Laura Carolyn Bates (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.
Biography
Bates' parents are Diane Elizabeth Bates, a French language teacher, and Adrian Keith Bates, a physician.
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.
She attended King's College, Taunton.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Bates' first book Everyday Sexism, based on the project, was published by the London subsidiary of Simon & Schuster in 2014.
Career
After
Everyday Sexism, Bates published several more books about sexism. Bates is a contributor to
The Guardian,
and other publications. She is a contributor to the New York–based Women Under Siege Project.
Honours and awards
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2013: Cosmopolitan magazine's Ultimate New Feminist Award in 2013.
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2014: BBC's 100 women.
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2015: Awarded the British Empire Medal (BEM) in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to gender equality.
[United Kingdom: ]
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2018: Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.
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2020: Honorary Fellow of St John's College, Cambridge.
Personal life
Bates married Nick Taylor in 2014.
Publications
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2014: Everyday Sexism: The Project that Inspired a Worldwide Movement, Simon & Schuster
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2016: Girl Up: Kick Ass, Claim Your Woman Card, and Crush Everyday Sexism, Simon & Schuster
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2018: Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism, Simon & Schuster
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2019: The Burning, Simon & Schuster
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2020: Men Who Hate Women, Simon & Schuster
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2022: Fix the System, Not the Women, Simon & Schuster
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2023: Sisters of Sword and Shadow, Simon & Schuster
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2025: The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny, Simon & Schuster
External links
