"female chefs" news and stories

Dig out your fondue pot, because we're about to to get all 1970s on you. The 2009 StarChefs.com salary survey has been released, and the results may awaken your inner radical feminist.

According to the survey, female chefs make, on average, 24 percent less than their male counterparts. And, putting the salary inequity aside for a moment, the survey also points out that women are just plain underrepresented -- only 13 percent in the executive chef category are women. (For a point of comparison, that's even lower than the percentage of women in Congress.) As Grub Street San Francisco put it, it's time for the ladies to "cry fowl" (oof).

Now that we've brought the subject up, let's keep going: During the last round of the James Beard Awards, of the 24 recipients only 3 were women. Grub Street theorizes that the problem is marketing -- women don't drum up the hype that men do, and hence tend to be ignored, both by award-givers and investors. Alex Raij, chef at Txikito and El Quinto Pino, mused to the Village Voice that this may be in part because it's considered sexy to be a male chef, but not so much to be a female chef (Nigella Lawson notwithstanding, one would assume).

Sure, there are a couple of male celebs who have come out as vegetarians (think: Joaquin Phoenix and Tobey Maguire), and women may be slowly entering culinary school as butchers instead of pastry chefs but, says Slate's Riddhi Shah, "in the American consciousness, real men still don't eat quiche and women stick with chocolate, tofu and yogurt."

So why do certain foods (and drinks) get divided among gender and why is America at the forefront of the girl vs. boy pack? Read more about it here.

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