Engender blog

Guest Post: A Woman’s Place is in the Kitchen (a professional kitchen, that is)

Guest post from Leonie Sooke

Leonie is a freelance chef and food stylist. Strongly influenced by working under a number of inspiring female head chefs, her career spans television; cookery books; London restaurant work; writing and presenting prominent talks for the V&A and Tate Britain, which showcase irreverent women in food history. Find her at curatedcakes.com or on instagram @Leoniesooke

Once again, this year’s employment figures highlight the inequality within the restaurant industry: data from the Office for National Statistics shows that only 18.5 per cent of Britain’s top chefs are women.[1] It’s an age-old problem. From Renaissance cooks and Victorian culinary masters to the macho celebrity chefs of today, men have taken centre stage on the professional platform.

Yet much has changed in the past few years. In the wake of pioneers such as Alice Waters, Ruth Rogers, Angela Hartnett and Margot Henderson, there’s a rising generation of young women taking the food scene by storm. Just consider Claire Ptak and Lily Vanilla with their pioneering bakeries, Florence Knight heading up the kitchen at Polpo or Kim Woodward at the infamously masculine Savoy Grill (to name but a few). The ‘boys club’ of late has certainly lost much of its cool.

Five reasons that media coverage of the pay gap is so bad (and why we think we should do better)

Yesterday saw the repeat of a ritual that happens a handful of times a year. An organisation - in this case the Chartered Management Institute - produces a figure it describes as a gender pay gap. News outlets contact organisations working on gender, or women and work, to ask for short quotes that explain both the pay gap and how we're going to fix it. These quotes are then strung together into pieces that are shaky on the facts and slight on analysis. In recent years, as the tenor of public discourse has softened slightly towards women's equality, they've been complemented by editorials denouncing the glacial rate at which the gap is narrowing. A couple of columnists may even take a swing at some particularly egregious examples of workplace discrimination, before the whole subject is unceremoniously bundled into an archive folder to wait for the next pay gap news release.

So why is there such fleeting, insubstantial coverage of this most pressing of gendered concerns? Why are we not having a grand conversation about women and work?

Guest Post: Women’s Access to Employment Tribunal

Guest post by Jillian Merchant of Thompsons Solicitors

Sex discrimination, sexual harassment and the fight for equal pay are, sadly, still the reality of many working women’s lives.

Despite the Equal Pay Act being passed over 45 years ago the fight for equal pay goes on. Women are still paid almost 10% less than men on average if in full time work and over 19% for all types of employment.