This study explored the experiences of women who are academics working in UK higher education (HE), using a feminist approach and narrative methods and analysis. The purpose of the research was to explore the experiences of women, with a view to highlighting potential shared experiences, informing the policies of universities and adding to the…

This essay proposes a feminist research agenda on the history of women teachers' experiences in the latter stages of their career and life. Drawing on extant histories of white women elementary and secondary teachers in the largely Anglo, western world (centred on the United States, Canada, England, Australia and Ireland), the essay explores the…

This paper examines the impacts of co-residence (admitting women to men's colleges and men to women's colleges) at the University of Oxford beginning in the 1970s. Co-residence increased the representation of women undergraduates at Oxford to near parity with men; the representation of women in academic positions rose but not as substantially as…

This paper offers an autoethnographic account of my first academic year as a Human Geography lecturer at a 'new' public university in the North West of England. This research is timely and much needed, since teaching at universities in England has recently come under increasing scrutiny. The Teaching Excellence Framework is a new scheme, which…

This article explores factors inhibiting or encouraging women and men from Black and Minority ethnic (BME) and also white backgrounds to pursue leadership positions in English schools. Data are drawn from a commissioned evaluation of three National College of Teaching and Leadership (NCTL)-funded courses which investigated the extent to which the…

Using a doctoral examination question as a starting point, this paper explores the specific race-gendered challenges Black women academics face when doing research on race. I argue that the stereotypical, racialised controlling images regarding Black women are not exclusive to African-American women and this has led some, in education, to draw on…

This paper presents a consideration of the experiences and perspectives of four female academics who are the first graduates of a new Professional Doctorate programme at a university in the South West of England. The authors position themselves simultaneously as researchers and research participants, engaging in collaborative autoethnography to…

This article focuses on two women educator activists based in Birmingham, UK, in the first decades of the twentieth century: Geraldine Southall Cadbury (1865-1941) and Margaret Ann Backhouse (1887-1977). Motivated by a common belief in education as a force for progressive social change Cadbury and Backhouse were both Quakers who shared similar…

An examination of recent gender scholarship demonstrates how a gendered lens has contributed to the debates on society, the state and education. Using local and international examples mostly from about 1880 to 1930, this paper will investigate how gendered perceptions coloured the provision of education, what we mean by "the state" and…

This research examines the school-based training experiences of a female trainee teacher of physical education (Emily) at a grammar school for boys. The purpose of this research is to consider whether the sex of the trainee teacher either inhibits or advances the professional development of trainee teachers in an opposite-sex school. Emily…

A sample of 221 female primary school teachers in Anglican state-maintained schools in England and Wales completed the Francis Psychological Type Scales (FPTS). The data demonstrated clear preferences for Extraversion (E) over Introversion (I), for Sensing (S) over Intuition (N), for Feeling (F) over Thinking (T) and for Judging (J) over…

This book was written across a period of intense turmoil and change in higher education in Australia and England. The authors are deeply unsettled by these changes and wish to open up the discussion about what it means to be an academic and engage in academic work in the 21st century. Accordingly, each of the authors has nominated a theme or lens…

This article is concerned to respond to recent UK governments' attitudes to teachers, who are predominantly women, and who are denied a voice and sense of professionalism. It looks to the role of teacher research in school decision-making, including school improvement, historically in England, which set a pioneering example in years before the…

One of the early forms of intercultural education was the upbringing of children by foreign governesses, who appeared on the European labour market during the seventeenth century. In Germany families of the gentry and the wealthy middle-classes began, since the eighteenth century, to copy the upbringing of princely children. They too wanted their…

The present paper argues that university quality assurance (QA) promotes a masculinist culture leading to systemic discrimination against female academics. The analysis relates to the question of what it is about academic life that results in persistent gender inequality. Based on an ethnographically informed comparative study, textual/discourse…