厨房里的性别歧视正在坍塌

Last week at Marea, a New York haunt of the powerful and the polished, Lauren DeSteno moved up from executive sous-chef to chef de cuisine. It may sound like a mere tweak of a title, but in a small way it is revolutionary.

在纽约权贵们经常去的马雷亚(Marea)餐馆，劳伦·德斯特诺(Lauren DeSteno)上周从执行副主厨晋升为烹饪主厨。这听起来好像只是头衔上稍有不同，但它却是一场小小的革命。

The promotion puts her in charge of one of the highest-earning kitchens in New York, where four male sous-chefs and 20 other cooks report to her. And though previous generations of female chefs had to fight past widespread sexism and a locker-room work culture to reach the top, at 31 Ms. DeSteno is calm, confident and entirely unsurprised by her success.

晋升之后，她开始掌管纽约最赚钱的一个厨房，四名男性副主厨和另外20名厨师听命于她。虽然前几代女主厨必须与普遍存在的性别歧视和一种更衣室工作文化抗争才能登上顶端，31岁的德斯特诺冷静、自信，对自己的成功完全没有感到意外。

“In a good kitchen,” she said (and she has worked at some bad ones), “male and female really doesn’t matter anymore. You get the work done, you handle yourself professionally — because kitchens can still be crazy places — and you go home.”

“在好厨房里，”她说(她曾在一些糟糕的厨房待过)，“是男是女真的无所谓。你把活儿干好，表现出端正的职业态度——因为厨房仍然可能是个疯狂的地方——然后你下班回家。”

Ms. DeSteno is living an idea whose time may have finally come: that one’s sex has nothing to do with the real work of a chef. In baby steps, the American restaurant kitchen, a high-pressure arena that still bears the image of the tough-talking, pot-throwing male cook, is beginning to reflect that idea, especially in the places where the most promising young chefs try to get a foot in the door.

德斯特诺正在实践一个理念，这个理念得以推行的时机也许终于到来了：那就是性别与主厨真正的工作无关。美国餐馆的厨房是个压力很大的地方，仍有讲话粗鲁、扔锅摔碗的男厨师，不过它已经开始初步体现这个理念，特别是在大多数有前途的年轻主厨们努力想加入的厨房。

A leading kitchen run by a woman is no longer newsworthy. But it is not quite commonplace, either; the tag “female chef” is still applied to Anita Lo, Barbara Lynch, April Bloomfield, Dominique Crenn (the first woman in North America to have a restaurant with two Michelin stars) and dozens of others. Certainly the most visible chefs are men, a fact made clear in November by a Time magazine spread that showcased its choice of the world’s most influential chefs, with not a woman among them.

女人掌管一流厨房已经不再是什么新闻。但也并非常见。“女大厨”这个标签仍被用于称呼安妮塔·罗(Anita Lo)、芭芭拉·林奇(Barbara Lynch)、阿普丽尔·布鲁姆菲尔德(April Bloomfield)、多米尼克·克朗(Dominique Crenn，北美第一个拥有一家米其林二星餐厅的女人)和其他几十个女人。当然最著名的大厨都是男性，《时代》杂志11月份的一篇横贯两版的文章表明了这个事实，在它选出的世界上最有影响力的大厨中没有一个女性。

But even though male chefs are still more prevalent in professional kitchens, particularly at the highest and lowest rungs of the industry, a new vanguard of American women like Ms. DeSteno is coming up right behind them. More than ever, women are filling the second- or third-tier jobs (chef de cuisine, executive sous-chef) that will produce the next generation of leaders in the nation’s best restaurants, according to statistics and interviews. And more women are entering the pipeline at elite culinary schools.

不过尽管专业厨房仍以男性大厨们为主，特别是在这个行业最高档和最低档的阶层里，但是像德斯特诺这样的美国新先锋女性正紧随其后。根据数据和采访，女性正在填充第二或第三阶层的职位(烹饪主厨、执行副主厨)，这些职位将孕育出美国最棒的餐厅的下一代领导者。而且有更多女性正在进入精英烹饪学校学习。

The reasons are many: High-end restaurants, which like others have historically lagged in providing health insurance, paid vacations and competitive wages for their employees, are becoming more corporate and professional; even a T-shirt-wearing, cheerfully profane chef like David Chang has a human resources team and offers paid maternity leave. An exploding food industry has created many new entry points for women, who once were largely limited to the “pink ghetto” of the pastry chef; that part of the business alone has grown so much in prestige and profitability that opportunities there have snowballed. And women themselves are pushing for the jobs, conditions and recognition they want.

原因有很多：高档餐厅和其他餐厅一样，过去不愿意给员工提供医疗保险、带薪假期和有竞争力的薪水，但是现在它们更像公司，更加职业化。甚至像大卫·常(David Chang)这样经常穿T恤、快乐世俗的大厨都有人力资源团队，提供带薪产假。蓬勃发展的食品行业为女性提供了很多新的入职点，女性过去大多最高能成为糕点大厨这样的粉领族。单是糕点业也在声誉和盈利能力方面增长了很多，就业机会随之暴增。女性本身也在追求她们想要的工作、条件和认可。

“A lot of jobs have tough schedules; a lot of jobs are physically demanding,” Ms. DeSteno said. “Nurses work weird hours. Police officers have hard jobs. You deal with it.”

“很多工作的时间安排很紧张;很多工作对体力的要求很高，”德斯特诺说，“护士们的工作时间很不寻常。警察的工作很艰苦。你得应付这些情况。”

Tracking restaurant workers by gender is not easy in a $683 billion industry that employs about one in 10 of all Americans. Many of those are part-time or transient workers, and even the most expensive restaurants have extremely high rates of job turnover, as a new national study showed last week. But recently, some of the country’s fastest-growing and most carefully run restaurant companies — including Union Square Hospitality Group, Barbara Lynch Gruppo, Altamarea Group, the Batali & Bastianich Hospitality Group and Think Food Group — provided a head count of men and women cooking in their restaurants, from line cooks to executive chefs. (Front-of-house employees like waitresses and managers were not included.)

追踪餐厅工作者的性别不容易，因为这个行业的产值高达6830亿美元，约有十分之一的美国人在这个行业工作。上周一份新的国情调查表明，其中很多人是做兼职或者短暂从事该行业，甚至连最昂贵的餐厅的人员流动率也很高。但是最近，美国发展最快、经营最谨慎的一些餐饮公司，包括联合广场餐饮集团(Union Square Hospitality Group)、芭芭拉·林奇集团(Barbara Lynch Gruppo)、Altamarea集团、Batali & Bastianich餐饮集团和Think Food集团，对自家餐厅的厨师进行了调查，从一线厨师到执行大厨(前厅的员工，比如服务员和经理，不在调查之列)。

The numbers showed that 30 to 50 percent of the culinary staff in all those groups are women. And those companies run many kitchens where the next generation of chefs most want to work, places like Animal in Los Angeles; Lucques in West Hollywood, Calif.; Gramercy Tavern and Del Posto in New York; Toro and Menton in Boston; Minibar in Washington; Michael Mina in San Francisco; and Le Pigeon in Portland, Ore. One-third may not seem a large proportion, but chefs say it is a quantum leap from even the recent past.

数据显示，这些集团的厨房员工中有30%至50%是女性。这些公司经营的很多餐厅是下一代大厨们最想去工作的地方，比如洛杉矶的动物(Animal)餐厅，加利福尼亚州西好莱坞的Lucques餐厅，纽约的谢来喜酒馆(Gramercy Tavern)和Del Posto餐厅，波士顿的Toro餐厅和Menton餐厅，华盛顿的迷你吧(Minibar)餐厅，旧金山的迈克尔·米纳(Michael Mina)餐厅，以及俄勒冈州波特兰市的鸽子(Le Pigeon)餐厅。三分之一也许听起来不是个很大的比例，但是大厨们说甚至和不久前相比，这都是个巨大突破。

“For the first 10 years of my career, I was the only woman in every kitchen I worked in,” said Michelle Bernstein, 44, the chef and owner of Michy’s in Miami, who started out in the 1980s. “And that was true for all the other women I knew.”

“在我从业的头十年，我是我工作过的所有厨房里唯一的女性，”44岁的米歇尔·伯恩斯坦(Michelle Bernstein)说。她是迈阿密Michy’s餐厅的大厨兼老板，20世纪80年代开始从业。“我认识的其他女厨师都是这种情况。”

In culinary schools, women have long made up the majority in pastry courses, but are now entering general culinary programs at unprecedented rates. At the International Culinary Center (formerly the French Culinary Institute), the change has been striking: In 2012, nearly half the graduates of the culinary program were women — 202 of them, up from 41 in 1992. At Johnson & Wales University, the proportion of female graduates more than doubled over those two decades, and in 2012, men were the minority: 820 women and 818 men graduated that year. At the Culinary Institute of America, the percentage of female graduates rose to 36 percent in 2012 from 21 percent in 1992.

在烹饪学校，长期以来女性是糕点课程的主力军，但是现在她们以空前的速度加入了综合烹饪课程。在国际烹饪中心(International Culinary Center，前身是法国烹饪学院[French Culinary Institute])，这种变化十分显著：2012年，烹饪项目的毕业生中差不多有一半是女性，多达202名，1992年这个数字是41名。在约翰逊&威尔士大学，女毕业生的比例在过去20年里翻了一倍多，2012年男性成了少数——女毕业生820名，男毕业生818名。在美国烹饪学院(Culinary Institute of America)，女毕业生的比例从1992年的21%增长到了2012年的36%。

Many of these women have been drawn by an industry that seems newly glamorous, lively and creative. And smartly run restaurants are making new efforts to keep them by paying more attention to employees’ needs.

这些女生中有很多被这个似乎焕发出新的魅力、活力和创造力的行业吸引住了。善于经营的餐馆更加关心员工的需求，努力用新方法留住她们。

Except for union jobs, most of them in hotels, restaurants are notoriously disorganized or worse about providing workers with benefits or even sick days. Staying on the line with a second-degree burn or a sliced-open thumb has been part of the macho culture of the kitchen.

除了有工会保障的工作——这些工作大多在酒店——餐馆是众所周知的混乱，或者说在给员工提供福利甚至病假方面情况更糟。二度烧伤或大拇指割伤仍然在岗已经成为厨房男子汉气概文化的一部分。

“At Lutèce, if you broke your leg, you leaned against a wall and finished your shift,” said Ivan Orkin, 51, the chef and owner of Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop in New York, who as a young chef agonized about whether to stick it out in prestigious kitchens or accept a low-profile job as a corporate chef, with structured hours and benefits. (He chose the latter when his first son arrived.)

“在Lutèce餐馆，如果你摔断了腿，那你就靠在墙上值完班，”51岁的伊万·奥尔金(Ivan Orkin)说。他是纽约伊万·拉门餐馆(Ivan Ramen Slurp Shop)的大厨兼老板。他年轻时当大厨时，为在有名的厨房坚持到底还是接受公司大厨的低调工作而极其苦恼，后者的工作时间和福利比较固定(在第一个儿子出生后他选择了后者)。

“This has been a transient industry, but the best employees are not people who want to live a transient life,” said Ahmass Fakahany, chief executive of the Altamarea Group, where 50 percent of cooks and 44 percent of all employees in its American restaurants are women. Under the culinary guidance of the chef Michael White, the company has opened 13 restaurants in five years. Altamarea employees, like Ms. DeSteno at Marea, get medical, dental and vision insurance and paid holidays.

“很多人只在这个行业短暂工作，但是最好的员工不是那些只想短暂工作一段时间的人，”Altamarea集团的首席执行官阿马斯·法卡哈尼(Ahmass Fakahany)说。在该集团的美国餐馆里，女性占厨师的50%，占所有员工的44%。在大厨迈克尔·怀特(Michael White)的烹饪指导下，该公司在五年内开了13家餐馆。Altamarea集团的员工，比如马雷亚餐馆的德斯特诺，有普通医疗保险、牙科和眼科医疗保险以及带薪假期。

At the nine branches of Momofuku in New York, employees who remain with the company for one year get free health insurance, paid vacations and maternity and paternity leave.

纽约Momofuku集团九个分店的员工们在公司工作满一年后能够得到免费的健康保险、带薪假期和(陪)产假。

“The restaurant business has to change, to accommodate real life,” said Alice Waters, who cooked full time at Chez Panisse in Berkeley, Calif., until 1983, when her daughter, Fanny, was born. At Chez Panisse — not a typical restaurant, but an influential one — Ms. Waters has pioneered job-sharing programs between parents, instituted a six-months-off furlough system for head chefs and put time and money into building a deep bench of cooks, which allows employees to move in and out of her kitchens as their lives change.

“餐饮业必须改变，以适应现实生活，”爱丽丝·沃特斯(Alice Waters)说。1983年女儿范妮(Fanny)出生前，她在加州伯克利的潘尼斯之家(Chez Panisse)做全职厨师。潘尼斯之家餐厅不是很典型，但是很有影响力。在那里，沃特斯在有孩子的员工中推行轮班制，创立了主厨六个月停职系统，花时间和金钱找了很多高水平的后备厨师，这样员工们在生活发生变化时能够离开或返回她的厨房。

Still, in most restaurants, benefits are a pipe dream and pay is meager. Entry-level jobs, even for chefs with culinary degrees, can pay as little as $15 an hour, once 80-hour workweeks are factored in. Last week, the first in-depth study of business practices in the American restaurant industry confirmed that low pay and job insecurity have led to an exceedingly high turnover rate, compared with other businesses. This is costly for restaurateurs and chef-owners, who contend that they cannot afford to offer higher wages or benefits.

然而，在大多数餐馆，福利是白日梦，薪水很微薄。初级职位的时薪只有15美元，而且一周要工作80个小时，即使是有烹饪证书的大厨也不例外。上周，美国餐饮业的第一份商业行为深度调查证实，薪水低、缺乏安全感导致餐饮业的人员流动率远远高于其他行业。这对餐馆老板或大厨兼老板来说代价很高，他们争辩说自己付不起更高的薪水和福利。

“Women are disproportionately affected by these problems that plague the industry as a whole,” said Saru Jayaraman, co-director of Restaurant Opportunities Centers United, an employee advocacy group that conducted the study along with Cornell University, with money from the Rockefeller and Ford foundations.

“这些困扰整个行业的问题对女性的影响更大，”餐馆就业机会联合中心(Restaurant Opportunities Centers United)的联合主任萨鲁·加雅拉曼(Saru Jayaraman)说。该中心是一个员工倡议组织，它和康奈尔大学依靠洛克菲勒和福特基金会的资金一起进行了这项调查。

Hand-wringing about the low status and low numbers of women in the culinary world has been constant since professional cooking changed from a menial trade to a respectable career, beginning in the 1980s. (Today, the lack of gender diversity is not the only concern: All groups except for white men are underrepresented at the top of the profession.)

自从20世纪80年代起职业烹饪从卑微的工作变成受人尊敬的事业以来，关于厨房里女性地位低、人数少的文章络绎不绝(如今，缺乏性别多样性不是人们唯一关注的问题。还有个问题是在这个职业的顶尖人物中，除了白人男性，其他人种的代表不足)。

For decades, chefs of both sexes believed that inequality was inevitable. The same stereotypes used to keep women out of armed combat, off the judicial bench and out of medical school were invoked to explain why women didn’t stick it out in the kitchen. The work, it was said, is too physically demanding and psychologically grueling; the hours were too incompatible with family life.

几十年来，男女大厨都认为这种不公平是不可避免的。曾让女人远离战场、法庭和医学院的成见被用来解释为什么女人在厨房坚持不下去。这种成见认为厨师工作要求体力好，心理承受能力强，而且厨师的工作时间与家庭生活无法协调。

But a younger generation isn’t having it.

但是年轻一代不这么认为。

“Leaving was not an option for me,” said Alex Raij, 44, who owns three popular Spanish restaurants in New York with her husband, Eder Montero; the couple have two children under age 5. “I don’t know how to do anything else.” Like many of her contemporaries, she carved out a niche where she could be in charge of her own hours and her own food.

“离开不是我的选项，”44岁的亚历克斯·拉伊(Alex Raij)说。她和丈夫埃德尔·蒙特罗(Eder Montero)在纽约拥有三家很受欢迎的西班牙餐馆。他们有两个孩子，都不到五岁。“因为我不会做别的事情。”像她的很多同龄人一样，她开创了一个合适的职业，让她既能掌控自己的时间，也能掌控自己的食物。

Many female pioneers — Jody Adams, Suzanne Goin, Odessa Piper, Lydia Shire and, until her death last year, Judy Rodgers — also stayed in their kitchens though children and divorces, fires and floods. Yet for every successful empire-builder like Barbara Lynch, who runs seven restaurants in Boston, there are a dozen Michelle Bernsteins, women who might have become the next Mario Batali or Andrew Carmellini but retreated under the pressure of being a multitasking modern chef and mother at the same time.

很多女性先锋不管生孩子、离婚或者经历任何风雨，都仍然留在厨房，比如乔迪·亚当斯(Jody Adams)、苏珊娜·戈因(Suzanne Goin)、敖德萨·派珀(Odessa Piper)、莉迪亚·夏尔(Lydia Shire)和乔迪·罗杰斯(Judy Rodgers)。最后这位直到去年去世前一直在厨房工作。但是有一个芭芭拉·林奇，就有十多个米歇尔·伯恩斯坦——前者成功地创立了一个集团，在波士顿经营七家餐馆;后者本可能成为下一个马利欧·巴塔利(Mario Batali)或安德鲁·卡梅里尼(Andrew Carmellini)，但是因为既要担当有多重任务的现代大厨，又要承担母亲的责任，压力太大所以隐退了。

When her son was born, “I made a decision to pull back on restaurants and expand on other things,” said Ms. Bernstein, who at one point was in charge of four restaurants. Now she has one, Michy’s; two bakeries; and several consulting gigs that have flexible hours. “To run a restaurant with the perfectionism of a Thomas Keller is a job that takes 18 to 20 hours a day, and I’m just not going to do that.” (Many men don’t want to, either.)

伯恩斯坦曾执掌四家餐厅。她说，儿子出生后，“我决定缩减餐馆，开拓其他事业”。现在她拥有一家餐馆——Michy’s;两个面包房;几份时间灵活的咨询工作。“经营餐馆若要像托马斯·凯勒[Thomas Keller]那样追求完美，每天需要工作18至20个小时，我不想那样。”(很多男人也不想那样。)

One big question — why even women who make it to the top rank of chefs struggle for recognition — has often been posed, and never fully answered.

有个大问题经常被提出，却从未得到完满的答案：为什么连顶级女大厨也要努力争取知名度?

It’s true that male chefs get more media attention than their female colleagues — especially on the global stage, now dominated by clubby events like Cook It Raw and power lists like the World’s 50 Best, where female chefs are still a tiny minority. There have been conferences and doctoral dissertations on the subject; support networks like Women Chefs and Restaurateurs, and Les Dames d’Escoffier; and a flash mob of female chefs in Boston who showed up at a food festival in October just to demonstrate their sheer numbers.

男大厨的确比女大厨得到更多的媒体关注，特别是在全球舞台上，这个舞台现在被Cook It Raw这样的小圈子活动和全球50佳(the World’s 50 Best)这样的权力排行榜所主导，在这个榜单上女大厨是极少数。有些会议和博士论文是关于这个主题的;像Women Chefs and Restaurateurs和Les Dames d’Escoffier这样的组织在支持女大厨;波士顿还有女大厨快闪族，10月份她们在一个美食节上突然现身，只是为了展示她们人数众多。

Many others were galvanized by the recent Time magazine spread, which arrived in American restaurant kitchens like a blast of ice water, chilling the women who have seen real change.

还有其他很多人受到了《时代》杂志上那篇文章的刺激，它像一盆冰水，泼到了美国餐馆的厨房，凉透了那些看到真实改变的女大厨们的心。

“It simply did not reflect the reality that we see in the industry every day,” said Amanda Cohen, the chef and owner of Dirt Candy in New York, who wrote a scathing riposte on the food blog Eater.

“它没有反映出我们每天在这个行业看到的事实，”纽约Dirt Candy餐馆的大厨兼老板阿曼达·科恩(Amanda Cohen)说。她在美食博客Eater上写了一篇尖锐的反驳文章。

“It was a turning point,” said Kerry Diamond, a founder of the female-focused food magazine Cherry Bombe, which had published its first issue, financed by a successful Kickstarter campaign, when the Time article appeared. “And now food is definitely having a feminist moment.”

“它是个转折点，”凯莉·戴蒙德(Kerry Diamond)说。她是面向女性的美食杂志《Cherry Bombe》的创始人之一。《时代》杂志的文章刊登后，《Cherry Bombe》通过Kickstarter成功筹资出版了第一期。“现在美食无疑正在经历一个女权主义时刻。”

One example is the recent founding of the Toklas Society, a network for women who work in the restaurant industry including some chefs, but also many women whose jobs are high on glamour but low on pay and job security: chefs’ assistants, publicity managers, event planners and administrators. As cooking has become a more creative field, more educated women have flooded into the business, looking not for a job but for a career; the Toklas Society aims to help them find a way in.

其中一个例子是最近成立的托克拉斯协会(Toklas Society)，该协会服务于在餐饮业工作的女性，不仅包括大厨，还包括其他一些女人，她们从事那些看起来光鲜但是薪水低、没有保障的工作：大厨助理、公关经理、活动策划人和行政主管。烹饪已变成一个更有创造力的领域，所以更多受过教育的女性涌入这个行业，不是为了找一份工作，而是为了获得一个事业。托克拉斯协会旨在帮助她们找到入门路径。

“No matter how much of a strong feminist you are, it is hard to work in such a male-dominated industry,” said Sue Chan, the group’s founder, who has worked in the Momofuku group since 2004. She decided to name the group after Alice B. Toklas, the woman who cooked and kept house while her partner, the writer Gertrude Stein, received the world’s accolades.

“不管你是个多么坚决的女权主义者，都很难在这个男性主导的行业工作，”该协会的创始人休·陈(Sue Chan)说。她从2004年起在Momofuku集团工作。她决定用爱丽丝·B·托克拉斯(Alice B. Toklas)的名字给协会命名。托克拉斯负责做饭、整理家务，而她的伴侣、作家格特鲁德·斯泰因(Gertrude Stein)却受到了全世界的赞美。

“We are the quiet power behind the throne,” Ms. Chan said. “But sometimes everyone gets tired of being quiet.”

“我们是默默无闻的幕后者，”陈说，“但是有时谁都会厌倦默默无闻。”