Sexism in the Kitchen

Helene Darroze, with restaurants in London and Paris, is the 2015 Veuve Cliquot Female Chef of the Year. She was also the model for the female chef Colette in the Pixar film Ratatouille in 2007, displaying, shall we say, a bit of attitude. This article argues, High-end kitchens have long been regarded as a male domain, with culinary students worshipping brutal but allegedly brilliant men, best exemplified by the “bad boy” chef Marco Pierre White and made popular by the character portrayed by Gordon Ramsay.Ramsay is, they argue, at least on TV, an equal opportunity abuser - he represents what society has decided is the ideal head chef: aggressive, abusive and above all male. But this does Ramsay a disservice - his range of TV offerings from Kitchen Nightmares to Hell's Kitchen frequently show him supporting female owners and chefs, and female winners of Hell's Kitchen have gone on to work for him  - indeed Ramsay was the first Michelin-starred restaurateur in Britain to appoint a female head chef. His approach is nevertheless somewhat robust, and it may well be difficult for many women to adapt to the culture of his kitchens. Raymond Blanc, whose style many think is more feminine, argues that women have "an allergy to becoming professional chefs.It is part of their DNA. As soon as they think of cooking, because they have had to do it for thousands of years – out of duty, rather than love – they hate the idea of having to do it professionally." adding that kitchens have always been male bastions which are inevitably "uncomfortable" for the fairer sex.Nigella Lawson, agrees, saying: "The professional kitchen's just not my bag."

Sexism in the Kitchen

Look carefully at the World's Top 50 Restaurant Awards 2015... there is a woman in there ....! Just the one.

Nancy Fraser on Feminism and Capitalism - and her Critics' Telling Response

Legendary disenchanted feminist scholar Nancy Fraser of New School University in Manhattan has a book in the stores and has puffed it with a couple of articles claiming that feminism has become the "handmaiden of capitalism". Here's one in The Guardian

Feminism and Neoliberalism

And an interview in the New York Times

Leaning-in

Fraser claims "My feminism emerged from the New Left and is still colored by the thought of that time. For me, feminism is not simply a matter of getting a smattering of individual women into positions of power and privilege within existing social hierarchies. It is rather about overcoming those hierarchies. This requires challenging the structural sources of gender domination in capitalist society — above all, the institutionalized separation of two supposedly distinct kinds of activity: on the one hand, so-called “productive” labor, historically associated with men and remunerated by wages; on the other hand, “caring” activities, often historically unpaid and still performed mainly by women. In my view, this gendered, hierarchical division between “production” and “reproduction” is a defining structure of capitalist society and a deep source of the gender asymmetries hard-wired in it. There can be no “emancipation of women” so long as this structure remains intact..... the mainstream feminism of our time has adopted an approach that cannot achieve justice even for women, let alone for anyone else. The trouble is, this feminism is focused on encouraging educated middle-class women to “lean in” and “crack the glass ceiling” – in other words, to climb the corporate ladder. By definition, then, its beneficiaries can only be women of the professional-managerial class. And absent structural changes in capitalist society, those women can only benefit by leaning on others — by offloading their own care work and housework onto low-waged, precarious workers, typically racialized and/or immigrant women. So this is not, and cannot be, a feminism for all women!"

But London-based Brenna Bhandar and Denise Ferreira da Silva counter that Fraser "reveals the innate and repetitive myopia of White feminism to take account, to converse and think along with Black and Third World Feminists." They find it "tiring when White feminists speak of second-​wave feminism as if it were the only “feminism” and use the pronoun “we” when lamenting the failures of their struggles" and complain that "the persistent claim to universalism, which is the core of this White feminism, renders the experiences, thoughts and work of Black and Third World feminists invisible, over and over again."

White Feminist Fatigue

Not so Sunny in the Valley

A divorce case at one of the world's leading business schools - rich enough to lend two staff a million dollars - has unearthed accusations of bullying, racial and sexual discrimination that were ignored... and has forced its Dean's resignation.

Stanford

Women on Boards

Some recent resources on women on boards.



UK Government Women-on-Boards Reports

FTSE Women

Gender Pay Gap

Elle's #MoreWomen video shows how few women are at the top in any industry

This video shows how rare it is for women to be leaders on the world stage - by cutting out all the men.The film photoshops out men from pictures of groups of leaders in politics, business, entertainment and the media, revealing that the women left behind often look rather lonely.

The first link goes to the full article, the second direct to the video.

Women cut out article

Isolated women

Freedom from or Freedom to... Margaret Atwood in Nottingham in September

Beach body or bass?

A couple of articles about the advertising campaign that many women found oppressive in relation to pressure to have a "beach ready" body and their response to it. This is a repost due to tehcnical problems with the original post

Beach Body Ready Ad Protest

Blogger's battle with beach body ad

And Meghan Traynor, not otherwise known for political correctness, has her own musical take on the issues.

Why not celebrate someone like us...

A piece by Anna Einarsdottir from The Conversation written for last International Women's Day. We are delighted that Anna has just joined us at York so this also serves as an introduction to a new contributor to this blog.

Why not celebrate someone like you?

Masculinity: Is your manager phallic, testicular or seminal?

Now available online before print

Linstead, S. A. and Marechal, G. (2015) Re-reading Masculine Organization: Phallic, Testicular and Seminal Metaphors Human Relations  SAGE Online First  
DOI 10.1177/0018726714558146

If you can't access it, you can get access to an uncorrected proof copy here (just scroll down the link)

Masculinity Paper

As a taster, the abstract.....

Why Qualified Women Don't Make It to Executive Leadership - Sponsors v Mentors

The diagram below captures what reports on both sides of the Atlantic have been saying for some years now - whilst women's participation in the workforce at entry levels, in larger companies at least, matches the broad division of the sexes in society at large the higher you go the worse it gets, until at the very highest levels you are looking at a Pareto advantage in favour of the male (which has to spell hegemony in any language)

                              

My apologies that I didn't pick up this Forbes article when it first came out some time ago - but thanks to Garance Marechal of the University of Liverpool for alerting me to it recently.

Why qualified women don't make it to executive leadership

By way of atonement, here's a the link to the full report as a pdf.

The Sponsor Effect

Some other more up to date useful links from the same fecund source - the first somewhat pessimistic

Why we'll NEVER see gender equality in the workplace

Women aren't getting to the top. Why?

The No. 1 reason why women are not getting promoted

Are women more emotionally intelligent than men?

We tend to assume so, but Daniel Goleman qualifies that somewhat in Psychology Today.

And in any case that might not always be a good thing according to the research of Bacon, Burat and Rann on the dark side of emotional intelligence reported on the British Psychological Society blog.

Forbes on International Women's Day

The gender pay gap is widening not just in the West, but in China, where many of my postgraduate students will return to work. Margie Worrell reflects on what can be done by women to help themselves and what else they might need. The article has a video embedded on whether equality is achievable.. but if you're impatient it's below.

Women own your power

Is equality achievable?

They just don't get it, do they .... or do they?

My other country, Australia, managed, albeit briefly, to have a female Prime Minister. But the Liberal National Party in Queensland have apparently gone one further by holding their IWD lunch in a Men Only club.

Which reminds me of the time my lovely late post-feminist friend, Prof. Heather Hopfl, was invited by a publisher to receive an award for best paper in a gender journal at the Reform Club in London. On arrival, she was informed that she would have to wait, as it was necessary for her to be "signed in by a male member".  "Oh really" she responded, with a voice that you could pour on porridge,"can't I use a pen like everyone else?"

International Women's Day 2015

Sunday March 8th is International Women's Day, but several workplaces will celebrate on Friday or Monday, which is the day I will give my lecture.

International Women's Day 2015 Home

Why Can't Women Get Funding in Silicon Valley?

Although the geeky-blokey-nerdy hi-tech firms of the valley seem to have finally woken up to gender issues regarding the composition of their workforces, venture capitalists are still reluctant to give them money.


Are Silicon Valley Venture Capitalists Hiding Gender Inequality of Opportunity?




But although only 4.4% of VC funded companies are female led, and men are 40% more likely to get support for their projects, some women do succeed. Six of them tell how they did it here.

Sex and Power 2014

The most recent update of this report focused only on politics and local government, but only in the European Parliament have any significant gains been made in women's representation since the report started.

Download here.

And although the FTSE 100 still shows that only 17.3%  of its directors are women, that's way better than the FTSE 250 (12%), which itself pips Amazon.

Taking the Other Perspective

Quite a while since the last post, but doing another guest lecture this term so here are a few updates... first an imaginative French film by Eleonore Pourriat that gives men the chance to experience what it might be like if the power differentials in society were inverted, and matriarchy simply mirrored patriarchy.

Oppressed Majority