Meet Laura Bates:
Laura Bates is the founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of hundreds of thousands of testimonies of gender inequality, which has expanded to branches in over 20 countries worldwide.
Laura works closely with politicians, businesses, schools, universities and police forces. Her work alongside the British Transport Police on Project Guardian, which involved using Everyday Sexism Project testimonies to retrain 2000 officers, resulted in a 30% rise in reporting of sexual offences on the transport network. Her campaign work alongside other activists has led Facebook to change its policies on content depicting sexual violence, and the UK government to commit to putting sex and relationships education on the school curriculum. Alongside the TUC, in 2017 the Everyday Sexism Project undertook the most comprehensive research in over a decade into workplace sexual harassment in the UK, revealing that over half of all women, and two thirds of young women, experience sexual harassment at work. Laura works with bodies from the United Nations to the Council of Europe to tackle gender inequality.
She is Contributor for Women Under Siege, a New York-based organisation working against the use of rape as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide, and she is Patron of Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support, part of the Rape Crisis network. Laura writes regularly for the Guardian, The New York Times and others. She won a British Press Award for her journalism in 2015. Her first book, Everyday Sexism, was published in 2014. It was shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Book of the Year award and named one of the Bookseller’s Top 10 Non Fiction Books of the Year. Her second book, the Sunday Times Bestseller Girl Up, was published in 2016.
Her third book, Misogynation, was published in 2018. Laura was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in the Queen's birthday honours list 2016. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of Worcester and Suffolk and has been named a Woman of the Year by Red Magazine, Cosmopolitan and the Sunday Times. She was named 9th on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Power List 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Oxford Internet Institute Internet and Society Award alongside Tim Berners Lee, and the 2015 Women's Media Centre Digital Media Award.
Laura works closely with politicians, businesses, schools, universities and police forces. Her work alongside the British Transport Police on Project Guardian, which involved using Everyday Sexism Project testimonies to retrain 2000 officers, resulted in a 30% rise in reporting of sexual offences on the transport network. Her campaign work alongside other activists has led Facebook to change its policies on content depicting sexual violence, and the UK government to commit to putting sex and relationships education on the school curriculum. Alongside the TUC, in 2017 the Everyday Sexism Project undertook the most comprehensive research in over a decade into workplace sexual harassment in the UK, revealing that over half of all women, and two thirds of young women, experience sexual harassment at work. Laura works with bodies from the United Nations to the Council of Europe to tackle gender inequality.
She is Contributor for Women Under Siege, a New York-based organisation working against the use of rape as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide, and she is Patron of Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support, part of the Rape Crisis network. Laura writes regularly for the Guardian, The New York Times and others. She won a British Press Award for her journalism in 2015. Her first book, Everyday Sexism, was published in 2014. It was shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Book of the Year award and named one of the Bookseller’s Top 10 Non Fiction Books of the Year. Her second book, the Sunday Times Bestseller Girl Up, was published in 2016.
Her third book, Misogynation, was published in 2018. Laura was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in the Queen's birthday honours list 2016. She has been awarded honorary degrees by the Universities of Worcester and Suffolk and has been named a Woman of the Year by Red Magazine, Cosmopolitan and the Sunday Times. She was named 9th on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Power List 2014. She was awarded the 2014 Oxford Internet Institute Internet and Society Award alongside Tim Berners Lee, and the 2015 Women's Media Centre Digital Media Award.
