Enrollment of women at culinary schools on the rise

Nation's Restaurant News, Feb 21, 2005 by Dina Berta

Editor's note: Because of a production error, this story, which ran in the Feb. 14 issue, did not appear in its entirety. Following is the complete version.

Patricia Homma of Atlanta started cooking for her family when she was 12, but she never considered a culinary career until a recruiter from the Art Institutes network of culinary schools visited her high school.

Homma became the first female to win the vocational school's Best Teen Chef competition, and the $30,000 scholarship prize now is paying her way through the culinary program at the Art Institute of Atlanta. While working part-time at a Hilton hotel restaurant, Homma, 20, aspires someday to have a cooking show on the Food Network.

Women like Homma are contributing to the burgeoning enrollments at culinary schools across the country. The popularity of celebrity chefs, TV food programs and changes in restaurant kitchens that have made them more welcoming environments to women are helping to attract more females to culinary schools, according to school officials. And that trend in time is likely to further transform industry kitchens, which long have been male dominated, they add.

"During the early 1980s, 5 to 10 percent of culinary students nationwide were females, and by the mid-90s it was 35 percent. Today about 50 percent are females," said Kathleen Wojcik, spokeswoman for Lexington College, a women's college in Chicago that offers degrees in hospitality management with concentrations in hotel and restaurant management, event planning and culinary arts. While Lexington College is 100-percent female, the school recently completed a survey of other culinary schools that supports Wojcik's observation.

A look at culinary-arts enrollment at Providence, R.I.-based Johnson & Wales University over the past four years shows a steady increase of female students at five of J&W's six campuses. The data do not include J&W's newest campus in Charlotte, N.C. Women accounted for 46 percent of J&W's culinary-arts students in 2004, the university reported.

While men still are in the majority at The Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, N.Y., the percentage of women studying culinary arts has moved from a quarter of the student population in 2000 to nearly 30 percent last year. Women, however, continue to dominate the baking and pastry arts at the CIA. In 2003 they accounted for 78 percent of the students in that field, according to the institute.

Chef Linda Rosner, culinary director at Lexington College, conducted an informal poll of culinary schools and community college programs in the Chicago area and reported that the gender of students almost is 50-50.

"We're still seeing more men than women overall in schools. However, women are doing just as much culinary work as [baking] and pastry work," Rosner said.

The Art Institutes reported that 45 percent of its culinary-arts students are women, said Jeff Durosko, spokesman for the for-profit vocational-school system, which is based in Pittsburgh and operates 31 schools across the country.

"Our fastest-growing program is culinary arts," he said. "Where we had 12 schools with culinary arts, we now have 19."

When the Art Institutes launched its Best Teen Chef competition six years ago, only two girls entered the contest. Last year, all but two of the 19 finalists in the competition were women.

Chef Michael Nenes, associate vice president for the Art Institutes' culinary arts school in Houston, said about one quarter of the students were women when the school opened in 1992. Women made up 43 percent of the enrollment during the most recent quarter, Nenes added.

"I think the back-of-the-house has opened up for women," Nenes said. "You see more female star chefs. You see them on the Food Network and in the community."

J&W and CIA, both of which boast that more than 90 percent of their students find jobs immediately after graduation, reported that more women are moving into jobs as line cooks and into kitchen leadership positions. Male CIA graduates, however, are more likely to garner sous chef or executive chef jobs, said Ray Wells, director of career services.

"Males tend to have more experience coming into the CIA," Wells said. "In Baking and Pasty Arts the reverse it true. Women come in with more experience in that area, and they are obtaining pastry chef and [other] chef leadership positions."

About 48 percent of recent female graduates from J&W took cooking jobs in the industry, and of those, 13 percent were in management positions, said Judi Mazzarelli, J&W's director of information and management systems for culinary development.

"We're also seeing women who are going out and starting their own catering company or bake shop," Mazzarelli said.

Chef Nenes in Houston credited some technology changes in the kitchen with making cooking jobs more appealing to women.

Innovations, such as stock pots with steam jackets that drain from the bottom so they don't have to be lifted and carried and stainless-steel-lined aluminum pans that are not as heavy as cast iron pans, can help make the job less physically demanding, he said.