I was asked to let a man take the credit for my work

‘Harriet, we have some difficult guests,’ the captain sat me down to say, ‘they want a male chef.’. I was in my late 20s at the time and I was working on a chartered superyacht, where I was part of a legion of staff hired to cater to a wealthy family. I was employed as the head chef – fully crafting a bespoke week-long menu and handling every detail surrounding the food.

The captain went on: ‘In order for us to go down the path of least resistance here, we need to play a game and that’s you staying away from them.’. Flabbergasted, I remember feeling confused and let down that I wouldn’t be able to put a face to my food, but I just had to accept that the guests would feel more comfortable if they were in a male chef’s hands. So I agreed to ‘lay low’ and do the work behind the scenes.

We ended up getting a male member of the deck team to pretend to be the chef and liaise with the guests, then feed back any requests to me behind the scenes. This is just one example of the sexism female chefs like me experience at work. I started my career in London at the age of 23, working for chef and restaurateur Mark Hix. I then went to culinary school, a staging (meaning internship) at Noma in Copenhagen, then came back to London to work across various Michelin star restaurants.

Sexism has been part of my career from very early on. When I showed up to one interview, the owner immediately assumed I was applying for one of the front of house roles, as I don’t think he thought a woman would apply for anything else. So I simply corrected him and said that I was applying as a chef (I ended up getting the job).

By my late 20s, my confidence and skills in the kitchen meant that I felt ready to work on chartered superyachts as a head chef. This is when I experienced that incredulous week with the family who only wanted a male chef because – as the captain relayed – it was just something they preferred.

Thankfully, the silver lining was that I managed to save up £35,000 tax-free through my years in this work. This meant that I could open up my own restaurant in Lyme Regis, near Exeter – initially as a pop-up, but then a permanent restaurant, which centred around wild foods that I personally foraged.

I decided to name it Robin Wylde because I have always loved wildlife and the robin in particular felt very British to me. Little did I know that this would lead to frequent casual sexism. When I’d take a break from the kitchen to go into the restaurant and meet some of the customers, they would regularly ask me, ‘when’s the chef coming out?’ They clearly assumed I wasn’t the chef or owner, even though it was an open kitchen and they could quite clearly see me in the kitchen cooking!.

Initially, I thought it was a joke. ‘We’ll roll him out later,’ I’d laugh it off, ‘don’t you worry.’ But then it kept happening, over and over – and initially I felt quite bad for unwittingly misleading them, gently correcting people as I explained the real reason behind the name.

Often, this would suffice, but sometimes I’d get infuriating questions back. ‘So it’s just you then? But how? Have you had financial support? An inheritance?’. Others would assume I had a business partner or backer to take care of the day to day. Or upon questioning and finding out that it was just me, they’d ask: ‘you must have a husband or partner behind the scenes helping you, no?’ I couldn’t believe it.

Of course, sexism exists in many different shapes and forms, including harassment and even assault. This should never happen in any workplace. To create a sense of solidarity, fellow chef and friend Sally Abé invited me to a WhatsApp group chat over a year ago with other female chefs and restaurant owners across the UK. It was a way of women supporting women within the industry, as well as sharing contacts, jobs, and information.

Most importantly, it’s a safe space and offers a real sense of community. Just this week, someone shared critic Giles Coren’s nine out of ten review of Ruth Hansom’s self-named restaurant, so everyone sent their congratulations to the news. But then one message changed everything.

This week, Sally sent a screenshot of an article in The Times, in which restaurateur Jason Atherton was asked whether women still experience sexism in British kitchens. He replied with his whole chest: ‘No, not really. I’ve not seen it. Any industry has its ups and downs.’.

I felt like it was inflammatory and completely biased, so I said so in the chat. Then fellow chef Dara Klein suggested collectively writing an open letter, which 70 of us ended up signing. The letter said that we’re ‘tired’ and ‘exhausted’ by an industry ‘so systematically flawed that we struggle to see ourselves within it,’ adding that ‘sexism has been and remains a pervasive issue’. I couldn’t have felt prouder to add my name to it and I believe Sally and Dara have done a brilliant job spearheading it all.