A YoungCheffes’ Opinion
My name is Dhwani Jariwala, and I come from India. Currently, I am pursuing a Master’s degree in Culinary Innovation and Leadership at Institut Paul Bocuse. I graduated for my Bachelor’s Degree in Hospitality Management from Auro University, India. I have experience working in the kitchen of a one Michelin Star restaurant, Auberge de la tour-Renaund Darmanin, in France, and I interned in a managerial position in Greenville Marriott, USA. Ever since, I have been keen to work in market research and data analysis in the Culinary Industry. I speak English, Hindi and Gujarati fluently and French at conversational level. Having travelled to 11 different countries I have gained a passion for Arts & Textile.
My Contact Information:
EMAIL - jhdwani@gmail.com PHONE NO. +33 7 66 26 83 24As attractive as the culinary industry looks, stress is one of the major drawbacks faced by chefs. CJUK News, in 2018, interviewed seven chefs to understand the leading cause of stress in the culinary industry. The chefs resoundingly emphasized that long hours, bad management, and poor work-life balance led to a harsh professional kitchen environment. Such stress has also been one of the significant causes to draw female chefs away from the culinary industry.
Few male chefs expressed their views on female chefs working in a professional kitchen; they would shy away from recruiting female chefs due to long-standing stereotypes that women cannot withstand long exhausting work hours or are unreasonably emotional, or are unable to focus on work-life due to personal matters. Moreover, this thinking has made females think that it is not a suitable industry for them and that they are the only gender who needs to strike a work-life balance. However, these are just the problems I argue that male chefs assume and see. Stagnation, long periods standing in the same position, change in temperature and physical constraints in the restaurant industry are the same for both sexes (Gardies, 2021).
Through my experience working for eight months in the kitchen, we had one female cook and me as an intern in the team of five cooks and a male chef. She became the inspiration for my life; she worked as much as we all did, the same long eleven hours, yet managed to ideally create a work-life balance with three kids and her husband. I have never seen her raise her voice or act irrationally in the kitchen. Her unwavering composure and calmness were an anchor for the cooks working alongside her in the messy kitchen. We saw her creativity on the plate without any stress, and the environment remained relaxed around her.
She was as much involved in everything the chef did, and the chef embraced her skills and included her in every decision making process because he was never able to stable himself due to stress he had for obvious reasons. She was the role model for all of us working in the kitchen, and she made the space livelier rather than emotional. Upon an interview with 'Jason Blanckaert, chief chef and owner of J.E.F. in Ghent', to know his point of view on why there are only a few female chefs in the professional kitchen, he mentioned, "I think that women often give up the job because of their social life—in my experience at least. Women have to birth children and often quit, too. They will then look for another job that still has to do something with food, but one that gives them enough space to care for their partner and children. I can understand this, but it is a pity" (Beersten, 2017). However, these are just the problems, I think, that male chefs assume and see but that are not always true. Female chefs are breaking this cliché and are managing to work in the kitchen.
In my experience, when the atmosphere gets too aggressive, it would stress and affect my performance, leading to an unhealthy state of mind and poor work-life balance. A harsh work environment depletes your life satisfaction; studies have found that individuals affected by workplace aggression experience reduced practical commitment, increased intentions to leave, decreased individual job performance (Barling, Rogers & Kelloway, 2001) and personal productivity and would force a chef to quit as lack of motivation and stress would lead to poor work-life balance. All said, this environment has remained the same for ages, and obviously, we cannot change it overnight. Still, there are few ways to overcome this environment, giving males chefs a considerable platform to regain themselves and female chefs to choose this industry as their career without a hiccup.
Females are becoming more and more independent and self-resilient. Many rising female chefs break the stereotypes and work in a professional kitchen, balancing their work and private lives, like Danik Heslop, an executive chef at Jamaica Blue, who is also raising a young daughter (SmartCompany, 2017). Male chefs prefer more female chefs for their pleasant collaborative skills; Matt Dillon, who owns several Seattle restaurants, including Sitka and Spruce, says, "Women chefs...they just have a thing that men cannot bring," Dillon says. "It's a touch; I don't know how to explain it. Cooking is about nourishing people, about creating an experience that goes beyond the plate" (Robinson, 2017).
Many male head chefs have recognised the advantages of having women chefs working with them and are changing the environment to empower females. In a research done on women in professional kitchens by Krunaz, Selçuk Kurtuluş and Kılıç (2018), the authors found out that "there is discipline and order in the place where the woman is, and there is no slang speech in the kitchen where the woman is, women work more steadily and regularly, women work cleaner and work more coordinated with their teammates", and "women can be more patient than men in some jobs in the kitchen." They further stated that a "woman's presence creates more polite men who speak more carefully most of the time." With a calm environment, there is always cohesiveness that improves mental health, giving us space not to be drained after a whole day at work and making us engage more in our personal lives. Zhong and Moon (2020) showed that happy staff and culture give a better experience to the customers. Females continue to grow in the culinary industry, and soon the imbalance will break and the culinary industry world will grow better, leading this industry towards success. The mindset of female chefs not being able to manage physical work has to stop. It has to start by teaching in schools and work environments that women in the kitchen are as important as male chefs and that males don't have to be competitive about females working in the kitchen; instead, embracing equality in the work environment and choosing harmony over opportunism always results in success.