Laura Bates

Laura Bates BEM FRSL
Bates in 2014
Born	(1986-08-27) 27 August 1986 Oxford, England
Alma mater	St John's College, Cambridge
Subject	Feminism
Notable works	Everyday Sexism (2014) Girl Up (2016) The Burning (2019)
Notable awards	British Empire Medal
Spouse	Nick Taylor ​ (m. 2014)​

Laura Bates BEM FRSL (born 1986) is an English feminist writer. She founded the Everyday Sexism Project website in April 2012. Her first book, Everyday Sexism, was published in 2014.

Early life

External videos
Everyday sexism: Laura Bates at TEDxCoventGardenWomen, TEDx Talks, 16:05, 17 January 2014

External videos
Shouting Back :Laura Bates, Caroline Criado-Perez and Samira Ahmed at Conway Hall 19:30, 9 October 2014

Bates was born on 27 August 1986 in Oxford to a mother who taught French and a physician father, and grew up in Hackney and Taunton, and has an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents divorced when Bates was in her twenties. She read English literature at St John's College, Cambridge, and graduated from the University of Cambridge in 2007. Bates remained in Cambridge for two and a half years as a researcher for the psychologist Susan Quilliam who was working on an updated edition of The Joy of Sex.

Everyday Sexism project

Bates then worked as an actress and a nanny, a period in which she has said she experienced sexism at auditions and found the young girls she was caring for were already preoccupied with their body image. The Everyday Sexism project website was founded in 2012. Bates told the Financial Times journalist Lucy Kellaway in 2014 about "having a guy in a car slow down and say, 'You walk down here every Wednesday and Thursday at about 12, don't you?'" Bates recalled asking herself afterwards: "Is it my fault?"

During an interview for The Daily Telegraph in April 2014, Bates said: "All feminism means to me is that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their sex. We have to get past judging women on their looks and then using that to derive some sort of idea about their agenda." "A man can be a father, a doctor, a politician, a lawyer, without his sex being an issue or being commented on", Bates told Anna Klassen of The Daily Beast website. "One of the nicest surprises has been the compassionate responses from men", she wrote in The Guardian. "It's not about men against women, but people against prejudice."

Around the third anniversary of the website, in April 2015, Everyday Sexism had reached 100,000 entries. She has faced abuse online. "People talk about specific serial killers they admire and who they would like to emulate", she told Lucy Kellaway, "and about the different weapons that they fantasise about using on you and in what order. It is quite twisted stuff."

A contributor to other publications as well as The Guardian, Bates' first book Everyday Sexism was published by the London subsidiary of Simon & Schuster in 2014. She is contracted to write two further books for Simon & Schuster. She is a contributor to the New York–based, Women Under Siege Project.

Honours and awards

Bates was awarded the British Empire Medal in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to gender equality. She received Cosmopolitan magazine's Ultimate New Feminist Award in 2013. In June 2018 Bates was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

Personal life

Bates married Nick Taylor in 2014.

Publications

• Everyday Sexism: The Project that Inspired a Worldwide Movement, 2014, Simon & Schuster ISBN 1471131572
• Girl Up: Kick Ass, Claim Your Woman Card, and Crush Everyday Sexism, 2016, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471149504
• Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism, 2018, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471169243
• The Burning, 2019, Simon & Schuster ISBN 1471170209
• Men Who Hate Women, 2020, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471194337

External links

• The Everyday Sexism Project
• EverydaySexism on Twitter
• The Guardian contributor page
• The Independent contributor page
• Women Under Siege contributor page