‘I tell my two young daughters that they can be anything, do anything, achieve anything’

I bought our eldest daughter a t-shirt a little while ago. It has ‘STRONG’ all in caps, emblazoned across the chest. She’s four. She’s learning to read, so she sounds out the letters she knows: “Suh, tuh, ruh…”

She asks me to confirm what it says. “Strong,” I say. “Strong,” she repeats and does a half gorilla, half Victorian strongman pose, grinning because she’s strong; strong enough to monkey-bar her way across one third of the climbing frame in the park. My little big girl. Strong-willed. Strong-hearted. Stronger than her comprehension of the word.

I am the mother of girls. First one, then two.

We choose not to find out the sex of our unborn babies and – overwhelmed by birth – it wasn’t until a dress arrived in the post for our first born that I realised this: the enormity of raising a girl encapsulated in a tiny embroidered denim pinafore.

So I start little. I teach these two women of the future that girls can wear blue; love diggers and tigers; that women can be firefighters and prime ministers; that women and girls can also be strong.

In many ways I feel like I’m just repeating the words that my own feminist mum told me 20-plus years ago. In many ways I feel like nothing’s changed. We are still fighting for the basics: equal pay for equal work; no glass ceilings; all professions open to women as well as men.

I tell our girls that they can be anything, do anything, achieve anything if they set their minds to it. I do believe this, although I know they will need more than just a t-shirt with the word ‘STRONG’ on it to break into some professions.

I used to work in Parliament and political journalism before that, so I got very used to being one of few females. In the restaurant industry, women are massively underrepresented in the kitchen.

Michelin posted a tweet recently, remarking on an all-women kitchen team coping well with the demands of the restaurant. It was swiftly deleted. I don’t think they meant it to sound quite so patronising but when we’re still expected to express surprise at female chefs! – cooking! – in a professional kitchen! – doing okay! – then we know there is a way to go.

It heartens me that our eldest daughter likes the idea of being a chef. Not, more stereotypically for a female, a waitress.

I’m encouraged that the industry has great female role models in it like Angela Hartnett, Monica Galetti, Clare Smyth and more recently Elizabeth Allen and Marianne Lumb. We had a brilliant young female chef work with us at Box-E in the summer. She’s now at River Cafe under another female industry stalwart, Ruth Rogers.

Cheffing is changing. The hours will always be unsociable, but an increasing number of restaurant kitchens are no longer the gratuitously macho environs of a previous generation.

Jay Rayner wrote an interesting piece in The Observer in November on the mental health of chefs, after which followed an online story trail of industry professionals sharing that they are not always okay. It’s perhaps this admission that chefs don’t have to be so bloody strong all the time that could add some equality to the industry.

Now, can I borrow a Sharpie to scribble a ‘sometimes’ before that ‘STRONG’?

Tessa Lidstone is a mum of two girls; an uncontrollable liker of Bristol docks photos on Instagram; and not the chef at BOX-E.

Read more: Tessa Lidstone: ‘Let’s celebrate Bristol’s varied and vibrant food scene’