I doubt it. Male TV chefs may be the kings in the television test kitchen, but the true test of whether you can stand the heat or not is a long stint say 20 years as the family cook. But here in lies the contradiction. Iain Hewitson, Ian Parmenter, Jamie Oliver, Geoff Jantz, Stefano de Pieri and Steve Manfredi, to name just a few, are all so busy telling us how to chargrill our salmon steaks or slice our sushi that it is easy to forget that it is still women who cook the family dinner most nights. Even more remarkable is that, despite this, women are still struggling for recognition and acceptance in the male-dominated world of professional cooking.
Cooper says men's dominance in the upper echelons of the professional kitchen is slowly shifting.
But you could starve waiting. I could not find any comparative Australian figures, but Juggling Time, the 1991 Australian Bureau of Statistics survey into how Australians spend their time, found that women's dominance in the lower echelons of the family kitchen is not shifting much at all. Women's unpaid work usually occurs inside the home, with cooking, cleaning, laundry and child care taking up 73 per cent of the time devoted to unpaid work. But it's not just what they do, and where, and how much that counts. The survey showed that women do about 70 per cent of unpaid work compared to men's 30 per cent.