Laura Bates

Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of over 200,000 testimonies of gender inequality, with branches in 25 countries worldwide. Laura writes regularly for the Guardian, Telegraph and the New York Times amongst others and won a British Press Award for her journalism in 2015.

She works closely with politicians, businesses, schools, police forces and organisations from the Council of Europe to the United Nations to tackle gender inequality. She was awarded a British Empire Medal for services to gender equality in the Queen’s Birthday Honours list 2015 and has been named woman of the year by Cosmopolitan, Red Magazine and The Sunday Times Magazine.

Laura is a contributor at Women Under Siege, a New York-based project tackling rape in conflict worldwide and she is patron of SARSAS, Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support. She is the recipient of two honorary degrees, an honorary fellow of St John’s College Cambridge and was awarded the Internet and Society Award by the Oxford Internet Institute alongside Sir Tim Berners Lee.

Laura is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Vice President of the Hay Festival. She has judged the Women’s Prize, the YA Book Prize, the Children’s Laureate and the RSL Giles St Aubyn awards for non-fiction.