A woman's place: reaching the top in the restaurant trade

When Anita Thoma began training to become a chef at DIT Cathal Brugha Street in the mid-1980s, her father gave her some advice. “My father, who was a chef himself, said to me that it wasn’t going to be good enough for me to be as good as everybody else in my class, in my work. Because I was a woman, I was going to have to be better."

Almost 30 years on, the restaurant industry is still predominantly run by men, and Thoma, now chef proprietor at Il Primo on Dublin’s Montague Street, believes women are still at a disadvantage when it comes to reaching positions of authority in a professional kitchen, an environment she calls "macho" and "full of testosterone".

“It’s a tough business," says Thoma, after describing the long, unsociable hours, an abundance of volatile male chefs and kitchens she has encountered where men and women have had to share a single changing room. "I don’t think women aren’t able for it physically or emotionally. They are, but they make other decisions in life sometimes, and the industry doesn’t lend itself to support women who want to have children and who want to work as well.”  Thoma admits the restaurant industry is not unique in this sense.“Women come to a glass ceiling wherever they go,” she says.

In her 16 years in the business, Aoife Barker, who was brought on board as head chef at L'Gueuleton on Fade Street in March, has encountered just one female head chef. “I think it’s definitely harder for women to make it to the top in this business. You tend to get overlooked a lot," says Barker. She believes men monopolise the upper echelons because women lack the confidence and knack for selling themselves, and because “men don’t like women asking them or telling them what to do a lot of the time".

There might be few women in senior positions, but there are few women in the industry to begin with. Barker is the only woman in a kitchen of 14 staff, and Thoma says that when Il Primo advertises for a job, for every 50 applications from men, there might be two from women.

Grainne O’Keefe, a senior sous chef at Pichet on Trinity Street, takes a different view. “In the kitchen, it doesn’t really matter if you’re male or female," she says. "All that matters is if you’re good.” She believes that to be a woman in a “heavy pressure kitchen” requires confidence, but she doesn't think the journey to the top is different for men and women.

At just 23 years old, O'Keefe is young for a sous chef, but she's been in the business since she was 17 and has worked in a quite a few kitchens. In that time, she's never experienced what she would deem sexism. “If you are in a kitchen that’s like that," she says, "then you’re in the wrong kitchen.”