Laura Bates

Laura Bates BEM (born 27 August 1986) is a British feminist writer. She founded the Everyday Sexism Project website in April 2012. Her first book, Everyday Sexism, was published in 2014. 2Early life Bates was born 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 Cambridge University 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. 2Campaign about Everyday sexism 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?'" Bates told Hannah Betts, during an interview for The Daily Telegraph, in April 2014: "All feminism means to me is that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their se