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In Sweden, several trends intersect: the gig economy is growing rapidly; immigrants find it challenging to find work; and integration policies increasingly focus on the role of the first job as a benchmark for integration. This empirical study inserts an intersectional perspective into the exploration of the gig economy by examining immigrant women's daily working experiences within a transactional gig platform, "Yummy". This food app links home-based chefs to public consumers through online ordering systems. Through in-depth interviews with chefs, the app management team and participatory observations at firm training sessions and food festivals, we explore the complexity of gendered and racialized precarious work from inside the gig economy to consider daily gig life from a feminist economics perspective. The study shows the gig economy does provide entrepreneurial opportunities for new immigrants with these being based on gendered norms. We demonstrate how gendered narratives of idle capacities and women's work in the home and family spheres are marketized and transformed through the platform. Our study widens the scope of understanding the gig economy by positioning gig work as part of broader social relations between a company, the workers and gender norms.

Friendship has potential as a key coping and self-care strategy among early career researchers (ECR's) and has been shown to be crucial to overall wellbeing and sense of belonging, but its importance as a response to career pressures is not well studied. For ECR's, friendships within the university are situated in a specific structural and institutional context, and formigrant women, this includes an additional aspect of gendered complexity. At the same time friendships may prove difficult as heightened neoliberal metrics emphasize competition forfunding, positions and teaching requirements. Using autoethnographic intra-reflections on the authors' own friendship, bridging human geography and physical geography, this paper examines friendship of two ECR women from a homosocial perspective where institutional hierarchies and structures may be somewhat equalized. Drawing on the exploration of the authors' friendship during their PhD years and into their post-doc positions, we reflect on the importance of friendship as an act of support, self-care and resistance. We argue for heightening importance for examining the way friendship creates safe social spaces and offer new insights into the importance of friendships in career paths. Friendship in the neoliberal academy has transformative potential for creating a culture of well-being in geography.

This special issue is the result of our longstanding interest in the conditions and experiences that characterize early career women's scholarly standing in academia. In 2016, we co-authored on the trajectories of recent doctors in Geography in Sweden (Caretta and Webster 2016). We wondered whether the situation was similar elsewhere and wanted to explore more deeply questions of: What are the key obstacles facing women in geography institutions today? How have women learned to bypass or navigate these hindrances? How is resistance incorporated in daily work-place practices? And for those who have overcome or continue to resist and encounter these challenges, what were the main factors in their successes, and which strategies helped as they navigated their career paths? Finally, we wanted to explore what approaches are being used by early career women geographers today to avoid falling into the trap of the 'leaky pipe' for those wishing to remain in academia as their chosen career path?To delve deeper and unravel the diversity of experiences of women in academia we organized a session at the 2017 Nordic Geographer's Meeting in Stockholm, Sweden called 'Women in Geography: is there a disciplinary glass ceiling?' The response to the session was overwhelming with at least 40 academics present; the room was at capacity for both the paper session and the group discussion that followed. The level of interest and the vigour of feelings regarding people's experiencesranging from Sweden to New Zealand, to Argentina, Iran and the USAled us to believe that there is an urgent need to unveil and discuss these questions. Following the session, we issued a call for practice-oriented contributionsfrom both the human and physical sides of geographyto outline and critically discuss grassroots organizing, mentoring approaches, foreign female scholars' inclusion strategies, networking tactics and practical solutions implemented at the department level by female early-career geographers to foster their permanence and advancement in academia, we received numerous abstracts. Eventually, with the collaboration of the journal editors and peer review processes, we came to the five articles that comprise this special issue. In the following sections of this introduction, we cover the themes and contributions that this special issue makes to the discipline of geography and we discuss the range of pathways to women's career advancement presented by the authors. The neoliberal academic panoramaPublications focusing on the gendered ramifications of the neoliberal university are ever growing (e.g. Thwaites and Pressland 2016;Bosanquet 2017;Taylor and Lahad 2018). Research shows small disciplines such as geography tend to rely on homosocial practices; making the career progress of men relatively smoother than that of women (Crang 2003; Mott and Roberts 2014; Leslie et al.