BUFFALO, N.Y. — The irony in the phrase "women belong in the kitchen" comes with the fact that, according to Data USA, in 2022 less than 23% of chefs and head cooks were female.

Emily Lonigan, director of community education at the Niagara Falls Culinary Institute, has always enjoyed being in the kitchen.

“I’ve wanted to be a chef since I was a little girl. I remember making concoctions and things like that in my mom’s kitchen,” she said. “I loved making a crazy Alfredo. I loved coming up with Alfredos when I was little.”

Even for Lonigan, the kitchen didn’t always look the way it does now. 

She says she was always the only girl in the kitchen when she was starting out, which she says comes with both its pros and its cons.

“There’s a big dichotomy there," Lonigan said. "So the way we consider culinary hierarchy and things like that, that comes from the military a lot of the time. And so that’s when restaurants started getting going and there weren’t a lot of women in those kitchens."

Although that gap has gotten better, there are still fundamental obstacles women face when entering the culinary field.

“Being a restaurant chef is a hard life," she said. "It’s very, very hard to be away for every Mother’s Day and every Christmas and every Easter and things like that. So, a lot of the times there’s not that support in place for women to be able to continue in their careers in a restaurant.”

It makes Lonigan's job not just about being in the kitchen.

“I really love to bring up girls that I think are exceptional here and really show them what their leadership styles could be and what they possibly could be," she said.

And it shows how she, and others, belong there.

“Women belong in every kitchen," Lonigan said. "Women are in every kitchen, whether or not they’re in the front or on the cookbooks.”