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.

Education and early life

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 was privately educated at King's College, Taunton. and subsequently studied English literature at University of Cambridge where she was an undergraduate student at St John's College, Cambridge and graduated in 2007.

Career

After graduating, 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.

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

Honours and awards

Publications

  • Everyday Sexism: The Project that Inspired a Worldwide Movement
  • Girl Up: Kick Ass, Claim Your Woman Card, and Crush Everyday Sexism
  • Misogynation: The True Scale of Sexism
  • The Burning
  • Men Who Hate Women
  • Fix the System, Not the Women
  • Sisters of Sword and Shadow
  • Sisters of Fire and Fury
  • The New Age of Sexism: How the AI Revolution is Reinventing Misogyny

Personal life

Bates married Nick Taylor in 2014.