Book excerpt: Originally published in 1987. The perspectives, research methods and strategies adopted by researchers and teachers to investigate gender and education have been diverse and contradictory. This book provides an overview of developments and analyses the range of policy responses to the issues of sex inequality as well. Divided into six parts, the first indicates the range of feminist theories conceptualizing gender and provides context for the following parts on equality of opportunity; gender, power and schools; and studies on class, race and gender. The last parts explore how education and training provision in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries were shaped by assumptions about masculinity and femininity; and examine patterns of policy making on equal opportunities at teacher, local and national levels.