Redefining Leadership to Mobilize Gender Equity in the Global Culinary Industry

ABSTRACT Gender inequality remains deeply entrenched in the culinary industry, where masculinist hierarchies, exclusionary cultures, and heroic ideals of the master chef continue to marginalize women. Most contemporary initiatives to address these challenges promote women's advancement through the celebration of individual inspiring women chefs and leaders, but such approaches risk reproducing the very hierarchical and celebrity‐oriented power structures they seek to dismantle. Drawing on participant observation and 24 interviews from the 2022 Parabere Forum—an international network committed to gender equity in gastronomy—we analyze how participants talk about and attempt to redefine leadership. Our findings reveal a tension between conventional, individualizing narratives of charisma, inspiration, and self‐knowledge, and emerging feminist definitions grounded in solidarity, care, and collective agency. Through this discursive struggle, Parabere participants expose the inadequacy of dominant leadership frameworks, and haltingly articulate alternative relational understandings of organizing for change. We argue that feminist re‐significations of leadership hold transformative potential, yet remain constrained by the hegemonic language and logics of leadership itself. Our study contributes to critical and feminist leadership studies by highlighting how leadership discourse simultaneously reproduces and resists inequality within gender‐equity movements in the culinary world.