Today I've been revisiting all the "Where Are All The Women Chefs?" pieces from the last ~15 years, and it's overwhelming how virtually all of them boil down to folks who don't (yet) know the phrase “systemic sexism” grasping for explanations that aren’t systemic sexism

(Including my own work in this!)

Authors, observers, chefs, etc. point to real things — the boys' club, work-life balance, the media, the brigade system, sexist hiring & promotion practices — but they end the interrogation there, they never push down to what those are all manifestations of

I'm not blaming anyone — I didn't have access to the concept of systemic sexism until not long ago, and I imagine many people still don't. (I learned about it as an intersectional extension of systemic racism; like other structures of oppression it doesn't exist in a vacuum.)

Amazingly (like, AMAZINGLY) the one thing I've found in my reading this morning that comes closest to coming right out and saying "yes, it's systemic sexism, the whole thing is designed that way" is this 300-word blog post by, of all people, Alan Richman https://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2013/11/11/why-do-female-chefs-get-overlooked/macho-men-in-the-kitchen-keep-women-down

"No women chefs among the magazine’s Gods of Food? Outrageous but accurate and, for that matter, obvious."

I mean, !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

To be clear: when he says this ^^ he's saying it in the sense of "OF COURSE the top chefs in the world are all men; the system is designed so that the top chefs in the world are all men."

In retrospect, it was heartbreaking how the main response to the Gods of Food debacle was all of us yelling the names of women chefs, despite the fact that they VERY CLEARLY were not as famous or successful as the men on that list — a textbook-perfect misdiagnosis of the problem

Anyway I feel tremendously grateful that, to quote @NeedhiBhalla, I get to learn terms & concepts "to identify, discuss and contextualize systemic and structural biases" which (Needhi again) "make having these conversations possible without internalizing marginalization"

We think of underrepresentation as the problem, we think of work-life balance as the problem, we think of abuse and harassment as the problem, when in fact they are all *symptoms* of the problem — and the fact that this distinction is becoming more mainstream is so exciting to me