Why were executive chef and other restaurant kitchen positions considered a man’s job when women were expected to be the household cooks?
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Because being a chef is a job, and once upon a time, jobs were something only men had. It’s not cooking that’s seen as feminine, it’s preparing food for your family that’s seen as feminine. If you’re cooking for other reasons, such as because you’re being paid for it, or you’re hosting a barbecue, then it’s not feminine anymore.
Being a household cook wasn’t seen as a full time job, because you were also taking care of children and other chores. The idea was that a woman in such a position wouldn’t be able to focus her attention and become a chef without neglecting all the other duties she had. Whereas a man could make cooking a full time job and thus become a better cook than a woman in that time period.
It’s not the cooking part that was “a woman’s job” societally, it was taking care of the household as a whole – the cooking, homemaking, raising kids, all of that stuff. The man’s “role” was to work a job – and whether that job was janitor or cook, that would have still been expected of men, since it was a career outside of the home.
Even today, when we’ve moved past those expectations, restaurant kitchens are still largely male dominated – women make up something like 20% of professional cooks (though they’re a larger share of front-of-house – servers, bartenders, hosting, etc.), and when you get into fine dining, it’s an even smaller proportion. There are lots of theories about the reasons behind that, but the point is, restaurant cooking continues to be dominated by men.
If you get paid for it, it’s a man’s job.
If you do it to care for your family, it’s a woman’s job.
That’s sadly what it boils down to. And at least these stereotypes are gradually being broken down.
A chef is in charge of the whole kitchen, he bosses around everyone else. No woman could boss anything back then
Being a restaurant chef is very different from cooking at home.
It is a high-stress job in an unpleasantly hot and potentially dangerous environment. It also involves some managerial duties, such as giving orders to junior kitchen staff, making decisions about ingredients and substitutions, dealing with customers (some of which are unpleasant).
IN old times, such jobs were considered inappropriate for the “weaker sex”
Historically, it’s very common for tasks associated with women to become male-dominated once they are considered prestigious, lucrative, or important. This happened with computer programming, too. In is early days, programming was mostly about getting computers to perform a series of complex calculations and was seen as secretarial/”women’s” work. As computers became more important, the early women programmers were edged out by men, and the field was rebranded as ‘software engineering’.
there’s a pretty shameless trend across many (most? all?) cultures that anything high status becomes a man’s job and anything lower status is women’s work. There are cultures where hunting is low status, and it ends up being the women who hunt. There are cultures where knitting is high status and the men do it. If getting kicked in the head by a horse earned you social status we would probably insist only men could do it.
I’m not trying to come off as raging against the patriarchy or anything, I just think people are weird and kinda dumb.
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