“Les chevilles ouvrieres de l’hotel Labourdonnais”_Le Matinal_ 7 April 2015

Name of article: “Les chevilles ouvrieres de l’hotel Labourdonnais”

Name of publication: Le Matinal

Date: 7 April 2015

Country: Mauritius

Theme: Gender Equality

Genre: News

GEM Classification: Subtle Stereotype

Skill: Language

This article describes the achievement of 3 young and talented women cooks who have won a prize for a recent completion. While the ladies are glorified and congratulated for their work and creativity acute credit is given to a male cook for initiating them in the competition.

The success of all the three ladies was not described as one based on merit and hard work; rather it was attributed to their male cohort. This article shows the patriarchal nature of society once more. Women have always been attached to domestic work and women as cooks is no exception.

However, in the restauration industry women cooks are most of the time inferior to men. This shows that cook as a profession is related to men who are always termed as high level chefs compared to women who are inferior.

Additionally, in the article it is clearly mentioned that the organizer of the competition is a renewed male chef and even within the testimonial of the chef he highlights that ‘the girls were wonderful in what they did’. This connotation speaks loud. While the latter could have used words like ‘chef’ or ‘cooks’, he chose to highlight on the word ‘girls’ which again demarks the segregation between men and women in the restaurateur industry.

This article would have been a good case setting an example of gender equality if it was properly written with gender lenses.