Top Chef's Tom Colicchio On Women, Cuisine, and Social Justice

I sometimes think about cancelling cable to save money and brain cells. Unfortunately there are a few shows on cable that make this a really hard plan for me to implement, Battlestar Galactica, The Colbert Report, Project Runway, and Top Chef chief among them. As you may have heard by now (spoiler alert) Stephanie won Top Chef on Wednesday night, making her the first woman in four seasons to do so. Throughout the season, the female contestants never let us forget about the boys club that exists not just within the show's history but in restaurant culture generally. "It would be so great to have a woman win this season," they would say. "It would be so cool to have three women in the finals."

Tom Colicchio, one of the show's judges, blogs about the dearth of women in professional kitchens and why Stephanie's win is significant (skip to page four for the quoted bits):

It used to be for lack of opportunity, but I don’t think that still applies today. None of the great American chefs (or at least not the ones I respect) have a glass ceiling in their restaurants. Quite the opposite: We like to hire women because they work hard without any of the competitive, macho bulls**t you often see among their male counterparts. The women I’ve hired help each other, don’t jockey for position, and work until they drop. So if the opportunities for advancement that make up the early part of a top chef’s career are there, why aren’t women availing themselves of them?

Because the perception of opportunity, on the part of women themselves, hasn’t kept pace. Women are reluctant to enter the culinary world because they believe (and this is not unjustified) that a cooking career is incompatible with raising children, which leaves those of us who want to hire, promote, and mentor women with a slimmer field to choose from than we’d like. And to an extent, they're right: The bottom line is our society does not yet provide women in the workplace with the type of social supports, like high-quality subsidized child care or extended parental leave, that allows them to fully go for it, and the impact this has on the scope and depth of a career is profound. Right or wrong, men plunge into their careers without much thought about how they’ll navigate the work/family balance. They assume someone -- spouse, parent, paid caregiver -- will materialize to take care of it (and usually someone does.) This one assumption opens up an entire world of possibility to a young person in a way that can’t be overstated. Ask yourself how many female Ferran Adrias, Thomas Kellers, or Joel Robuchons have chosen a different path -- say, catering or opening a bakeshop -- because it seems more family friendly? These may be great career choices, but they aren’t the breeding grounds of culinary legend.

So yeah, some of this seems oversimplified to me. Surely it isn't the case that all women want babies and therefore they don't become chefs. And the whole "women play nicer than men" bit is naive. But the lack of social supports for parents, gendered expectations about who ought to be doing the nitty gritty of parenting, and the effect those factors have on career self-selection and career success sound pretty well grounded to me.

I haven't found that level of macroawareness on network yet. So the cable stays for now.