ABSTRACT
Expansion of the UK higher education system in the 1960s, following the Robbins Report (1963), fostered a growth in the number of younger women (18–21 year olds) entering higher education. Since the 1980s, the introduction of widening participation and lifelong learning policies has enabled more adult women (over 21 years) to participate at undergraduate level. Universities are no longer, as Quinn (2003: 129) points out, ‘a male space, as feminists have tended to do, but need to explore it as a place of women which is still imbued with masculinist notions’.
