Why boys should learn to cook and girls to fight

In most Indian homes, cooking is still introduced to girls as duty, tradition, and destiny. Boys, by contrast, encounter the kitchen largely by accident—when they move out, live alone, or discover that hunger is a powerful teacher. This imbalance is so deeply normalised that we rarely question it. Yet teaching boys to cook may be one of the most powerful educational, social, and moral interventions we can make.

Cooking is not merely a domestic chore. It is applied science in its most delicious form. Every kitchen is a laboratory: heat transfer explains why bread browns and milk boils over; chemistry governs fermentation, emulsions, and caramelisation; biology determines how yeast rises, how bacteria transform curd, and why food spoils. Measurements sharpen mathematical thinking, timing teaches precision, and experimentation builds curiosity. When children cook, they do not just feed themselves—they learn how the world works.

If this is true, then cooking is not a “soft” skill. It is a core life skill, as fundamental as reading, writing, or basic arithmetic. And like these, it should belong to every child, regardless of gender.

In India, however, the kitchen remains one of the earliest classrooms where inequality is taught. Girls learn responsibility early: planning meals, managing budgets, and serving others before themselves. Boys often grow up assuming that meals appear magically, prepared by mothers, sisters, or wives. This silent division does more than assign tasks—it shapes attitudes. It teaches entitlement on one side and invisible labour on the other.

Getting boys into the kitchen and girls out on the streets sends a powerful message: no domain belongs to any one gender. Kitchens and streets, care and courage, nourishment and protection—these are human responsibilities, not gendered territories. When children repeatedly see boys cooking and girls practising self-defence, the boundaries that society has drawn for centuries begin to soften. Roles become fluid. Possibilities widen. What was once “unthinkable” slowly becomes normal.

This gender divide, however, was not always so rigid. In many early agrarian and hunter-gatherer societies, survival depended on shared labour. Historical records and anthropological studies show that women farmed, traded, and worked outside the home, while men cooked, cared for children, and participated in domestic life when needed. The sharp separation between the “public male world” and the “private female home” emerged much later.

It was during the rise of settled agriculture, property ownership, and especially the Industrial Revolution that this divide hardened. As men moved into factories and formal wage labour, women were increasingly confined to unpaid domestic work. The 19th-century ideal of the man as breadwinner and the woman as homemaker spread through colonial administration, education systems, and social reform movements—including in India. What began as an economic arrangement slowly transformed into a cultural rule, then into a moral expectation, and finally into a tradition.

Over generations, schools, textbooks, advertisements, films, and even toys reinforced this division. The result is not only unequal workloads at home but also unequal confidence in public life and unequal preparation for independence.

Philosopher Judith Butler’s theory of gender performativity helps explain why these divisions are so durable. Butler argues that gender is not something we are born with, but something we repeatedly do—through everyday acts, expectations, and social rewards and punishments. When girls are praised for cooking and boys are excused from it, and when boys are encouraged to roam freely while girls are cautioned to stay safe, society is not merely reflecting difference; it is actively producing it.

When boys learn to cook, something subtle but profound happens. They begin to understand effort: the standing, the chopping, the waiting, the cleaning, the thinking ahead. They experience what it takes to keep a household running, meal after meal, day after day. This knowledge builds respect—not the abstract kind preached in speeches, but the lived respect that comes from doing the work yourself.

Teaching boys to cook is therefore not only about food. It is about empathy. It is about partnership. It is about raising men who do not see domestic labour as women’s work but as human work.

And if boys must learn to cook, then girls must learn to fight.

By this, I do not mean violence, but strength—martial arts, self-defence, physical confidence, and the right to occupy space without fear. For generations, girls have been trained to be careful, quiet, and accommodating. Teaching them martial arts rewrites this lesson. It tells them: your body is strong, your presence is valid, and your safety matters.

Imagine a generation where boys can prepare meals with competence and pride, and girls can walk with confidence and physical courage. Imagine classrooms where cooking is taught alongside physics and self-defence alongside literature. This is not social engineering; it is social correction.

Education is meant to prepare children for life, not merely for exams. Life demands nourishment, cooperation, resilience, and mutual respect. A curriculum that teaches boys to cook and girls to fight does more than break stereotypes—it builds balanced human beings.

Perhaps then our homes will no longer run on invisible sacrifice, and our children will grow up knowing that dignity lies not in who serves, but in knowing how to care—for oneself and for others.

(The writer is founder-CEO, Parikrma Humanity Foundation)

(Disclaimer: The views expressed above are the author's own. They do not necessarily reflect the views of DH.)