By Dr Scott Taylor, Reader in Leadership & Organisation Studies
The Department of Management, Birmingham Business School
Who does the majority of the work required to keep your household running smoothly? The cooking, cleaning, ferrying people around, looking after children – the sort of thing that, if it stops happening, makes everyone’s lives a little worse, more difficult, impossible even.
If you live in a heterosexual relationship in one household, in most cases it is the woman who is doing around twice as much of this kind of work as the man. On average, women are doing around 65-70% of the work needed to maintain a household. As the UK Office for National Statistics stated in 2016, women ‘continue to shoulder [most of] the responsibility for unpaid work’.
We can respond to this evident inequality in a range of ways. Perhaps you think it’s fair and reasonable because it’s how we’ve always done things; maybe you think it can be ‘justified’ by the fact that men tend to earn more; or possibly for you there might be a convincing biological or evolutionary explanation i.e. ‘women are naturally more suited to this kind of caring and nurturing work than men’. Whatever you think does or doesn’t justify this imbalance, it’s important to recognise that what sociologists call ‘the gendered division of labour’, has effects beyond the home.
First, we can think about the gender differences evident in leadership positions. When we ask why so few women have reached prominent roles in political, intellectual, and corporate life, we need to know how the men who have reached these leadership roles live.
As the Swedish journalist Katrine Marçal showed in 2012 in her book Who Cooked Adam Smith’s Dinner?, men who reach a position of power and are able to work long hours are dependent on the support of those around them – often a female partner. Law professor Joan Williams calls these men ‘unencumbered employees’ – someone whose life is defined by work, and by being looked after to enable that work.
In practice, this means that everyday work is subcontracted, either through paid labour (employing a cook, cleaner, or driver), or through unpaid supportive labour (being in a relationship with someone who does most of the domestic work). That frees the ideal chief executive, the deep-thinking academic, or the high-level politician, to work when they want, where they want, and for as long as they want.
Second, alongside this, we should also be thinking about the structure of the food industry, often one of the largest economic sectors in first world countries. If women continue to do the vast majority (double men’s contribution, in case we forget) of household work, including the cooking that makes up a quarter of all household labour, then surely we could expect women to dominate the paid variant of this work? After all, in cooking as in any craft, practice makes perfect…
Well, no – it is true that numerically, men and women are more or less equally represented as proportions of all restaurant employees. However, that changes dramatically when we look at the award winning chefs that serve as inspiration for many professionals. To take just two awards: Michelin stars, and the World’s 50 Best Restaurant awards. The geographical home of the Michelin awards, France, is recognised as having a particular problem with gender. Currently, between two to three percent of starred restaurants there are run by women in the kitchen; it is ‘normal’ for new guides to be published without reporting a new star for a woman. Inspectors and the guide’s publisher explain this puzzling state of affairs by falling back on a very unsatisfying reason: ‘we just judge what’s on the plate’.
This is precisely the problem – few people involved in the high prestige restaurant trade deny that most of the kitchens are both dominated by men, and highly masculine, even macho. The Michelin inspectors may be highly skilled at recognising ingredients, or assessing how flavours are combined, but if they can’t also judge the conditions their dinner was produced under, then they’re surely not doing a great job in identifying the best places to eat.
The World’s 50 Best Restaurant awards are, if anything, even less progressive. This annual list could be dismissed as just another unimportant public relations ranking; however, it is exceptionally widely reported, and self-presents as defining the industry globally. The 2017 list showed promise, with a 50% rise in the number of women honoured – from two to three. In their wisdom, the organisers also developed a ‘Best Female Chef’ award that year – but then forgot to include her restaurant in the main listing.
So, during World Food Week, should we be thinking about gender and food, or just celebrate the best things to cook and eat? Both – no matter how good the taste, the working conditions that our food is made in are crucial in a range of ways. If those production conditions, in the home and in restaurants, disadvantage 50% of the population, and they’re the 50% who do 70% of the domestic labour – well, that should leave a bad taste.