Laura Bates

Around the third anniversary of the website, in April 2015, Everyday Sexism had reached 100,000 entries. She has faced abuse online. "People talk about specific serial killers they admire and who they would like to emulate", she told Lucy Kellaway, "and about the different weapons that they fantasise about using on you and in what order. It is quite twisted stuff."

Bates was awarded the British Empire Medal in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to gender equality. She received Cosmopolitan magazine's Ultimate New Feminist Award in 2013. In June 2018 Bates was elected Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in its "40 Under 40" initiative.

During an interview for The Daily Telegraph in April 2014, Bates said: "All feminism means to me is that everyone should be treated equally regardless of their sex. We have to get past judging women on their looks and then using that to derive some sort of idea about their agenda." "A man can be a father, a doctor, a politician, a lawyer, without his sex being an issue or being commented on", Bates told Anna Klassen of The Daily Beast website. "One of the nicest surprises has been the compassionate responses from men", she wrote in The Guardian. "It's not about men against women, but people against prejudice."

A contributor to other publications as well as The Guardian, Bates' first book Everyday Sexism was published by the London subsidiary of Simon & Schuster in 2014. She is contracted to write two further books for Simon & Schuster. She is a contributor to the New York–based, Women Under Siege Project.

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?"

Laura Bates BEM FRSL (born 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 was born on 27 August 1986 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 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.