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New attitudes

Line drawing in profile of woman at a lectern holding a book before her to readActress Sybil Thorndike reading at King's 1922The suffragette movement helped foster new attitudes to women in the work place and education.

This was reflected at King's with debates on the relationship between men and women students and some criticism of women's residential colleges and encouragement of a mixed environment cultivating openness between the sexes.

Unfavourable comparisons were drawn between the 'fluffy type of girl and the academic type' with the women's colleges being criticised for producing unsociable eggheads.

The prosperity of the late 1950s and 1960s witnessed a greater willingness by women to participate in the student radicalism that emerged at the time.

The proportion of women students has also risen steadily and now stands at about 60% of the undergraduate population according to the 2013 Annual Report.

The rather limited career prospects of earlier years have been transformed.

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