Laura Bates

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.

Laura Bates

BEM FRSL
Bates in 2014
Born (1986-08-27) 27 August 1986
Oxford, England
Alma materSt John's College, Cambridge
Home town
SubjectFeminism
Notable works
  • Everyday Sexism (2014)
  • Girl Up (2016)
  • The Burning (2019)
Notable awardsBritish Empire Medal
Spouse
Nick Taylor
(
m. 2014)

Early life
External video
Everyday sexism: Laura Bates at TEDxCoventGardenWomen, TEDx Talks, 16:05, 17 January 2014
External video
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.[1] 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.[1]

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.[2][3] 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?"[4]

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."[1] "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.[5] "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."[6]

Around the third anniversary of the website, in April 2015, Everyday Sexism had reached 100,000 entries.[7] 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."[4]

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.[8] She is contracted to write two further books for Simon & Schuster.[9] 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.[10] She received Cosmopolitan magazine's Ultimate New Feminist Award in 2013.[2] In June 2018 Bates was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.[11]

Personal life

Bates married Nick Taylor in 2014.[1][12]

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
gollark: They are harder to get!
gollark: Or 1278.
gollark: It's bigger than 5005...?
gollark: Aeons look very cool, so we must all accumulate 5006 of them.
gollark: Might be deliberate.

References
  1. Bates, Hannah (12 April 2014). "Rape Threats, Groping and Perverts – Everyday Sexism: Why Laura Bates Is Shouting Back". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  2. Hines, Sophie (5 December 2013). "Laura Bates Wins Ultimate New Feminist 2013". Retrieved 20 August 2014.
  3. "BBC Radio 4: Woman's Hour Power List 2014 – Top Ten Revealed: 9. Laura Bates, Campaigner". BBC. Retrieved 28 July 2014.
  4. Kellaway, Lucy (1 August 2014). "Lucy Kellaway Interviews Everyday Sexism Project Founder Laura Bates". Financial Times. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  5. Klassen, Anna (9 April 2013). "Everyday Sexism Creator Laura Bates on Helping Women Speak Out". The Daily Beast. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  6. Bates, Laura (16 March 2015). "'Anti-Feminists Don't Get Irony'". The Guardian. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  7. Sanghani, Radhika (16 April 2015). "A Day in the Life of the Everyday Sexism Hashtag". The Daily Telegraph. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  8. Bates, Laura (2014). Everyday Sexism. London: Simon & Schuster. ISBN 9781471131578.
  9. Farrington, Josh (6 February 2015). "Laura Bates Signs Two More with S&S". The Bookseller. Retrieved 26 January 2016.
  10. Bates, Laura (12 June 2015). "Queen's Birthday Honours List: Knights Outnumber Dames Five to One". The Guardian.
  11. Flood, Alison (28 June 2018). "Royal Society of Literature Admits 40 New Fellows to Address Historical Biases". the Guardian. Retrieved 3 July 2018.
  12. Bates, Laura (28 June 2014). "How to Have a Feminist Wedding". The Guardian.
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