There's an odd dichotomy in the word "kitchen". When we think of a domestic kitchen, there's still very much an assumption that a woman is at the heart of it, making the food with little fuss or bother as it requires no "real" skills - whether it's still true or not, it's a prevailing view, one we like to shine up from time to time and bathe in its nostalgic glow. Yet when we think of a professional kitchen, we suspect the immediate image is one of big shouty men in white, flames a-leaping and waiters a-dancing, all fire and metal and noise. That's the only way our food - the food we pay someone else to prepare and clear away - can be cooked, with maximum strength and bombast. There's no acknowledgment that both of them contain just... cooking. That's it, just someone making a meal using exactly the same skills - time-management, people management, multi-tasking and so on.
Yet there's still a quiet (ironically) insistence within the restaurant industry that women are terminally unsuited to life within it. Tom Kerridge - the creamy-voiced shrinking giant of The Hand and Flowers - is the latest to give voice to this curious anachronism: He likes "girls (NB) in the kitchen, makes it not so aggressive. But then at the same point a lot of that fire in a chef’s belly you need, because you need them to force themselves to be ready for dinner service." In other words, women don't have the necessary to excel in that environment, that ability - to quote again - to "get things done, that ability to dig deep and be put under pressure."
What is this BS? How does the restaurant industry keep skipping clear of any equality legislation that other industries are (albeit slowly) getting on board with? How does it keep promulgating this crock that women are unable to excel in restaurant kitchens because they are crap at time-management and pressure (but curiously enough can get to the top in other workplaces using those exact skillsets)? There's a notable tendency for "top" male chefs (mostly on the TV) to acquire quite a blind spot when it comes to high-achieving women in their game; viz Clare Smyth, Lisa Allen, Monica Galetti, Hélène Darroze, Angela Hartnett to name but a few, and all of them with experience of the odd Michelin star.
It has to be acknowledged that the restaurant industry isn't particularly female-friendly. Not only are women mostly invisible, it seems, but they tend to have children just as they're reaching the upper ranks and you try finding childcare that covers midnight and/or 6am weekends, double shifts and low pay without an extremely understanding partner or family. The innuendo, the "banter", the entire system is geared towards bonding an all-male team (The Hand and Flowers has football and cricket on the radio all day - nice and inclusive if you're interested, less so if you're not). The TV features male chefs far more prominently than female chefs - name ANY that aren't relegated to unthreatening baking or cooking uncomplicated "simple" food rather than the whistles and bells that the men get to play with?
Frankly, it's not going to change any day soon. Until the industry (the country, THE WORLD) starts to recognise there is no difference apart from scalability between what we expect women to do in the home and what we exclude them from excelling in professionally, women chefs will continue to be bullied and undermined and elbowed out of an environment they have already proved themselves in for millenia.
