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Joshua Engel Enthusiastic eater and adventurous cook
A big chunk of it is historical. Escoffier’s brigade de cuisine was the guide for commercial restaurants for many years. The chefs (as in, the guy who runs the kitchen) are businessmen as much as cooks, and that kind of business was an almost exclusively male profession. It was implemented in a very sexist fashion: most of the line cooks were also men. It was men working for a living; female cooks cooked at home.

Women were gradually admitted to the brigade system, but it took time for them to work their way up to chef. The Michelin Guide and other systems that makes chefs famous therefore focused heavily on men. Even today celebrity cheffing focuses heavily on men, though that’s a status accorded more to ego and self-promotion than quality.

I concur with Todd Gardiner that women have been highly respected as among the world’s best cooks for many decades. Cookbooks in their modern incarnation were long dominated by women. (Earlier versions, before the 18th century, were largely written by men, even when they were written for women, under earlier incarnations of what became the brigade system.)

The first “celebrity chef” was arguably Julia Child. She came not from the restaurant system but from home cooking, adapting French cuisines to the American table. She was trained in the French professional culinary tradition, inherited from Escoffier, which gradually began to admit women in the 1940s.

Celebrity chefs are still made primarily by TV, where it’s their personality rather than the insight or skill of their cooking that makes them famous. There are about as many men as women, roughly speaking. The women still seem to represent largely the home tradition and the men the restaurant system, but there are plenty of counterexamples. – quora.com