The macho kitchen culture that @gemiwing mentioned is, I think, the fault of the French. The classic French restaurant kitchen runs on the military model, because that kind of discipline, rigor, and unquestioning submission to authority is a pretty good system for getting a large crew to perform a complex task as a unified organism.
Until the French recently did away with obligatory military service for males, French kitchens were staffed mostly by guys straight out of the army. The military atmosphere of the kitchen was just a natural follow-through of the way they had been living for the previous two years. Since it would have been unthinkable to the French that women could fit into this scheme, women have been largely side-lined in the French culinary establishment, and so have rarely received opportunities for advancement.
Because of the indisputable success of this model in turning out great cuisine, and also because chefs trained in this system went around the world and replicated this model wherever they went., it became the default way of organizing a kitchen. Even the terminology in the restaurant kitchen is martial: Orders are “fired”, the rush of the dinner service is the “coup de feux” (coming under fire), and the kitchen staff is a “brigade”.
Ironically, there is a parallel tradition of the great “mothers” of Lyonnaise cooking. These were a handful of women who ran small restaurants around Lyon in the early to mid 1900s. They have been virtually deified in culinary lore as paragons of French home-style cuisine. But their model was not primarily a commercial one; it was just the great “mother” with a few helpers back in the kitchen sending out her miracles to her cult following in the tiny dining room. Religion, not the military, would have been the applicable metaphor.