What Male Chefs Should Know: A Woman's Place Is in the Kitchen
New America Media, Commentary, Shana White, Posted: Mar 03, 2006
Editor's Note: A young culinary school graduates finds restaurant managers want to hire her as a waitress, but not a cook. Shana White, 25, is on the staff of Silicon Valley De-Bug, a project of New America Media.
SAN JOSE, Calif.--I finally finished culinary school and am now looking to get a job in the field. My first real-world lesson has been hard to swallow: As a woman, I'm good enough to cook at home, but not in a restaurant.
When I asked various restaurants if they were hiring, some of them said yes, but only for hostesses and wait staff. After two years in culinary school I wasn't too interested in waitressing, so I asked if they were hiring for line cooks or other jobs in the kitchen. They would take my application, but I got the sense they weren't taking me seriously.
When I would eat out at restaurants, I would see women running around in their waitress outfits. When I would look into the kitchen, it was nothing but men cooking. I didn't think much of it until my mother and I went out to lunch one day at a local steak house. The restaurant manager was going from table to table asking people how they liked their food. When he got to our table, my mother started talking with him in Spanish. I guess she was getting on his good side, looking for a job hook-up for me. Good looking out, mom.
When he left, my mother told me that they were talking about introducing Nicaraguan food to the restaurant. I am Nicaraguan, and I cook Nicaraguan dishes. But when she told him her daughter was a cook and asked if they were hiring, he said he had nothing for me. The job I wanted "gets too hectic," he said, and is too hard for women.
I checked out more restaurants, and the pattern held -- whether it was a Denny's, a steak house or a Chinese restaurant, women waitressed, men cooked.
I did a little research and found out that what I was facing was a national reality. The U.S. Department of Labor considers chef a "non-traditional" job for women, placing it on the same list with jobs such as construction worker, firefighter and engine mechanic. And it's not just this country -- in the 2000 Michelin Guide to Paris, none of the 100 restaurants listed had a female senior chef.
The story of men being the "professional" chefs plays out on TV as well. The most popular TV chefs are men like Emeril Live and Bobby Flay. Women such as Rachel Ray may host popular cooking shows, but they are set in a "home" kitchen and are designed to show audiences how to cook for family and friends. The men are head chefs who are opening up their restaurant kitchens to the public.
If being a good cook is considered "non-traditional" for women, why do many of us start off our lives in the kitchen at home? In school, I studied under a male master chef who taught me everything I needed to know. But what role did his mother play in the development of his cooking instincts? If women are good enough to cook in our homes and good enough to serve in restaurants, then we are capable of handling our jobs in a professional kitchen.
It's not that women are not aspiring to be chefs. My class at culinary school was 75 percent women. I asked Rochelle Sigler, a pastry chef and one of my teachers, about sexism in the restaurant industry. She said that a serious, "macho" attitude dominates most kitchens. "I had a boss who said I smiled too much in the kitchen," she recalled. "I thought he was joking at first, but he was serious."
I am still going to try to become a chef. I'll just have to fight extra hard to prove myself, and show that I can do whatever the next man can. My female classmates and I might just have do to what women have done in other fields where we were discriminated against -- create our own spaces.
Women need to open more of our own restaurants, catering businesses and bakeries. We have to show those who think we can't stand the heat that a women's place is indeed in the kitchen -- including the professional kitchen.
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