Dr Felicity Cooke

Felicity Cooke is an independent equality practitioner. She began her career in secretarial work and retailing in the early 1970s, experiencing at first hand the gender pay gap and the ‘sticky floor’. She graduated as a mature student from Thames Polytechnic (now University of Greenwich) in 1978. After achieving an MA in Social History at the University of Essex she moved to Cambridge where she completed a postgraduate teaching qualification and a PhD. Her doctoral research was on the development of girls’ schooling, its social context, and its gender-differentiated curriculum. She subsequently held a post-doctoral research fellowship at the University of Cambridge for four years. During that time she published articles, book chapters and two books in her married name of Felicity Hunt.

In 1988 Felicity moved to the university’s central administration where she soon assumed a responsibility for equality issues which she maintained alongside a personnel role for a number of years until the university created a dedicated post for Equality and Diversity to which she was appointed in 2003. In 2007 she was recruited as Head of Equality and Diversity at the University of Oxford, where she was responsible for the strategic and operational development of equality. There her small team was responsible for policy development and implementation for equality and diversity, for staff and student disability services and for childcare. She retired from Oxford in 2010 and is now an independent equality practitioner.

She is a former Chair and steering group member of the Higher Education Equal Opportunities Network (HEEON). In the wider community Felicity has chaired a Care and Education Equality Task Group for Cambridgeshire County Council, has been a Vice-chair of School Governors and a Church Warden.