Women in Restaurant Business

Hello,

I read a story...a few weeks back... about a female archeology professor showing her students a picture of the first-ever "calendar made by man". It was a stone slate with carvings depicting the movements of Moon thus effectively counting the number of days per rotation.

At the end of the class she offhandedly commented, why would a man need to count the number of days in every lunar cycle? This had to have been the work of a woman trying to track her monthly cycle.

The story was effective, immediately led me to think about what else might have been the work of a woman, that "man" is getting credit for?

But before I could get on to this train of thoughts where contributions of women were ignored for centuries altogether, I realized this wasn't the story of my life. My contributions to my work, business, home, and life are well recognized and accounted for.

So does that mean that we can pat ourselves on the back and go with our lives now?

No, far from it.

I started my food entrepreneurial journey about 7 years back and if you would have asked me back then about women being in the Hospitality Industry, I would have proudly said women could rock any industry they wanted to, but in Hospitality, they had a special place.

After all, who's more familiar with the workings of a kitchen? Who can maintain better hygiene standards? And who of the two genders have better work ethics? Well, in my experience...women do.

But why is it then we see no women at all in any of the restaurants we might ever walk in?

The reason for this is both practical and stupid at the same time. 

The working hours are long in a restaurant. Moreover, restaurants usually don't shut down before late night (say 10 or 11 pm at night) and no women could be outside for work till those late hours.

Apart from this, some moderate to heavy lifting is required to be done on a daily basis, and there again, men become better suited for the jobs. And the most stupid one of them, there aren't any washrooms in the local marketplaces in India...anywhere! So women basically have to either dehydrate themselves or have steel bladders to make it through the day.

Reasons like these (and many more) make it extremely difficult for women to be hired in industries like Hospitality and Restaurants. But really, which industry should then the women go to?

Because historically, every single industry is made for Man to work and provide for his family. And even though there have been more and more women working and contributing in each and every industry, we haven't really changed our style of making businesses to suit both genders.

And that's why in my 7+ years of Sandwedges we could never hire any women there. When we did try very early on in the business, these stupid but practical reasons never really worked out for long.

When I was starting Dohful about two and half years back, I was determined, I did not want any gender discrimination while hiring. So we decided to do things differently.

Instead of taking a back kitchen kind of a place in a market, we took a proper office space with an attached washroom which we were determined to keep clean and unisexual. We wanted the people who came to work with us to feel proud of the place they were working at.

Plus we weren't a restaurant so didn't have to be open till hate hours. We could shut down after the shipments of the day went out in the evening (about 7ish).

In fact, our first 5 hires in Dohful were females. No, it wasn't intentional, it was just due to the fact that Shahpur Jat is filled with young women working in designer showrooms. So everywhere we looked, asking for references of someone who could work with us, we ran into women.

And it makes me so so so happy to say that it was the best decision ever.

I have seen these females grow from being school dropouts to operating computers, managing most of the steps of an e-commerce operation. They have started learning English because they see us talk in English to our customers, they manage inventories to the T and can basically run the whole office (and not just the kitchen) with acute precision.

But the fight is still on. Every day we make choices and try to maintain gender equality in those choices. I just hope we continue to reform the way we do business so that anyone can become a part of any industry irrespective of their gender.