Una Mullally: Cooking should be woman’s work

At the Restaurants Association of Ireland Awards this week, there were ten categories for individual winners, featuring Best Chef, Best Restaurant Manager, and Local Food Hero. All ten winners were men. Discrimination against women in the world of top chefs and top restaurants isn’t new, but it’s something that has yet to be solved. Why is it that women can’t excel in kitchens when the world designs itself around keeping women in them?

In the first series of Chef’s Table, a great documentary programme on Netflix that profiles individual chefs, there were six episodes and one female chef, the amazing Niki Nakayama of N/Naka in LA. In the next instalment of six episodes out this month, two out of six are women. Progress!

To succeed at the upper echelons of nearly everything, structures are established subconsciously or very consciously indeed, to ensure that it’s harder for women to succeed. Asking why there aren’t more female Michelin star chefs, or top chefs in general, is like asking why there aren’t more female billionaire tech CEOs or female banking bosses or female Prime Ministers. The odds are stacked in favour of men and against women, from the unsociable hours that continue to punish women for being hemmed into taking responsibility for most of the world’s childcare, to a macho culture than sidelines women because of their gender.

But cooking, an activity that is aimed at women from childhood, should be an area where women excel. Maybe the best chefs in Ireland are women, and maybe they’re just not visible when food awards season comes around.

At its most clichéd level, we’re given the impression that once it moves out of the home and into the restaurant, cooking is transformed from a meditative and caretaking activity to a testosterone-laden man cave, where the tropes of swearing, bullying, shouting, and occasionally physical violence are not necessarily uncommon. I often think that this construct is enforced to defy the female origins of making a meal, and that in order for men to feel comfortable in a “girly” zone, things must become as blokey as possible. Frequently these days, you see chefs with cooking-related tattoos - like X Factor candidates who have treble clefs and old school microphones inked on their arms - to further macho-ize the profession. Cooking, we’re told, at its highest level, the bit that’s important, the bit that’s about impressing and innovating, is apparently a man’s job. Restaurants and kitchens have a serious gender problem, and it’s clearly not being adequately addressed.

I’m sure all the fellas who won the awards were worthy winners. But that’s not the point is it? To say someone is a worthy winner without delving deeper into this massive gender disparity, ignores the context within which they became a “worthy winner”. This same argument is deployed to shut down conversations about the lack of female directors, the lack of women in a theatre programme in the Abbey, the lack of women in the Dáil, the lack of women at the top of most industries and professions. It is the argument of “merit”, as if we all live in an equal society, with all of the exact same opportunities and enabling and disabling factors and variables. And of course, that’s not the reality. So why shut down the conversation? Why not just have the conversation?

There would have been something of a collective gasp right across the restaurant industry - and perhaps even a revolt - if ten women won those awards. Wouldn’t it be astonishing if ten women did? And why would that be astonishing? Because we just accept that women simply do not get to the top of many areas of our society, cooking included. It is not enough to be “worthy” as a woman, because in order to emerge past all of the worthy men, a woman has to be exceptional. Worthy is easy. Worthy is enough for men.

Why aren’t the doors of top kitchens open to women? Do culinary schools not encourage them? Do they have enough mentors? Are male chefs more likely to hire male understudies as we see in so many other male-dominated industries? Are the hours so bonkers that only a man could handle them? And why can’t women handle such hours? Oh yeah, because they’re looking after your kids. So before #SautéingTheFeminists begins, let’s wonder why all across the world, women do most the cooking everywhere, apart from in the places we give awards to people for doing so. Isn’t that strange?