Babies.

“Without our community creating support systems, having children is really not an option for a lot of people.”

  • Chef Beverly Kim.

Idea vs. Reality.

“It felt like if you were to get pregnant, you would be—not fired. But your position and your status would diminish.” —R.

As masculinized spaces, restaurants are hostile to motherhood. Rather, they are supportive of the idea of motherhood but unwilling to accommodate its realities.

Hundreds of restaurants around the country are named after women, often with “old-school” monikers inspired by maternal figures. On my Brooklyn block alone there’s Cafe Paulette, Miss Ada and Evelina—all owned by men. If you live in New York City you might’ve been to Sadelle’s, Gertie or Marta. Or perhaps you’ve been to Rose’s Luxury in Washington, DC, Odette in Singapore or Babette in Stockholm. All are owned and operated by men. 

Men name their restaurants after women to convey a sense of warmth and generosity (Levin). It’s a way to signal a certain kind of caring hospitality that’s universally understood. Mothers and grandmothers are often chefs’ earliest sources of inspiration and culinary learning and naming is a popular way to honor them. It is also, however, a way to continue separating masculine, professional cooking from feminine, domestic cooking. This naming phenomenon continues to position women who cook at home and men as the people who transform that labor into an elevated, legitimate craft. Plus, as historian Paul Freedman explains, a feminine name has the added bonus of showing “that a restaurant doesn’t have a Mario Batali attitude…or even David Chang’s fuck-you attitude” (quoted in Levin). It’s a way to perform values of gender equity (irregardless of whether they really exist). 

Mothers, then, are allowed to inspire chefs from their home kitchens, but when they want to enter the restaurant workforce they are met with systemic resistance. Since restaurants were built on a masculine default and women, historically and presently, are primary caretakers, as workplaces they have made little effort to accommodate mothers. 

In fact, the women I spoke to largely couldn’t recall working with pregnant women or mothers. C noted that “a lot of times cooks are young, and they tend to move on. The people who do end up sticking around for longer tend to be men. I think that’s because of the challenges of motherhood.” M concurred. In twenty years of professional cooking, “The people that I worked with, the partners that I worked with, or even the teams that I worked with, didn’t have any children.” When I asked AL if she had ever had any pregnant colleagues, she seemed surprised at the question: “It’s so interesting that you ask me that, because I have not experienced that many pregnant women.” She did recall one colleague who, leading up to her due date, “worked until she couldn’t.” AL was quick to explain that no one “was forcing her to be here…that’s just who she is as a person.” 

Maybe, but maybe not. Women like AL’s colleague learn early on that pregnancy limits their opportunities for professional advancement. R explained:

“In the beginning [of my career] I just was like, okay, I know I can’t get pregnant. I just knew it. It felt like if you were to get pregnant, you would be—not fired. But your position and your status would diminish.”

C echoed this sentiment. She is gearing up to start her own business and already wonders if she’ll be able to balance motherhood with operating a restaurant. “I’ve thought about if we decide to start having kids, what is my thing? I want to have this business. But if I were to get pregnant now, what would happen?” C’s anxiety is justified: women in heterosexual partnerships are consistently more likely than their partners to worry about future parenthood when making career choices (Conroy Bass). They are even more likely to “downshift” their current professional goals to prepare for responsibilities that come with new parenthood, well before they actually have children (Conroy Bass).

Parental Leave.

“I made it work, because I didn’t know what else I was going to do.” —M.

Women are stressed because they remain the world’s primary caretakers.

Globally, 75% of unpaid care work is done by women who spend 3-6 hours per day on it, while men spend just 30 minutes to 2 hours (Criado Perez). Women are also the primary or secondary breadwinners in 2/3 of American families (Kludt 2016). So, as women have entered the workforce over the second half of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first, they haven’t decreased their unpaid domestic labor load—their total work time has in fact grown (Criado Perez). 

Managing all this work starts postpartum, because just 4% of foodservice workers get any paid family leave. Women who give birth face tremendous financial pressure to return to physically demanding jobs well before they are ready. M, a 49 year-old mother and chef, shared with me the grueling reality of returning to work with an infant: 

“I made it work, because I didn’t know what else I was going to do. I couldn’t work 12 hours a day and have an infant at home. [My workplace] didn’t care what hours I worked, and I didn’t get paid much there as a result. But I was able to have my own schedule. I would get into work—this sounds crazy to say—but I would wake up at three in the morning, I’d pump breastmilk for 30 minutes, then I’d quickly get dressed. I’d take a car over to [work] and I’d be working at four. Then I’d pump somewhere in the middle there, and then I’d be home by like noon or one o’clock when [my husband] had to go to work.”

M and her then husband employed split-shift parenting, where parents work opposite schedules to divide child care responsibilities. It’s typically an unsustainable model, as M explained: “You’re sort of on 24/7…I remember in the beginning, those first couple of years, just feeling utterly exhausted, and tired all the time.”

M developed this debilitating schedule because she needed to return to work, as do most American mothers: just 14% of the workforce gets paid parental leave (Collins), as permitted by the Family and Medical Leave Act. Introduced in 1993, it guarantees 12 weeks of unpaid leave to individuals who have worked at companies with more than 50 employees for at least one year. This means that unpaid leave is available to just 60% of the workforce; the other 40% are not guaranteed any leave at all (Criado Perez). Most foodservice workers fall into the latter category because independent restaurants typically have fewer than 50 employees. Because of the financial constraints that unpaid leave presents, 1 in 4 mothers in the US returns to work within 2 weeks after giving birth—well before they are physically or mentally ready (Criado Perez).

Time Cost.

“It takes time to have a child. It takes time to bond with that child…when an owner looks at that, they just see money. They see money out the door.” —R.

M took a pay cut in order to have a more flexible schedule—if you can call getting to work at 4 AM flexible.

But this kind of change isn’t always an option. The long hours and grueling physical conditions in restaurants can be particularly hard on pregnant and postpartum people. They also present a time bind, which occurs when long hours at work cause higher levels of disruption in family life (Harris & Giuffre). In restaurants, nights, weekends and holidays are “prestige shifts”—opportunities to visibly display ambition and commitment (Harris & Giuffre). But they’re also the times parents want or need to be with their children.

When I asked R why restaurants are so inhospitable to mothers, she responded, “It’s because of the time mechanism. It takes time to have a child. It takes time to bond with that child…when an owner looks at that, they just see money. They see money out the door.” 

Some owners would rather not deal with the time or money costs of bringing a woman back after maternity leave. S explained that a former colleague was fired while away:

“When she was going into maternity leave, somehow within that timeframe she was terminated. It was made to seem that she never returned.”

Reflecting on another former colleague who returned after maternity leave only to learn she would be making $30,000 less than her men coworkers, S explained that “it was almost easier for someone to quit right after [maternity leave]. She was treated horribly when she was pregnant.”

Women owners, in R’s experience, are more accommodating. “They can identify with pregnancy and that type of leave. But they plan for it. They’re budgeting for it. They are considering it in their projections. Until leaders recognize and respect the plight of women, and the conditions of womanhood, I don’t think there’s going to be much change.” 

Unpredictable shifts are one example of an unwillingness to accommodate these conditions. The rise of “just-in-time” software allows employers to schedule shifts last-minute, based on when the business is busiest (Criado Perez). 74% of women hourly employees have schedules that vary every week (Morsey & Rothstein). This kind of unpredictability is impossible for parents trying to set up child care and makes it difficult for them to succeed at work. As C observed: “I worked with a couple people who were mothers, and one specifically would have a lot of challenges with her kids and being sick and getting them to school and everything….I really liked her, but she was very inconsistent [in terms of] reliability.” C’s observation represents a persistent, gendered tension in restaurant work: businesses require 24/7 availability, but so do children.

Financial Cost.

“I worked with a couple people who were mothers, and one specifically would have a lot of challenges with her kids and being sick and getting them to school and everything….I really liked her, but she was very inconsistent.” —C.

Child Care

In theory, child care should help women build careers. In reality, it is unaffordable for restaurant workers. They occupy 7 out of 10 of the lowest-paid occupations in the country, and women are disproportionately funneled towards the lowest-earning of those (Kiesling). The federal minimum wage has been $7.25/hour since 2009 (Gould & Cooke). The federal tipped minimum wage is just $2.13, though a handful of states require a full minimum wage for tipped workers. 

All this is to say that paid child care is out of reach for foodservice workers. In 33 states, infant care costs exceed the average cost of in-state public college tuition (Gould & Cooke). In Washington, DC, a minimum wage worker would need to spend 102.6% of their annual earnings on infant child care, and 81% on care for a 4 year-old child (Gould & Cooke). The average American household with children under 5 spends 10% of monthly income on child care and those at the poverty line (including many restaurant workers) spend 35%; the US Department of Health and Human Services considers 7% to be affordable (Kiesling). 

Even if universal or subsidized child care did become available, it would be incompatible with restaurant schedules. As of 2015 only 8% of American childcare centers were open in the evening, and the government subsidies that are available don’t cover individual babysitters (Kiesling). This leaves mothers who get called in at the last minute to work on Saturday night at the mercy of whoever is available to watch their kids. In 2014 Jannette Navarro, a Starbucks employee and single mother earning $9/hour, had to pause pursuing her associate’s degree indefinitely because of child care issues: “Last month, she was scheduled to work until 11 p.m. on Friday, July 4; report again just hours later, at 4 a.m. on Saturday; and start again at 5 a.m. on Sunday. She braced herself to ask her aunt, Karina Rivera, to watch Gavin, hoping she would not explode in annoyance, or worse, refuse” (Kantor).

Pay & Benefits

Then there are the financial hurdles to restaurant motherhood. Let’s consider New York as a case study. Here, the median yearly income of chefs and head cooks is $62,000 (US Bureau of Labor Statistics), and women chefs make 28.3% less in base pay than their men colleagues (Albors-Garrigos). The average cost of child care in NYC for one infant is more than $15,000 per year (The Economic Policy Institute). Plus, operating on profit margins of just 1%-5% makes offering parental leave akin to filing to bankruptcy for a small restaurant. As a result, only 4% of foodservice workers get paid family leave (Kludt 2016). Only 50% of restaurants offer any kind of healthcare coverage at all—and the cost of pregnancy without it starts at around $30,000 for a straightforward vaginal birth (Smith).

These costs are significant because the United States the pay gap between mothers and married fathers is 3x higher than the pay gap between men and women without children (Criado Perez). Put differently: the pay gap for women without children is 7% but for mothers it is 23% (Collins). This is part of the “motherhood penalty”: the financial losses women accrue when they become mothers as a result of being perceived as less committed to their jobs than childless women or men (Harris & Giuffre). Fathers, by contrast, typically get a “fatherhood bonus,” or pay increase, when they start having children. 

M is case in point: “My income hasn’t increased or changed since 2014,” and one of her peers—a father—“was charging twice as much” as she was for consulting projects until she found out and upped her fee. 

Intensive Mothering.

“There are times when I feel like I am a horrible parent. I’m a horrible mother. I’m not taking care of my kid the way a full-time stay-at-home mom would.” —M.

It is not restaurants alone that make it difficult for women to succeed at work.

The cultural phenomenon of intensive mothering also places tremendous pressure on mothers to derive their entire sense of worth from their children’s wellbeing. M is an ambitious chef who has worked hard with her ex-husband to come up with child care that works for her 11 year-old son. Still, she feels immense guilt: “There are times when I feel like I am a horrible parent. I’m a horrible mother. I’m not taking care of my kid the way a full-time stay-at-home mom would.” 

A few moments later she explained to me that during the most trying months of the pandemic she “let it all slide,” allowing her son—as many parents did—to play with as many video games as he wanted. She paused for a minute and said to me (and, I think, herself): “I’m not the only one.” Intensive mothering obscures the fact that all working mothers are dealing with the same sky-high cultural expectations. Women with children are expected to deprioritize their careers in a way that men are not. AL shared a story about an executive at the hospitality group where she works who had recently left her job: “She was like, ‘I’m not being a good parent to my children. They need me to be a good parent right now.’” This single mother found that her job was preventing her from being a “good” mother, so she left it without another one lined up. Forcing women to choose between excelling at work and excelling at parenthood individualizes what is in fact a much broader issue: women are expected to perform an unattainably perfect version motherhood, without any legislative, financial or cultural support. Restaurants can’t be expected to overhaul their practices to be more mother-friendly if the country won’t follow suit. 

Choice?

“I know that she worked until couldn’t. But I think she also is a workhorse. I don't think anyone was forcing her to be there. I think that's just who she is as a person.” —AL.

For women, leaving restaurants is often framed as a choice.

But looking at all of these systemic barriers, it’s clear that this is a fallacy. In Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home Pamela Stone pioneered this argument, identifying that women across industries do not choose to leave their jobs; instead, they are pushed out because of inflexible policies, institutionalized barriers and a system that punishes women who have children (Collins). The scale of these problems is enormous, and, as I hope I’ve shown, the burden of change should not rest squarely on restaurants’ shoulders. It is our broader political and cultural context that makes navigating paid labor and unpaid care work so burdensome for mothers. Crucially, restaurants will not be able to change without federal legislation and a shift in gendered attitudes toward parenting. 

References.

Images.