Laura Carolyn BatesBEMFRSL (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.
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]
