Hot Debate Over Giving Women Chefs Their Due - Building Gender Balanced Business

From Jamie Oliver to the nearly all-male three-star Continental chefs to the Food Channel, it seems like only men can cook (except, of course, in the home kitchen; there it’s still a woman’s world). Time Out noticed, and takes the food world to task:

• “Mad Men–style ass-pinching may have gone the way of aspic, but women, for all of their gains in the notoriously tough restaurant industry, are dealing with a more subtle form of sexism: visibility, or lack thereof,” the dining-oriented magazine notes.

• Some have concentrated on the positive — there are now four female three-star chefs worldwide. But only one woman is a three-star chef in France, and critics, male and female alike, argue that Michelin, the leader in such rankings, is ignoring promising female talent. But it is not alone, as magazines and TV concentrate on testosterone-fuelled macho chefs.

• Industry insiders freely admit that few women reach the top in the restaurant industry. The organization Women Chefs & Restaurateurs reports that only 10% of US executive-level chefs are women. The question is why.

• One reason is that few executive chefs in big restaurant groups are women.

• Another reason is that women tend to predominate only as pastry chefs, a less noticed realm when discussing the hottest chefs.

• Some industry insiders say the difficulties for women as chefs are not particularly remarkable, however poor an excuse that might be. “Inevitably you hit a glass ceiling,” said Rohini Dey, owner of At Vermillion in Chicago. “In many industries, the proportion of [women] who get to the higher-level positions is very small, and that’s very true of this industry as well.

• While high-profile female chefs are still rare, women have made some advances in numbers as sommeliers and maître d’s at some top-level US restaurants.

The Time Out article

The Guardian, on the first female three-star chef in France in 50 years