Thi Le

While Alvarez hasn’t experienced any on-the-job discrimination, she’s aware of the obstacles that female chefs face. The sharp end of the knife for many women comes in the form of unfriendly work hours and a lack of resources to allow them to both run a restaurant and have a family. “Restaurants are physically demanding and involve a lot of nights as well,” she says. “I think we, as an industry, have not been very good at creating allowances for that. There are plenty of female chefs out there; they just aren’t staying around long enough to reach the top of the game.”

It’s a tale that is borne out statistically. A roughly equal number of men and women now enter culinary schools in Australia (the balance in the United States has recently tipped in favour of women) but, as in many industries, the number of female chefs becomes much smaller at the higher ranks.

The winds of change were blowing at the launch of Rockpool Dining Group’s Sydney CBD restaurant Bar Patrón (barpatron.com.au) this year. Introducing head chef Pamela Valdes Pardo, group culinary chief Neil Perry spoke of the significance of helping his employees find work/life balance. “The most important thing is that women are not lost to the industry and that a career break is not so great they lose momentum,” says Perry,