When Laura Meyer won the World Pizza Championship for pan pizza in Parma, Italy, the Italian judges called her the male word for champion. Despite her first-place victory, she was the only winner who didn’t get a trophy that day. Hers was mailed a year later. “They basically refused to acknowledge that a woman had won,” she said, recently recalling the snub. She was the first woman to win — and the first American. That was in 2013. The next year, competing as the only woman, she won best nontraditional pizza at the International Pizza Expo in Las Vegas with a triple-infused rosemary dough (rosemary water, rosemary-infused olive oil and chopped rosemary). And last month, Meyer’s simple pepperoni pizza won the first American Pizza division of the Caputo Cup, a pizza-making contest in Naples, Italy, the birthplace of modern pizza, and placed third for traditional pizza at a September contest in Atlantic City, N.J. Meyer is a pizza powerhouse, any way you slice it. But to many in and out of her profession, she’s just a woman. “Women have always been part of pizza, but it’s very macho. It has a macho problem, like most of the job world,” she said from Tony’s, the prestigious pizza parlor in San Francisco where she is owner Tony Gemignani’s right hand and runs its International School of Pizza. “Guys stare at my chest. They think I don’t see. Guess what? I see. My very first day of work, a coworker just watched me do my job like I was a show, entertainment, an ooh-la-la toy. So many people think I could only be as high up as I am because I’m Tony’s wife. I’m not his wife. I’m his talent.” Broadly and frequently, male chauvinism is baked into pizza at every step: from the presumption that pizza deliverers are men to the dearth of female pizza-makers statues. “Pizza making is a profession where men tell you that you belong in a kitchen, but not as a career,” Meyer said. “They celebrate grandma slices but not the actual grandmas.”