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.