It is just me, or do I get the feeling that almost all chefs that are featured on TV are male? Are lady chefs really that rare? Why so, considering that most mums are responsible for the cooking?
This is one of those age old questions that isn’t entirely true this days, but being in the industry I’ll offer a few of my own WAGS:
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The first thing to consider is that no one just “becomes” a chef. There is a lot of training and experience required. Another thing to consider is that there are a lot of women chefs, they just haven’t become as promenent as their male counterparts.
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Many chefs start out as low-level cooks or dishwashers at an early age. Most young women are lucky enough to be able to serve tables and avoid being a dishwasher or low-level cook. As a result, its the guys that move their way up the line and eventually become a chef.
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Life in a kitchen is a lot like being in the military, or at least a lot like what the military looks like on tv. It involves a lot of humiliation, yelling, injury, and general unpleasentness. From my experience young girls have an extremely difficult time dealing with this and leave before moving up the ranks.
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The title “chef” is very much an upper management position; they’re the CEO of the kitchen. As a result women cooks get a lot of the glass-ceiling problems than business-women get.
Those are pretty much my thoughts/opinions, I’m not sure there is a “factual” answer for this. I think what’s you’ll find is that women chefs work their way into very different roles such a catering, pastry, and baking–areas that women far exceed at over men.
The job of “chef” used to be almost exclusively male. Women could be pastry chefs or garde-manger (cold kitchen), but they generally weren’t sous chefs or line cooks or head chefs. For whatever reason, it was a traditionally male job, perhaps because of the perceived masculinity of such a position and the fact that it’s a very physically demanding job. Women could be “Cook” - like in a Jane Austen novel - but not “chef.”
It does seem like most of the cooking shows on TV have male chefs. That’s probably a combination of there being less female chefs overall and that filming a TV show and running a restaurant, or several restaurants, is a whole hell of a lot of work and maybe female chefs generally don’t want to do it.
Of course the most famous TV chef of all time was a woman. Perhaps the men on TV now are just trying to reach her level, and the female chefs of the world feel they already have.
In one of Tony Bourdain’s books, he remarked on the excellent women sous-chefs at another Manhattan restaurant he visited. He ruefully noted that that women probably could not withstand the atmosphere in his own kitchen, which he runs much like a rough-and-tumble, borderline violent and profane men’s locker room. Too bad. I don’t see why so many restaurant kitchens must be like this. Although it is not for the fragile, cooking should not be a cutthroat contact sport.
Although I agree with the answers above, I also think that women may be less likely to take on the rigors of what it takes to become. Chefs work long hours and often end up having to relocate several times. Granted, this is changing in our society, quite rapidly.
A friend of mine’s son is a chef and has had to train in Pittsburgh, New York, and Atlanta. Then upon graduation the restaurant he was working in wanted to send him away again for more study. After that he was eyeing up a position in Minneapolis. During all this, he was working/training about 12-18 hours a day, and had no social life because when he wasn’t cooking, he was sleeping.
The prospect of a girlfriend/wife, or family was impossible for him during all this time. Even though more and more women are getting out of “traditional” female roles in our society, there are still plenty that are expected to get married and become a baby machine so the concept of becoming a chef may never occur to them. That’s just my 2 cents.
Aside from the traditional boy’s club atmosphere, it’s hard to think of a career that’s more family-unfriendly than being a chef at a top restaurant.
Some of the most creative women in the food business seem to have chosen other ways of expressing themselves. Alice Waters is plenty famous, but Chez Panisse isn’t the usual Guide Michelin sort of place.
Women also seem to dominate the cookbook industry, as far as I can tell.
Um, first sentence of my post was to be <snip> “I also think that women may be less likely to take on the rigors of what it takes to become a chef.”
:smack:
Strangely enough, George Orwell commented on this in Down and Out in Paris and London. His conclusion was that, although women could be excellent cooks in a non-professional setting, they weren’t “punctual” enough and as willing to cut corners in order to make it as a professional cook.
Today, we wouldn’t accept such a stereotyping statement, but it is interesting that even back then, someone was asking the same question.
Almost all anything featured on TV are male!
How many female national news anchors have we had?
How many female local news anchors?
How many female sports commentators?
How many female hosts on late-night talk shows?
How many female hosts of variety shows?
The answer to all of these is either none or a very small percentage. TV has always been pretty male dominated. That is changing now, but pretty slowly.
A restaurant kitchen is a stressful place. You’re in a hot, loud room along with a bunch of other people, doing precision, sometimes delicate work on a deadline for people who are eager to crititize you if the food takes too long to prepare or isn’t good, all the while having to keep up with orders that keep coming in.
You’re being satirical, aren’t you?
Um, every local TV news market I’ve ever seen has at least one female anchor. Generally there’s one female and one male anchor among the “main” people, and one of those is often some flavor of minority.
OK, Captain, you’ve convinced me. Precise, stressful, delicate work is best done by profane, borderline-violent, rough men.
Remember that next time you’re going in for major surgery, folks!
:rolleyes:
Best done by? Not really. As Bourdain himself notes, you’ll never catch the cooks at top restaurants being anything but utmost professional. However, those are the top restaurants with the top cooks with top qualifications. Your average line cook is a Central American immigrant who worked his way up from being a porter or a dishwasher - work which women tend not to do. Those types of atmospheres tend to become a bit rowdy. And when the chef came up in that type of atmosphere as well (like Bourdain), that tends to be the atmosphere they’re used to and comfortable in.
Must most kitchens be like that? No. But there’s no impetus to change them because most of the line cooks are men and they’re comfortable and it’s not like there’s a huge number of women aching to become a line cook. If they aspire to be a top chef, then they’re going to be going to culinary school and likely working in a more professional atmosphere - not doing their studies in Applebee’s.
Rachael Ray, Ina Garten, Martha Stewart, Ceci Carmichael, Cat Cora, Paula Deen, Sara Moulton, Tori Ritchie, Giada De Laurentiis. . . .
I do not agree at all that the stress and cut-throat atmosphere is what keeps more women away from the culinary arts. If women shied away from chaos and grueling work then none of them would get married and have children.
Something occured to me when I was reading Neurotik’s post. My GF used to work in a restaurant in Buffalo that was owned by a European immigrant and this guy would only let the females become hostesses, dishwashers, and bussers. The men were the cooks, chefs and servers. To him this was just how it was done. So I wonder if a lot of it is European influence on the expected gender roles in a professional kitchen.
I post on a food message board and this comes up fairly often. Traditionally, Women dominate the home cooking while men dominate the restaurant cooking. The line up of food network stars represents this dichotomy fairly well, all of the female stars mentioned above are home cooks while the prominent food network male stars like Mario Batali do restaurant cooking.
It’s a mistake to take Bourdain’s comments on restaurant cooking too seriously. Every kitchen Bourdain has worked in has been a Bourdain style kitchen, mainly because Boudain works exclusively at Bourdain style kitchens. There are many other management styles and cooking styles which lead to much different kitchen atmospheres. Certainly a lot of the stuff he says is true; ex-cons are attracted to line cooking, drug abuse is rampant, the hours are anti-social, there is a lot of machismo and dealing with pain, it is stressful work etc. All of those have certainly contributed to making it an unfriendly place for women.
The observation that women made poor cooks date back to as Escoffier who is considered the father of modern cuisine and is also surprisingly universal across cultures as well.
… the Two Fat Ladies, Nigella Lawson, the Barefoot Contessa, Julia Child!, …
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There seems to be no dearth of women cooks/chefs on the Food Network, Home and Garden, Style, and other television networks.
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There does seem to be a continuing underrepresentation of women chefs in the top-ranked restaurants.
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One cause of this seems to be the culture of the professional kitchen, which, going by Anthony Bourdain’s book, seems to be super-macho and abusive.
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Such a culture is not necessary for a good restaurant, but that is the way it has evolved. I don’t know whether there is any trend of change, or whether there has been any movement to effect change, or how one would go about changing things.
I don’t recognize any of those names except Stewart, and she is not a chef (although she ran a catering business for a time).
Being a good cook is not the same as being a chef, even if you’re a good cook on a TV show.
IANAC.
Nora Pouillon is probably the best-known-to-the-public female chef in DC. I do not know how long is th reach of her reputation.