Producing the Right Sort of Chap: the senior Civil Service as an exclusionary culture

In: Policy & politics, Band 22, Heft 3, S. 211-222

Abstract

This paper draws on a series of detailed, qualitative interviews with senior British civil servants to explore the development and implementation of equal opportunity policy in the Civil Service. Introduced in the early 1980s, it was designed to reduce the importance attached to masculine traits in the recruitment and promotion of staff, including those on the fast track to senior positions. The paper concludes by arguing that career progression still depends heavily on giving the impression of being 'the right sort of chap', which itself embodies a set of attributes which happen to be more prevalent in men than in women.