This bit of fallacious folk-wisdom, which dates back to the days of the Egyptian pharaohs, has simply no basis in reality and many biological research studies have demonstrated unequivocally that sex alone has no impact whatever on taste discrimination. A related and equally frivolous argument, that women are so concerned with their figures that they will never be able to taste enough to develop discriminating palates is equally easy to dismiss. There has never been a requirement for great chefs to be fat. The fourth argument, about the differences in how men and women perceive food is perhaps the most fascinating one. A famous chef, on the other hand, is a culinary artist, and this is something quite different, for the male chef takes pride in the food per se and is able to detach it from the eater.
Women cook for the people they love.
There is logic to this argument, but it is a logic based on the fact that for thousands of years women have been assigned the joint roles of nurturers of the family and housekeepers. The argument that women do not have the managerial skills to supervise a large kitchen is obviously fallacious, and this can be seen by studying the increasingly large number of women who are hospital administrators, senior editors of newspapers and magazines, and corporate executives, positions that frequently require the organization and supervision of staffs far larger than those found at nearly all of the world's great restaurants. The claim that women are not capable of supervising or organizing men can be dismissed in precisely the same manner. The truth is that the reasons most often given to explain why women are not great chefs are not valid. The painful reality is that women have not become great chefs largely because men, willingly or not, have chosen to monopolize the field.