Equal Opportunities: rhetoric or action

During the last 10 years many higher educational institutions following the ILEA initiatives and equal opportunity (EO) legislation of the mid 1970's, announced they were equal opportunity institutions. This paper questions whether such pronouncements and declared policies have had any more than a marginal effect on the power structures and day to day running of institutions. It proposes that a positive action programme should be adopted to increase the proportion of women lecturers in higher education. More idealistically still, it discusses a transformational model of EO which would challenge the public private divide and democratise institutions. It draws on the experience of equal opportunities initiatives in a number of higher educational institutions and emphasises the importance of understanding resistance to change.