All across Britain, the whiff of charred, low-quality sausage meat is hanging in the summer haze. And with it, floating almost indistinguishably in the grease-filled air across the garden fences, is blokey barbecue chat. If there is anything less compelling but more oppressively penetrating than the conversation of four suburban men discussing how to light and then operate a barbecue, I have yet to hear it.

Is there anyone who doesn't know how to employ a match, a matchbox, a firelighter and some charcoal? Sales of charcoal bags may have risen sixfold on last year's rain-sodden summer, but it's hardly as if you need years of experience. You stack the coals in a small, chimney-like arrangement, lace it equally with bits of firelighter, which you light, then you walk away and pour a drink. That's it.

How best to position the meat on the grill? Er, how about arranging it, equally spaced, above the embers? And how, then, to cook it? Well, simply prevent it from burning by moving it around. If it's burning, take it off. That's it.

No, what really drains the joy from the summer breeze is the assumption, and the practice, that this is Man's Work. All over the UK, probably the world, the barbecue is now one of the last places where even normal blokes become sexist. What we have here is some kind of psychic counterpart to the Paleo diet, a biologically deterministic blizzard of bullshit that sees women as salad-spinners and men as the keepers of the grill, the tenders of the flame, lords and masters of the meat. It's a sausage-fest out there, and it's getting ugly.

Where else can women be told so implicitly and explicitly that this is not their place? OK, running a hedge fund, running a bank or presenting a radio programme, just off the top of my head. But in the domestic sphere in 2013, don't we share stuff such as childcare, cooking and cleaning? This grilled-food gender split is ubiquitous, odd and unacknowledged.

Women, try this trick. At the next barbie you attend, grab the tongs and start cooking, and watch the eyebrows rise and the conversation level drop. Women at most barbecues in the UK, even those in liberal homes – possibly a lot like yours – are relegated to the chopping board. Grilled meat and steaks, the wider culture tells us, aren't for girls.

No, the mythology of meat is well marbled with machismo. But, as several thousand years have passed since men had to kill our protein, make a fire, cook it and eat it, why is barbecuing seen as something women don't or can't – or, more accurately, shouldn't – do? How – and why – do men continue to claim this sacred fire-space as a male-owned sanctuary where women are not permitted?

Here's a secret. Barbecuing's not even hard. Cooking a chicken breast over embers does not require some sort of mystical, innate caveman-like genius. Really. And another secret: the reason we have so many awful eating experiences at barbecues isn't that it's so difficult. It's because many men don't – won't – do any other kind of cooking.

These blokes don't know about temperature, don't think about distance from the heat source and never consider the fat or water content of different foods and the impact of that on cooking times. And even when they do know, don't we know it? The slightest whiff of male cooking expertise becomes elevated somehow into dreams of restaurant-opening (sublimated into expensive knife choices, novelty aprons and that extra ring on the kitchen hob).

So no, it's time to call time on the blokey barbecue huddle, that sizzling scrum, this grim last resort of acceptable sexism. Women of the world, unite. Burn their aprons, light the flames and cook. And men, drop the Bear Grylls pretensions and make a bloody salad.