Indian kitchens are changing. But are women still doing most of the work?

The kitchen is often romanticised as a space of love and bonding, essential for the family. But in Indian kitchens, more often than not, women do more than men. From decision-making to the physical tasks, the burden falls on them. In urban India, men are entering the kitchen, but is the system still biased? Do they get more luxuries? We speak to men and women across the country to find out.

A once-a-month affair in my home in baking a vanilla cake. A slow wait for the oven to heat up, before the warm sweet fragrance fills the room. But the 20 minutes that the cake takes to rise are followed by an hour of cleaning the kitchen and the kids. Then comes the homework runs, tantrums, and then, finally, shut-eye. I realised all of it was being done solely by the mother.

According to the findings of the National Family Health Survey-5 2019-21, approximately 84% of married women decide what is cooked daily. It adds that 14% of both men and women support physical violence if the wife “does not cook properly”. The World Health Organisation noted in 2023 that over a fifth of all women in India have been subjected to intimate partner violence. The data on the why is negligible.

Do men cook?

We asked people about their view on cooking, kitchens, and labour.

Men who now live alone, or not with their parents, cook more often and are more involved in the kitchen. "I have been helping my mom in the kitchen since my teens, so I pretty much know where everything is. I also cook for myself every evening, so it is just muscle memory at this point,” says Dildar Talukdar, a 20-year-old college student from Delhi. 

“When I was young, I would only know about the basic spices, but when I started living alone I developed more knowledge about the kitchen,” says Sudeep Ghosla, a 40-year-old corporate professional.

Division of labour

“Since I live with my partner, juggling between college and a job, we often cook alternately. There are times when she cooks more than I and vice versa,” says Harshit Sharma (name changed), a 24-year-old Puducherry student.

However, his partner, 23-year-old Swati Khuranna (name changed), feels differently: “I cook most days of the week. Mostly around weekends, it is him. Sometimes, I do it just because I do not want to eat from outside, as it can make my PCOS worse. My partner does not have such concerns. It was selective learning that he learnt to make dal tadka exactly like me, but never once made aloo parathas. Simply because “he can’t knead the dough and roll it. Why should only I be doing it?”

Changing mores?

A report published by India’s Ministry of Statistics and Programme Implementation in 2024 noted that the time spent by women doing unpaid labour has reduced. “Females spent 140 minutes in a day in caring for their household members compared to 74 minutes spent by male members of the household,” said the report.

“Cooking has always been seen as part of her (his mother’s) core role. In fact she also takes a lot of pride in it,” says Sudeep. He adds that “It was my father’s responsibility to make morning tea. My nanaji (grandfather) used to do the same for my grandmother. But largely, in terms of expectation of cooking, the role is assigned to females.” 

Praise as a commodity

The final masala in most dishes is the praise that one gets. 

Dildar calls his mother the “backbone of the family.” He adds that “I try recipes I see on Instagram and YouTube, but those don’t always turn out well. Still, I do get praised for cooking, my mom even brags about it in front of relatives, saying I’m her right hand.”

Is admiration doled out according to one’s gender? Sudeep doesn’t agree. It is not gender but expectations. 

“Sometimes even if I prepare something as basic as tea for guests, they will tell my mother that her son is the best. I’ve seen that happening for my sister-in-law too. She isn’t interested in cooking and isn’t the one who cooks often, but whenever she does, praise for her is generally more than what one would get for regular cooking. Praise is not always gendered but based on expectations.” 

“I am not praised for cooking. Because it is something I am obliged to do. If my brother cooks, it is “dekho tumhaara bhai cook kar rha hai” (See! Your brother is cooking!). It has given me so much trauma,” says Rio, a 25-year-old gender-fluid, trans-masculine person from Delhi.

Chef vs cook

All these norms change when one enters the professional kitchen. Being a chef is a glamorous profession. A cook? Not so much.

“A chef is a title you earn after moving up the ranks. I think a chef is like the boss of the kitchen who can manage a whole team by himself. A “cook”, is someone who prepares food but may not have that level of authority. I would say all chefs are cooks but not all cooks are chefs,” says Dildar.

“I remember a male line cook kept addressing me as baideo (sister) in Assamese, while seamlessly calling every male leader in the room ‘chef.’ You could practically feel them thinking, ‘How is this young woman going to tell us what to do?’ By the end of that pop-up service, those exact cooks actually came up to thank me for what they had learned,” says Farha Naaz, founder and chef, Mamazaki, a food consultancy and pop-up restaurant.

She adds, “In my own family, my mother is the one who handles the cooking. It is sad, but it is the truth. She, like so many women of her generation, has been deeply conditioned to believe that serving the family through the unpaid labour of cooking is just ‘her role.’

“When it is unpaid, it is viewed as a woman’s duty. But the moment cooking becomes a paid, high status profession with a uniform and a paycheck, it suddenly flips and you find a world dominated by male chefs,” states Farha.

The invisible third person

In Indian kitchens there is also a third person whose roles often goes unacknowledged. A person who does not inhabit the home, hotel, or kitchen but cooks, works, and cleans for it.

The International Labour Organisation notes that there are approximately 20-80 million people in India employed as domestic workers or “maids” and 80% of them are women. Some earn as low as ₹1,000 per household and work for 12 hours every day. It characterises the sector as a site of “triple exploitation” based on gender, class, and caste, resulting in “slavery-like conditions.” 

While social norms may be changing, the role of gender in urban kitchens is still skewed.