Leadership and Executive Development for women of all races, cultures and backgrounds
Issue link: https://diversitywoman.epubxp.com/i/632328
26 D I V E R S I T Y W O M A N W I n t e r 2 0 1 6 d i v e r s i t y w o m a n . c o m We Mean Business > We Mean Business DW: The world of high-powered restau- rants is infamous for its macho atmo- sphere. Have you ever faced any overt or covert sexism in your career? TDJ: If you look at the statistics [of the ratio of men to women in the restaurant industry], I would have to answer that absolutely it's a male-centric feld. Have I felt like being female has been a huge ob- stacle for me? No. But I have been able to look past a lot of fairly egregious things in my career. When I worked in France for a total of a year and a half, I was the only woman in each of the kitchens in four diferent restaurants. So what's the reasoning behind that? DW: Why do you think that is? TDJ: I think there are a bunch of rea- sons. I think that when women get to the childbearing years, they tend to drop out of our industry. Te years it takes to become a restaurateur or a chef-owner coincide with when women are ready to have children or they're at the tail end of their childbearing years. So I think a lot of women—and I've seen this—drop out. It's also due to the fact that running a restaurant has historically been male dominated, and that's not easy to change. DW: Is there an association of women chefs? TDJ: Tere is. Tere's Women Chefs & Restaurateurs, WCR. I was on the board many years ago. I would imagine there are the same sorts of obstacles in the regular business world as in ours, in terms of having kids and fnding work- life balance. Te big diference, though, is that most of what happens in the res- taurant world happens at night. Tat's a bigger challenge in terms of managing day care and managing a family. How do you do that? DW: How have you managed that schedule? TDJ: I have a 15-year-old son. But I can't say it's been easy. It took planning. I had to be at a certain point in my career in order to make that happen. When I was 17, I had the plan in mind that I wanted kids in my early 30s—and it was another 17 years before I had my son. By that point, my feet were frmly planted, and I already owned my own business by the time I had a child, so I had a lot of fex- ibility. As a business owner, I could write my own ticket. DW: Are there certain working styles that are acceptable in the restaurant indus- try but may not be acceptable in other industries? TDJ: Oh, yeah! I was on a panel on stress recently, which included an NFL quarter- back, a psychologist, and a FEMA frst re- sponder. I said to the quarterback, "We're both in industries that I consider to be the last bastions of bad behavior." In sports and in restaurants, there is still a lot of motivation by intimidation and threats and profanities. It certainly is the way I was trained. I was trained in an environ- ment where what we considered normal behavior anyone of a sound mind would have said was abusive. Tere was a lot of yelling and screaming, and there were fst- fghts. People got beat up or had things thrown at them, and they had plates smashed down in front of them. Te stories you read are true. It was a large part of my learn- ing experience in restaurants. Early in my career, when I frst became in charge of a kitchen, I ruled that way. But quickly I realized I didn't want to be that way. I didn't want to be a yelling, scream- ing, tyrannical, threatening, intimidating person. It took a lot of energy and it felt like negative energy. I re- fected on that and tried to fgure out a way that it could happen better. But there are still residuals of that in our industry, and fairly domi- nant ones. DW: But given the stress in the job, aren't restaurants owned by the most enlightened executive chefs still chal- lenging work environments? TDJ: Yeah, that was defnitely one of the challenges in my career, to sort of fgure that out. Tere are still residual parts of that in my kitchens. It's still very hi- erarchical. It's still kind of run like the military. Tere is a hierarchy and a pre- cision that is necessary in the heat of battle. In the moment during what we call "in-service"—when there are guests in the restaurant and we're servicing those guests—if I tell my sous chef, "Tis chicken is undercooked" or "It's not sea- soned correctly," he might not agree with me. He might think it's cooked perfectly or seasoned correctly, but he's not go- ing to argue with me in that moment. If the server comes back to me and says, "Tis isn't to the guest's liking," I say to the chefs, "You need to make this again, and this is what they didn't like about it." Tey don't have time to discuss who's right and who's wrong. It just needs to get done. Traci Des Jardins making tortillas