When men get to be creative empire-builders and women stewards of tradition, a chicken-egg problem emerges.

Disrupting the kitchen boys’ club, which fosters these toxic levels of harassment, requires hiring and retaining more women chefs. But even when those women arrive, as the experiences outlined in the Post and elsewhere suggest, they face a blistering hostility. Why are restaurant kitchens, especially high-end kitchens, so persistently male, and why are they so inhospitable to women who seek to join their ranks? Behind the history of all-male brigades is an effort to distance restaurant cooking from home cooking, the result of a phenomenon some sociologists call “precarious masculinity.”