A popular approach over the past twenty years has been to rely upon voluntary standards as a means to make claims, measure and judge whether or not a number of social equity concerns exist in private sector practices. But can we expect standards to deliver gender equity? In this article I respond to this question by exploring how standards and gendered division of labor interact in certified tea value chains (i.e., Ethical Tea Partnership (ETP), Fairtrade (FLO), Organic (OR) and Rainforest Alliance (RA)) in Tanzania. The results of this mixed-method study contribute to the literature on gender equity and standards by building on the gendered value chain approach to analyze these complex and contextual interactions. I propose that there is a need to focus on the interactions between men and women with different knowledge of techniques that filter how equitably their roles are distributed in the certified value chains.