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This study aims to explore the role of Italian women in society and at work during the pandemic. Specifically, it analyses Italian women’s positioning in the work context and in the leadership coordinating the national response to the Covid-19 pandemic.

Inspired by feminist thinking addressing recent debates on women’s livelihoods at the time of Covid-19, the study focusses on Italy’s gendered response to the pandemic and its exclusion of women from decision-making roles in the management of the pandemic and the subsequent post-pandemic socio-economic recovery. Drawing on recent studies and media contributions it provides a thought-provoking analysis embedded in the country’s history and culture.

Despite their high involvement in the daily management of the pandemic, as key workers and family carers, Italian women’s voices have remained unheard and concealed, even in face of movements towards their recognition (#DateciVoce). This study trace this lack of inclusion in the sedimented gender inequalities characteristic of the Italian socio-political-economic context, combined with the effects of Covid-19. This study suggest that the country needs a long overdue and radical shift towards the centring of women and their contributions in work and society.

The study offers insights into the gendered pandemic response of one of the first and worst affected countries. It specifically addresses women’s continued marginalisation in the political arena vis-à-vis their key role in supporting the country’s economy.

Recent research has captured the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic in widening gender inequalities, by highlighting that academic women have been disproportionately affected. During the COVID-19 pandemic, women assumed most of the care labour at home, whilst working at normal patterns, leaving them unable to perform as normal. This is very concerning because of the short and long-term detrimental consequences this will have on women’s well-being and their academic careers. This article aims to stimulate a change in the current understandings of academic work by pointing towards alternative – and more inclusive – ways of working in academia.

The two authors engage with autoethnography and draw on their own personal experience of becoming breastfeeding academic mothers throughout the COVID-19 pandemic.

To understand the positioning of contemporary academic mothers, this study draws on insights from both cultural studies and organisation studies on the emergence of discursive formations about gender, that is “postfeminist sensibility”. Guided by autoethnographic accounts of academic motherhood, this study reveals that today academia creates an individualised, neutral (disembodied), output-focused and control-oriented understanding of academic work.

This paper adds to the conversation of academic motherhood and the impact of the pandemic on working mothers. The study theoretically contributes with the lens of “motherhood” in grasping what academic work can become. It shows the power of motherhood in opening up an alternative way of conceptualising academic work, centred on embodied care and appreciative of the non-linearity and messiness of life.