Just as in many fields, women must work harder
- Scott Daniels: We Ate Well and Cheaply
- March 19, 2021
- 790
There is, and has always been, a weird dichotomy in kitchens. In homes, women are held to be traditionally in charge when it comes to cooking. In restaurant kitchens, it’s an entirely different story: Fewer than 7% of head chefs in commercial kitchens are women.
A man who does all the cooking at home may draw some ribbing, but in the restaurant world, women face serious hurdles if they want a successful career in the same space with the boys. The reasons for this are fuzzy, to say the least.
There are stories of the kittens of the European-landed nobility and the male cooks who prepared the meals for royals. As the blue bloods fell to revolutions and depleted family fortunes, their unemployed cooks opened the first real restaurants, and the male domination of kitchens has held ever since.
In our time, restaurant kitchens are generally plagued by men who didn’t get the memos about sexual harassment, paid family leave doesn’t exist, having any kind of family tugging at a cook’s time is a liability and pregnancy is a nonstarter.
At the other end of this spectrum are men who work long hours, are away from their families too much and have to hold their own in a frequently toxic work environment of fatuous egos and locker-room bullying — in short, not an environment that invites women to thrive and grow. No wonder so many chefs smoke cigarettes.
Yet cooking talent is certainly not tied to gender, and the ratio of male-to-female excellent cooks must be at least one to one. In the United States, this is not reflected in the realities of the business. The list of women who have held Michelin stars is pretty impressive, but the majority of them are in Europe, with a high concentration in France.
There are encouraging trends. More women are choosing kitchen careers by entering culinary school than ever before, and while the under 10% landscape continued to hold out until about 20 years ago, the number of men and women attending culinary schools is about even today — except in the very best high-level academies, where it’s still 7-3.
Still, as of about 2016, female students outnumber the males at most of the Culinary Institute of America campuses. Perhaps this will slowly translate into restaurant kitchens, but for now women are still largely outside looking in.
It’s a career worth pursuing as top executive chefs can make north of $80,000, with an average only about $10,000 below that. And what is the stratosphere? Celebrity chef and restaurateur Gordon Ramsay made around $65 million in 2019.
My grandmother’s assessment of the whole situation was blunt. She worked as a server in the best restaurants in the area for years, and it was her opinion that men were just better cooks.
I don’t think that’s so, though I used to believe men were bolder with trying things and experimenting. Knowing plenty of chefs today, I no longer think this is so. In fact, it may be true that men actually fear varying so much as a tiptoe away from “the way we’ve always done it” while women, with more to prove, will take more risks.
Just as in many fields, women must work harder, be better, fend off more nonsense and prove themselves hour by hour to hold their own against men in the restaurant business. In this Women’s History month, here’s a big glass of respect for those who are still fighting to pave the way for their future sisters at the range.