Campaigner says food industry second most unequal workplace for women

The food industry is the most unequal workplace for women after the IT industry, a French campaigner has told a conference in Galway. Maria Canabal said women were paid an average of 28 per cent less than their male counterparts internationally in an industry with “a very clear glass ceiling effect”.

However, one of Ireland’s leading chefs, Danni Barry, said she did not find being a woman was a disadvantage as she worked her way up through the Michelin kitchen system. “I’m left-handed and 5½ foot so there were loads of difficulties,” she said, but being a woman was not one of them.

She said she was not described as a “female chef” until she won a Michelin star in Eipic restaurant in Belfast last year. “We’re just chefs. We’re all the same and merit goes a long way.” She took her father’s advice – “don’t you have two feet and a brain?” – and found another way when she encountered difficulties in her career.

The conference, organised by chefs Jess Murphy and Hilary O'Hagan-Brennan in response to an article in The Irish Times about under-representation of women in kitchens, also discussed unpaid internships – often referred to as stages – which are common in the restaurant industry. "The business plan of many restaurants is based on free workers," Ms Canabal said when chef Holly Dalton asked whether young chefs should refuse to work for free.

Drigin Gaffey of Aniar restaurant in Galway said they took people on unpaid stages for six weeks as an educational programme, giving them experience they could not get at college. “They’re coming in to learn and we’re not replacing working staff with free labour. We’re accommodating them in the kitchen.”

Her husband, chef JP McMahon, had worked three unpaid stages himself in the last year, she said.

Ms Canabal, who founded Parabere Forum, an international group of women working in the food industry, said successful women chefs were nothing new. The first chef in the world to be awarded six Michelin stars, three for each of her restaurants, was French woman Eugenie Brazier, who turned Lyon into France’s gastronomic capital in 1933.

Restaurants needed to work to eliminate gender pay gaps and make kitchens more accessible to women. “Only 1 per cent of Michelin star restaurants have women’s changing rooms. The message is that they are not a place for women.”

The Athrú 2016 inaugural conference attracted leading female chefs and restaurateurs from across Ireland and Europe for a culinary think-in and conference on gender roles within professional kitchens and throughout the hospitality sector.

Ms Canabal said that while 93 per cent of cooking in the home was done by women, fewer than one in five chefs in the UK was a woman. Women were underrepresented on important judging panels for professional cookery awards, she said, with the Bocuse D’Or awards judged entirely by men. The awards are named after Paul Bocuse, who was a student of Brazier.

“If you Google ‘famous chefs’ this is what you get,” she said, showing an image of entirely male faces. “You get only men.” Women chefs were written about as a separate category. They were trained to “do things very well and to wait for recognition” in what she called the “good girl syndrome”. Women were not raised to boast about their achievements.

Making kitchens more diverse would help to solve the current skills shortage in the catering industry, she said, and would improve conditions for both men and women.