Laura Bates

Laura Carolyn Bates BEM FRSL (born 27 August 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 (age 38) 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)​
Website
laurabates.co.uk

Biography

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' parents are Diane Elizabeth Bates, a French language teacher, and Adrian Keith Bates, a physician.^[1] She grew up in the London Borough of Hackney and Taunton, and has an older sister and a younger brother. Her parents divorced when Bates was in her twenties.^[2] She attended King's College, Taunton.^[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.^[2]

Bates then worked as an actress and a nanny, a period during 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.^[3][4]

Everyday Sexism Project

The Everyday Sexism Project website was founded in 2012. Around the third anniversary of the website, in April 2015, Everyday Sexism had reached 100,000 entries.^[5] Bates has said that she has faced abuse online. After her publication of Men Who Hate Women in 2020, Bates said she received deepfake pornography images of herself performing sexual acts on the sender.^[6]

Bates' first book Everyday Sexism, based on the project, was published by the London subsidiary of Simon & Schuster in 2014.^[7]

Career

After Everyday Sexism, Bates published several more books about sexism. Bates is a contributor to The Guardian,^[8] The Independent^[9] and other publications. She is a contributor to the New York–based Women Under Siege Project.^[10]

Honours and awards

• 2013: Cosmopolitan magazine's Ultimate New Feminist Award in 2013.^[3]
• 2014: BBC's 100 women.^[11]
• 2015: Awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to gender equality.^[12][13]
• 2018: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.^[14]
• 2020: Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.^[15]

Personal life

Bates married Nick Taylor in 2014.^[2][16]

Publications

• 2014: Everyday Sexism: The Project that Inspired a Worldwide Movement, Simon & Schuster ISBN 1471131572
• 2016: Girl Up: Kick Ass, Claim Your Woman Card, and Crush Everyday Sexism, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471149504
• 2018: Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471169243
• 2019: The Burning, Simon & Schuster ISBN 1471170209
• 2020: Men Who Hate Women, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471194337
• 2022: Fix the System, Not the Women, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781398514331
• 2023: Sisters of Sword and Shadow, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781398520042
• 2025: The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny, Simon & Schuster ISBN 9781471190483