Thanks Yahoo Answers

I wanted to keep the general form of this blog very open, I wanted people to feel free to write about anything in their lives...as long as it was somehow tied in with food. Since most of my friends, myself included, are great cooks and find so much joy in cooking, I began thinking differently about how female chefs are represented.
I love watching cooking shows, even the over dramatized "Kitchen Nightmares", and when I was trying to list off names of famous chefs from these, all I could think of were men.

Here is a link for a list of famous chefs: http://www.whispy.com/famous-chefs-resources.html
Almost all men.

Just google searching "Famous Female Chefs" this link comes up:
http://answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20100320235419AA0BuOs

A Yahoo Question posted by a women expressing her confusion about this:
"My sister and I were talking about this, why are there so many guys in "female" jobs? She was saying the best hairsytlists are gay men and they are also the best beauticians to do makeup too. But the biggest thing is chefs! There are more women in the food network, but channels like Travel with Anthony Bourdain and TLC with Cake Wars, most of the best cooks are men."

This is the only response....
"Being a chef is a very high-presure job, and men tend to do better in the environment of a professional kitchen. In fact, professional chefs in restaurants have always been largely men, it has never been regarded as a 'female' job.

You can see this from watching 'Masterchef' for example, the TV series in which amateurs compete to become a professional chef. they always start with equal numbers of male and female contestants, but in the first five series, there has only been one female winner. I would imagine this is fairly representative of the numbers of real professional chefs.

And in fact hairdressing used to be considered a man's job, women only really started going into hairdressing in the 1920s."

Women get to cook. We get to feed our families, friends, run bake sales and make snacks for cub scout meetings, we were "put in place" in the kitchen....but when it comes to acknowledging achievements in cooking, men get it all.
It has NOTHING to do with it being a "high pressure" job (who knows, a woman could get hysterical during a dinner rush!) but with the idea of a woman, being in charge, confident, smart and capable and that being shown in the public. Men just don't us around that many knives at once. :/

It's frustrating to see that men and women are still, in 2010, accepting the joke that women are simply not able to stay in control under pressure. Julia could school pretty much anyone in the kitchen.