Bourdieu overlooked the possibility of gendered capital. A number of feminists have taken issue with this and have claimed that uniquely feminine forms of capital exist.This article takes up this proposal and explores two forms of gendered capital — feminine capital and female capital. This article explores these forms of capital operating as cultural resources within the field of paid caring work. In the caring field `femininity' and `femaleness' appear to be resources women draw upon, but gendered currency operates within limits.This article examines women's perceptions of advantage arising from ownership of feminine dispositions or the experience of feminine selves; the gains that might be made from working with and for similar female others; and the parameters to female privilege. Building on feminist Bourdieusian scholarship, this article argues that Bourdieu's concept of capital is particularly useful for understanding contemporary gender practices and the relationship between gender and class.

Australia features a highly segregated workforce where certain occupational spaces appear to privilege particular gendered dispositions. While research on gender and work highlights the association between occupational segregation and gender inequality, conventional explanations of why men and women continue to be concentrated in different occupations, and in different roles within occupations, can be considered problematic. This article argues that we may be able to achieve a deeper understanding of gendered occupational segregation than previous explanations have offered by appropriating Bourdieu's concept, 'capital'. Drawing on qualitative research with Australian workers we explore men's 'gender capital experiences' within masculinised and feminised occupations. The article discusses how male, masculine and feminine embodiments can operate as capitals which may be accumulated and transacted, perpetuating horizontal gender segregation in the workforce but also vertical segregation within occupations. In doing so, we expand the work of feminist Bourdieusian scholars who have reworked Bourdieu's approach so that gender, as well as class, may be understood as a central form of stratification in the social order.

The Covid-19 pandemic presents the profoundest public health and economic crisis of our times. The seemingly impossible has happened: borders have closed, nations have locked down, and individuals have socially isolated for the collective good. We find ourselves involved in an unprecedented social experiment. This living laboratory is ripe for sociological analysis. In this introductory article, we provide a broad sociology of Covid-19, paying attention to the production of pandemics and the creation of vulnerabilities. We acknowledge the dystopian elements of the pandemic: it will provide opportunities for ‘disaster capitalists’ to profit, it will enhance certain forms of surveillance, and it will impact some constituencies far more negatively than others (here we pay particular attention to the pandemic’s gendered consequences). Yet there are also resources for hope. We are witnessing altruistic acts the world over, as mutual aid groups form to render assistance where needed. Notions of welfare reform, progressive taxation, nationalisation and universal basic income now seem more politically palatable. Some even predict the imminent demise of neoliberalism. While this may be too hopeful, reactions to the pandemic thus far do at least demonstrate that other ways of living are within our grasp. As Arundhati Roy has said: the virus is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next.

Women remain underrepresented in senior positions within universities and report barriers to career progression. Drawing on the concepts of Foucault and Bourdieu, with an emphasis on technologies of the self, this article aims to understand mothers’ academic career experiences. Interviews were conducted with 35 non‐STEMM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine) academics in Scotland and Australia, to reveal the gender dimensions of parents’ academic careers, in neoliberal university contexts. The data suggest that there are tensions between organizational policies, such as maternity leave and flexible work, and the contemporary demands of academic labour. New managerial discourses which individualize and make use of moral systems are particularly effectual in driving women to take up marketized research activity and compromise leave entitlements.

A generation of women have sustained careers in senior management. We use Bourdieu's concepts of field together with contemporary feminist interpretations of embodied cultural capital to analyse a group of such women's narratives of their own managerial experiences. We extend feminist analyses of gender capital and argue it may be an important cultural resource by which women develop and sustain their careers in senior management. Drawing on selected findings of an empirical study of senior managers in Australian organizations and a recent theoretical analysis of women's narratives using Bourdieu and feminist interpretations of Bourdieu, we examine whether women wield gender capital in the management field. We propose that gender capital, as articulated in contemporary feminist theory, provides an unexplored but potentially powerful explanatory mechanism for furthering our understanding of the complex and different ways the presence of women in senior managerial roles may shape contemporary management discourses and practices.