Cultural Capital and Gender

The concept of cultural capital is one of the central pillars of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu's theoretical formulation of cultural and social reproduction. Cultural capital is a usable resource or form of power. Its possession or lack thereof influences whether an individual will be able to gain advantage in a given field such as education or the labor market.

The ability to possess cultural capital and to convert it eventually into economic and symbolic capital depends on the intersection of social class and gender. Bourdieu specified several forms of capital that contribute to the reproduction of the structure of power relationships and symbolic relationships by social class and gender. Of these forms of capital—which include economic, social, and symbolic—cultural capital has received considerable attention. In his ...