Women have always been the people that cooked at home for their families, so why have they not traditionally been more represented in Cooking professionally? It seems all the great Chefs of the past have been Male (think Escoffier etc) and all their assistants have been male as well.
How did this come about? Wouldn't women have been trusted to cook better food than men?
And conversely, was there ever a time when women actually outnumbered men in this field and if so, what caused it to shift?
Just something I read in a popular history on the topic, but Wilson suggests that kitchens of the well-off in the Middle Ages were hot, dangerous places, where not only skirts tended to catch on fire but that men would go nearly naked in order to cope with the heat, and this set later trends.