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Why don’t we pay attention to women in the kitchen?

Jill

Because men are “chefs,” but women are “cooks.” I do love this article, especially the conclusion:

As Cohen — not to mention any number of thoughtful, well-reasoned articles on the subject — points out, there’s a sore disparity between the number of women running kitchens, and the number of women receiving acknowledgment for same. (Nominal efforts to address the achievement gap, like last year’s Barbie-hued “Women in Food” James Beard Awards, don’t exactly help.) Flat-out sexism is almost never directly addressed in these articles, and so it is that the conversation tends to come back to wondering what it is that’s wrong with women, rather than what it is that’s wrong with the system. There’s the “women cook to nurture, men cook to win” line; the insistence that a cooks’ hard-living lifestyle doesn’t jive with the family oriented preferences of the weaker sex; and our favorite, the frankly ridiculous notion that girls just don’t like to play with fire and knives as much as boys do.

But of course, women can play with fire, and they do it brilliantly. Chefs like Cohen — not to mention folks like April Bloomfield, Gabrielle Hamilton, or brand-new Beard Award winner Koren Grieveson — poke all kinds of holes in these theories; they’re as talented, badass, nuanced, tireless, and innovative as any men cooking today. And yet Cohen and Hamilton, who work independently, are largely missing from the breathless media coverage of all things food-related, and Bloomfield and Grieveson, who have managed to crack into the club, both cook under the aegis of men. Ken Friedman and Paul Kahan are emeritus members of the culinary boys’ club if anyone is, and their long shadows hang over their protégés’ successes.

The more a chef is written about, the more likely he is to win awards, and vice versa — so being excluded from the media-awards continuum hits female chefs coming and going. “Why would an investor back a female chef in a restaurant?” asks Cohen. “He knows that she won’t get the hype and attention a male chef will get.” Hype seems to be the key here, not talent: Women just don’t seem to come by it as easily as men do. That points to there being an outside bias, not an inherent problem; it’s a systemwide failure of inclusion. If Bloomfield, Grieveson, Hamilton, or Cohen were given the kind of attention (and subsequent funding, and subsequent more attention) lavished on young turks like Nate Appleman or David Chang, they could easily achieve comparable rock-star status. Even better, it would be without being ghettoized as “women chefs.”

18 thoughts on Why don’t we pay attention to women in the kitchen?

  1. “the frankly ridiculous notion that girls just don’t like to play with fire and knives as much as boys do.”

    This notion seems like it’s sort of at the center of the problem, in fact. The process is something like:

    1. Cooking is traditionally thought of as “women’s work.”

    2. Interest in cooking rises, a fad for cooking shows, etc.

    3. To compensate for (1), the cooking shows try really hard to play up the “manly” aspects of cooking: fire! knives! Look at all those big, tough, sweating cooks on TV.

    4. People believe the hype enough that they can claim that activities like turning on stoves and chopping vegetables require a virile, masculine personality.

    The frustrating thing is that you can sympathize a bit with (2). It’s quite right to try and talk people out of the idea that cooking is a silly, frivolous, easy, women’s activity. But I wish they could talk about it as serious, respectable work without automatically making it men-only.

  3. I’d posit a different dynamic. Home cooking is, yes, traditionally thought of as “women’s work.” But commercial cooking/gourmet cuisine are traditionally dominated by men.

    Famous women who break into that other world of cooking (Julia Child, Martha Stewart, Alice Waters to some extent) exist in a weird sort of duality where they both have an image as cavalier badasses, viz. Julia Child standing up to the old curmudgeons at Le Cordon Bleu, and also make their money as crossover stars relating commercial cuisine back into a posh domestic context. Meanwhile, there are hundreds of non-celebrity women chefs doing great work around the world to little acclaim.

  4. YES. So much love for this post. I am a female chef, trained by a female chef, and it SO MUCH IS a male dominated ‘boys club’, where they pat themselves on the back and don’t take women chefs seriously…. because OBVIOUSLY we’re going to quit when we want a family *rolls eyes*. It doesn’t help that female celebrity chefs are marketed as “just really home cooks who make a living from it”. Just….. Urgh. So much urgh. I can’t even form a coherant thought about it.

  5. I also really recommend a Gastronomica (a semi-academic food magazine) piece by Charlotte Druckman ,”Why Are There No Great Women Chefs?” It’s a few moths old now, but I imagine it will hold up for a long time. She talks about stuff like a recent panel at Astor Center which conducted a blind experiment to determine which dishes were prepared by a female vs. male chef. Very quickly, the piece describes, the discussion became about how the same elements- edible flowers or drizzled sauces- connote different things depending on the gender of the chef.
    She also hits it out of the park, I think, when she addresses television, where female chefs are presented inevitably in home kitchens, and male chefs are likewise always shown in professional kitchens. Slightly kinda problematic, no?

    There are some points made in the piece that I don’t agree with, but many more that I find very hard to argue with. It can be downloaded here, if you scroll down the page a bit: http://www.gastronomica.org/issues1001.html

  6. Anything that creates buzz, garners acclaim, and pays very well suddenly seems to default to “male.” The minute it is financially/culturally devalued, it becomes “female.” It’s friggin’ ridiculous.

  7. This makes me think of my sexist uncle who went to culinary school, and every time he makes dinner when we visit, he informs us he has to “create.” Not cook – create. Cooking is too conventional. He is an artiste! Only us ladies cook.

    As someone who loves to cook, and also loves to eat, particularly at restaurants, I find this discouraging. It’s like getting cooking recognized as a serious enterprise meant that men had to take it out of the home and create media buzz about how they are food artists. And don’t women become pastry chefs at a greater rate than men and/or regular chefs? Because pastry chefs also tend to be portrayed as “less serious” than chefs who cook meat – which is, as we all know, “manly.”

    It also caters to this idea that women aren’t competitive too. And speaking as a woman with a mean competitive streak – we are! So I totally believe “women chefs” are in it to win it just like men are. They’re just caught in this construct where women at large are though of as nurturers first. So, so frustrating.

  8. I just, uh… not to disagree with the point, but just to have this up here, in response to the post’s title… the difference between a ‘cook’ and a ‘chef’ is formal training– if you’re formally trained, you’re a chef, but if not, you’re a cook. Or at least, that’s the explanation Rachel Ray gave for why she doesn’t call herself a chef…

    1. The Flash: Well, yeah. My point was that when cooking is unpaid, it’s feminized and disparaged. Once it’s paid work, it’s culturally valued and then masculinized — so the stereotype of a “chef” is a man, erasing all the female chefs out there.

  10. I enjoy cooking, but I never feel any compulsion to come up with my own nomenclature to excuse it. Sure, there’s a part of me that’s been socialized to feel that I am somehow less than a man or shamefully un-heterosexual in doing so, but I do my best to push past it, as I do with other parts of my personality and behavior that aren’t exactly the masculine “norm”.

  11. Those “great chefs” tend to be people who have been running well renowned restaurants for decades. I think the discrepancy in the numbers mainly comes down to the classical gender imbalance in top positions in most professions. Which may or may not be caused by sexism (There are also the cultural gender stereotypes that makes men more likely to struggle the get into dominant positions in hierarchical structures).

  12. I read Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential not too long ago, and while he goes out of his way to make mention of female chefs, his emphasis seemed to be on the idea that female chefs have to be “more male” than the male chefs.

  13. The naming issue confuses me. In the institutional kitchens I have experience with (quaker center pendle hill, dance camp pinewoods), people were called “cooks” or “head cooks” (gender balance of head cooks: 2M/2F). When does someone get called a “chef”? Is that a restaurant word?

  15. This reminds me of the IQ survey. Women and men both predicted that mens IQ’s were higher than they actually were. Women and men tend to over estimate mens abilities and achievements. So, whenever a man tells me he can do something or that he has read a certain book, I treat it with a grain of salt until I know otherwise.
    No food pun intended.

  16. @Femocracy: There’s also a large amount of homophobia in the pastry chefing, as many people I’ve spoken to in the industry whole-heartedly believe that only a woman or a gay man can be a truly skilled pastry chef. Neverminding Albert Roux as an example of why that’s a crock.

  17. @The Flash: Being a chef isn’t just a matter of formal training, although the two generally go together. You can be a chef without the training– it’s a mark of respect from others in the profession as well. There are plenty of chefs who explicitly state they have had no formal training, but are still referred to as such due to talent.

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