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Anyone who thinks women cook differently than men has never watched Anne Burrell. Case closed.

As a woman who cooks, I depend on brute force sometimes like when I'm hacking apart a chicken to expose the marrow in the bones before returning them to the stock; or when I'm "butchering" lobsters. I'm sure there are men who don't have a lot of upper body strength and depend on more cerebral techniques to accomplish these tasks.

If anyone wants to do a real study about such a topic - try examining how people work around perceived "shortcomings" in the kitchen. See how women who may not have upper body strength go about moving a loaded tray or stockpot; see how men do more intricate tasks with larger hands and fingers.

As far as food flavor, there is no difference.

No, the whole premise is preposterous. "Culinary cross-dressing?" Please.

@Ariel_W - It's definitely having an impact on people's careers. Read the laundry list of idiotic assumptions a group of culinary professionals made about women!

The reason women are so underrepresented in high-end kitchens isn't simply that there aren't as many women as men who want to work there - it's that kitchens still tend to be "boys' clubs," and from my limited experience in professional cooking, many male chefs simply don't believe that women can be as talented or powerful in the kitchen as men (not to mention the fact that the kitchen environment can be very sexist and unfriendly to women).

Articles like this, unfortunately, aren't debunking anything - their final conclusion is that yes, gender makes a difference, despite the fact that nobody could explain what that difference was. That doesn't sound like step forward to me, but rather an example of a group who found their assumptions unproven by this silly "experiment," and chose to hold on to them regardless.

"What conclusions could and did we draw?

(1) Mentors influence a chef's cooking style more than gender does....
(2) All the chefs were influenced and inspired by family members of both sexes...
(3) Cooking styles, then, are a function of experience, personality, and gender. "

what?! how does the last point follow from the previous ones?

"Gender certainly affects how chefs cook, but neither the chefs nor the panelists could articulate how and why exactly."

this is just silly. producestories is absolutely right.

@callmenaomi

The statement wasn't made from the "experiement" alone. I believe that the gender differences call was made from the fact that the panel consisted of experts with many years of experience dealing with both sexes in the kitchen who have found that - at least in their own experience - there is a difference.

I also have many years of restaurant experience, and tend to agree. I wouldn't say women are better or worse in a professional kitchen, just different. Now whether that's because of the way professional kitchens are set up and the legacy of machismo in the way they are run is a different question. Perhaps even the infrastructure of a restaurant kitchen is less conducive to occupation by females.

Not to flog my blog, but coincidentally, one of our writers just put up a post about the exact same topic (she recently gave a talk at the ASFS about gender roles in home kitchens):

http://www.goodeater.org/2/post/2009/06/women-in-the-kitchen.html

@heart of glass
The wife comment isn't really meant to be funny, it refers to one of the classic examples of a loaded question as it is defined in scholarly or legal terms. A loaded question is often, but not always, a "yes or no" question into which certain false presuppositions are loaded.
So "have you stopped beating your wife" is a yes or no question, but either answer damns the target into an admission of guilt.
If the target notices, they are forced to defend themselves against the false suggestion that they are or were beating their wife, but they'll probably be flustered at the surprise attack and make themselves look guilty. Or they would be, if that example wasn't the single most common example of a loaded question.

I was there that night (I'm the one who asked if the question wouldn't be better answered by sampling home cooks' meals) and I have to say the whole experience was so frustrating. And not only because we couldn't taste the food ;) Really, so much of what Gwen said was so contradictory, like that women have a lighter touch, but then she'd turn around and say how woman just make masses of food in the stereotypical jewish or italian mother way; eat! eat!

It sounded like a topic that had been brewed up late at night over a few too many cocktails. Add in the awkward pauses, and not too deft monitoring by the hosts, and what could have been a lively argument went flat.

Rethinking the home cook angle, there's no real answer there either. My mom is an excellent cook, but she was building a business while I was growing up, and we went out to diners almost every night. I never became a cook (a home cook, not a professional) until after I moved out and on my own. Now I take food and cooking very seriously, perhaps a bit too seriously, and have become an extremely enthusiastic amateur. I have definitely evolved something of a style, in which I mean there are flavor profiles and techniques I tend to return to again and again. If we had maybe been given which two chefs were cooking that course it would've been easier to discern which dish was whose. Like the squab course. Knowing that it had been between Alex Guarnaschelli and Aktar Nawab I could have easily said who had made which dish. Their styles of cooking and the flavors they use are so different, but equally delicious.
Eat Me Daily had a good write up of the night, too. Worth checking out.

Hi all,
Gwen here. Got a couple of things to say.

First, thanks, Ed, for such a lovely post on the event.
Second: I'm feeling like I really need to defend myself here: I seem to have been seriously misheard! My fault, I suppose, for depending on sarcasm and air quotes! Guess I should have been clearer.

So: let's be very clear.
I do *not* believe that women cook more subtly, with more heart, from the reproductive organs, etc etc etc. I was playing with stereotype, trying to show how ridiculous those ideas are. To wit: we say ("we" being stereotype) at the same time that the same dish (for instance, a really hearty pork dish) is:
a) "cuisine grandmere," the product of years of home-cooking, a means of feeding up one's men, cooking from the heart, etc--thus "female"
b) manly, tough, rich cooking, a means of demonstrating your culinary conjones--the kind of stuff skinny women would never eat--thus "male"

...in other words: instead of talking about inherent differences in food, it's more usefl and more interesting to talk about how we talk about food--that is, how we *construct* it as gendered. And it's really important to talk (as I tried to do) about the effects of culture and economics on women in the kitchen and our perceptions of them.

It's true that I talked about spicy food as inappropriate for women because it "inflames the passions"--but I *did* mention that this is how people thought about spicy food for women IN THE NINETEENTH CENTURY. It's not, in fact, something that I believe! I was trying to make the point that there really is no "science" of "male" or "female" cooking!

As I said at the end of the forum, I really, really, REALLY do NOT believe in inherent, somehow biological differences between men and women that cause them to cook (or think, or write, or work in other ways) differently than men. As a scholar who has worked a whole lot on gender, I believe very strongly in the effects of culture and tradition--and nothing is more tradition-bound than the restaurant kitchen. I think it's hugely important to look at how women are perceived in the kitchen and to investigate the sources and effects of those means of looking--because otherwise, women will continue to be kept out of culinary power in the majority of cases.

So: for instance: when people say women cook "from the heart," what they're really saying is that women are more empathetic and less intelligent than the brainy men who cook from the head (that whole thing about men cooking more refined food, molecular gastronomy etc etc). As (ahem) a woman who likes to use her brain, this is not what I think. Instead, what I think is actually the case is that:

a) women have been discouraged from becoming "molecular gastronomists" in the same way that they have been discouraged from becoming scientists--by a lack of mentoring, by the old-boys-club world that is higher education in the sciences, by people like Larry Summers insisting women can't "do science," etc--a sensibility that trickles down right through the science education program in schools

b) just as women in science often aren't taken seriously, so women in cooking are often not taken seriously by the foodpress, and by many bloggers. When women and men cook the same dishes, they are talked about in different ways--and the homey grandmere thing gets perpetuated. Women have considerably less access to the foodpress, I think, and when they do have access, they are often written about as being "women chefs," and the language used to describe them is feminized to a huge degree. And when this happens, diners tend to perceive these women and the food they make in the same way. Women who cook are put in a different category than men who cook, and that's really unfortunate.

c) Women who cook still have considerably less access than men to backers; they are still taken less seriously; they still need to prove themselves a thousand times over. We may be over the days when certain pastry kitchens featured pictures of women naked but for drizzles of chocolate--but we are certainly not in an equitable labor situation.

I know many cooks who are women. I would never presume to think that I could tell their gender by their food; I have tremendous respect for their ability to make their way in a profession that sets up huge barriers to their success. They are, to a woman, smart, tough, uncompromising, ambitious, talented--that is, they have all the ingredients to be great chefs, and then some.

So: mea culpa if I was misunderstood. (And sorry for hijacking your blog with this long post, Ed!) Hope this clears things up--
Gwen

@kevster--yes, I should have been more direct. I understand the concept of a 'loaded question,' but especially given the subject of the post, I think a less offensive one could have been chosen. Although it says something about the English language that the question is one that springs to mind, rather than "did you stop stealing the cookies," for example.

On topic, on an individual level, yes, everyone is the sum of there experiences so by definition, men and women have different experiences and those differences will be expressed in all of the actions of that individual. The question of whether stereotypically male and female styles are useful constructions to evaluate food seems silly, especially with professional cooks, as I said, for whom I think past experiences and technique have far greater influence than gender. (In personal, home cooking, I think 'gendered' socialization in regards to food probably has more of an influence.)

My inclination is that cooking is a lot like film directing in this respect. You can direct a movie with a perspective that is heavily influenced by your gender, or not. A male director is probably never going to get the female perspective right and a female director is never going to get the male perspective right, but that's not to say that they can't both come awfully close, or even make a gender-neutral statement. If the analogy holds, then it may also be the case that women are more often aware of when they are injecting their gender perspective into the final product.

@Gwen - All your points are good, but unfortunately none of them came through in this post.

@bodyk - The problem is getting "the Boss" to let you have a chance.

Gwen's explaination in the comments makes plenty of sense, though I think perhaps the Astor Center panel asked the wrong questions and that muddled the issue. What I take from Gwen's post is that there's sexism in restaurant kitchens, not that chefs' cooking is gendered. And of course that's important to talk about and understand the reasons why.

Restaurant sexism has assuredly been a part of the French haute cuisine tradition. Good rundown on this is here: ttp://www.stratsplace.com/rogov/women_chefs.html Also, "The Taste of America" by John and Karen Hess also touch on this, particularly on some sexist claptrap said by Paul Bocuse about how women could never be chefs.

In France, there's a distinction drawn between haute cuisine (in restaurants, prepared by men) and la cuisine de la bonne femme (at home, prepared by women). Logically, one is not better then the other, but which one has been accorded glory?

With the cooking and eating stunt I think the panel was trying to touch on the gender issues inherent in consumption of food, which to me is most interesting: why would a pink cocktail be girly? Why is red meat for dudes, while salads are for women? Some background on this can be found in Laura Shapiro's wonderful books "Something from the Oven" and "Perfection Salad."

It would have been interesting to see what dishes would have been made had the chefs not known that they were going to be judged for gender.

As in, would some have made stuff that "sterotypically" would have been the other gender anyway? Or would things actually fall along the theoretical stereotypes on male vs female cooking that you guys brought up? Clearly this was not intended as a big scientific study that would reach statistical significance...but double-blinding would have been nice.

I think it probably wouldn't necessarily have made a difference in the ability of the judges to determine who cooked the food (since I agree that factors other than sex are more important), but it would at least seem to be less intentional in getting the judges to guess wrong.