Feminism and Male Scholarship: The Treatment of Women and Gender in Social Policy Texts

This paper reports the results of a study of sixty selected British and Australian academic texts on social policy and the welfare state. The purpose of the study was to investigate changes over the last fifteen years in the ways in which the position of women and gender‐related issues are dealt with by feminist and non‐feminist writers in the social policy field. Differences in the levels of feminist awareness in the various texts are found to be associated with the sex of the author, the type of book, the date of publication, the country of publication, and the socio‐political and intellectual context in which the various texts were produced.