Women make up just one in seven chefs at leading London restaurants

Positively cooking: Angela Hartnett said statistics should not put off women who want to be chefs
Rex

Just one in seven of the chefs hired to work in London’s most prestigious Michelin-star restaurants are women, research reveals today.

Female chefs also earn about £4,000 a year less than their male counterparts, according to the analysis from an agency specialising in finding staff for top restaurants, hotels and private members’ clubs.

A macho “Gordon Ramsay culture” and the industry’s long and inflexible hours are being blamed.

The figures show that of the 1,525 chefs who registered with London Bridge recruitment firm The Change Group last year, just 217 — or 14.2 per cent — were women. This imbalance was almost unchanged on 2014.

Even at “Magic Circle” law firms, once seen as a bastion of male dominance, women partners now make up about one in five of the total. Last year the average salary for male chefs of £26,858 was 18 per higher than the £22,813 average for women, The Change Group’s figures show.

An agency survey of more than 500 female chefs found that 44 per cent worked in kitchens where they were the only woman. Only 1.5 per cent had at least 10 female colleagues.

A third said being a woman had a negative impact on their career with half of those citing the “very male dominated” atmosphere as a major reason for their opinion.

Other factors were “I am given more menial work” and “men are always promoted ahead of me”.

Asked what would make it easier for women to be chefs over half called for “more flexible hours” and almost 40 per cent said “higher pay”.

Ana Seini Ma’ilei, a sous chef at Aubaine, Brompton Road, said: “Being a woman chef is hard because I have a five-year-old daughter. When I have double shifts I leave when she’s asleep and I get home when she’s asleep.” Sabrina Gidda, head chef at Bernardi’s in the West End, has done two Roux scholarships and said it was “a bit worrying” that she was the only woman out of 120 chefs in last year’s competition.

But Angela Hartnett, chef patron at Michelin starred Murano, said statistics “shouldn’t put off aspiring female chefs”. She has “three fantastic female head chefs and many female chefs working at my restaurants… and of course there is no difference in salary between the sexes at the same level here.”

Thomasina Miers, co-founder of restaurant group Wahaca, said that “younger women, by their very nature, are less good at fighting for money than men… Until women set aside their bashfulness and demand more, they can’t expect to get more, in this world at least.”

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