Welcome to Ann Oakley’s website. Here you can find out more about Ann Oakley’s work and life, and get details of her books and other publications. There are also links to videos and interviews in which she talks about her work.
Ann Oakley is a writer and a sociologist. She has written both novels and many non-fiction books. Most of her life has been spent working in university research. She is best known for her work on sex and gender, housework, childbirth and feminist social science. Her more recent interests have focused on evidence-based public policy and methodologies of research and evaluation, on the sociology of the body and on biography as a form of life-writing.
She is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at the Institute of Education, University of London, and until January 2005 was Director of the Social Science Research Unit (SSRU) at the Institute, where she also headed the Evidence for Policy and Practice Information and Coordinating (EPPI-Centre). She holds honorary appointments as a Professor in Social Sciences at the Institute of Child Health in London and as a Fellow at Somerville College in Oxford. In 2011 the British Sociological Association gave her one of their first Lifetime Achievement Awards for her extraordinary contribution to the history of the development of sociology in Britain. She now works on research part-time, and spends the rest of it writing, wondering what to do about her archives, developing environmentally friendly cleaning products, and looking after her grandchildren.