/detail/en/c/1733916/

Author: Lukie Pieterse, Potato News Today
Cover image: Credit Potato News Today