Asking For It

Barriers to Women Leadership in Restaurants.

Daisy Zeijlon | December 2021

It’s 2021, and women are in the kitchen.

After being denied entry to the restaurant workforce for most of the profession’s history, we’ve been busy making up for lost time. Today women represent 52% of all restaurant workers, 71% of servers and 82% of hosts (Maroney, Krishna). A whopping—and inspiring—54% of culinary school students are women. 

These numbers are a mark of progress, but they obscure a murkier reality.

Despite a majority presence across the industry, just 7% of restaurants nationwide are led by women chefs (Albors-Garrigos).

On its own that is a discouraging statistic, but paired with other data the picture gets grimmer. Women chefs make 28.3% less in base pay than their men colleagues (Albors-Garrigos). A 2015 study of California restaurant kitchens revealed that white men made an average hourly wage of $12.24; white women made $9.96 and Black, Indigenous Women of Color (BIWOC) made $9.92 (Wilson). Nationwide, there is a $4.79/hour wage gap between Black women and white men in tipped positions (Mackinnon & Fitzgerald). White men hold just 37% of entry-level positions in restaurants but 70% of chief executive roles in foodservice (Maroney). 

These numbers tell us that the restaurant industry is navigating a gendered leadership gap. While women are now entering the restaurant workforce in unprecedentedly high numbers, very few of them are achieving top positions. This disparity is the result of a series of systemic barriers rooted in the historic and persistent designation of professional cooking as masculine.

The leadership gap’s origins run deep, because men have always led restaurants. Two French chefs in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Marie Antoine Carême and Georges Auguste Escoffier, were the first to set about professionalizing cooking. They did so by strategically separating it from home cooking, which was typically done by women. Escoffier came to prominence in the wake of industrialization, when men went to work outside the home and women were tasked with maintaining it: doing the invisible and unpaid labor of caretaking. I explore this history more deeply in this project’s Boys section, but in short, women were prevented from working in restaurants because their (unpaid) labor was antithetical to these men’s goal of establishing cooking as an elite profession. This process solidified the idea that men cook for money and women cook for family, and it laid the foundation for every barrier to leadership that restaurant women face today.

Roadmap.

Method.

To identify these barriers, I conducted in-depth interviews with 9 women who currently work in or who have worked in hospitality. Those interviews are the backbone of this project, and you will see the women quoted everywhere on this website. To preserve their anonymity, I refer to them only by their first or first and last initials. You can read in detail about my research process, this project’s limitations and the current state of gender and restaurant labor scholarship here.

Part 1: Barriers.

The first half of this project explores 5 barriers to women leadership. In Boys I explore the origins of the restaurant industry’s masculinization. In Brainpower I argue that this history has burdened women with extra mental and emotional labor that makes progressing supremely challenging. In Bodies I assess the myriad ways that restaurants have been built for male, cisgender bodies, as evidenced by the industry’s rampant sexual misconduct and disregard for women’s health. Babies is an examination of perhaps the biggest hurdle to leadership: the fundamental incompatibility of restaurant work with childrearing. Lastly, in Buzz I illustrate how the culture of food media and awards has normalized an absence of women leaders. Taken together, it’s clear that there is no single issue preventing women from rising through the ranks. To be a woman in restaurants is to endure a dizzying gendered obstacle course.  

Part 2: Fixing It.

The second half of this project is concerned with dismantling these barriers. Sweden? is a brief exploration of whether these same barriers exist for women working in restaurants in a country whose identity is so strongly informed by gender equity. Business Case makes the argument that closing the gendered leadership gap is not only ethical but profitable, and Solutions proposes a few ideas for how to go about it. Resources is an ever-growing list of people, organizations and businesses that are already engaged in this work.  

Library.

Finally, if you are interested in this subject and want to learn more, I’ve put together a Library full of material on women and restaurant labor.

Why Now?

I remain stubbornly optimistic that we can diminish the gendered leadership gap and that now is the moment to do it.

Navigating unprecedented hardship through the pandemic, restaurants are starting to re-emerge with renewed vigor. The sector is expected to grow 15% in the next 10 years, and even though 17% of restaurants nationwide closed in 2020, by October of that same year the rate of openings was outpacing that of October 2018 (The Great Service Divide; Cadigan). In the midst of this growth, restaurants have been forced to rethink some of the structures that made them inequitable spaces. Any that didn’t now find themselves with no choice in the face of a nationwide labor shortage. 1 million leisure and hospitality workers left their jobs in September 2021 (Casselman). 75% of restaurant operators report recruiting as their biggest challenge (Black) and as a result are experimenting with increased wages, better benefits and other measures to create safer workspaces. For example, the average hourly pay for hospitality workers in August 2021 was $16.60 compared to $14.72 in August of 2020 (Black). These small changes represent a power shift. The current labor shortage is the culmination of years’ worth of events that have made it difficult for women to succeed.

Now that the industry needs them, why would they rush to go back?

References.