Caroline Criado-Perez

In another campaign, she criticised the Bank of England’s decision to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on the £5 note, which left no women featured on the reverse of bank notes; the Queen is depicted on the front of bank notes, with historically prominent people on the reverse. Dismissing Churchill as "another white man", Criado-Perez pointed out that the Equality Act 2010 commits public institutions to "eliminate discrimination", whereas proof the Bank had acted with the required "due regard" was absent because details of the decision-making process were not made public. Criado-Perez met Head of Notes Victoria Cleland and Chief Cashier Chris Salmon at the Bank to discuss it.

While she felt it was taking over her life, Twitter at the time was assuming no responsibility for the content of tweets, merely advising users to contact the relevant authorities. Criado-Perez said the campaign of abuse, provoked by a small issue, "shows it's not about what women are doing, not about feminism. It's that some men don't like women, and don't like women in the public domain." In her view: "Men get attacked because they’ve said or done something someone doesn’t like, whereas women get attacked because they’re visible."

In April 2017, Sadiq Khan announced that Gillian Wearing had been commissioned to create a statue of women's suffragist Millicent Fawcett. Prime Minister Theresa May also signalled her approval. Fawcett is the first woman to be featured in a statue in the Square, and Wearing is the first female sculptor to have a statue located there. Announcing the plan for the statue of Fawcett, Khan said: "It’s simply not right that nearly a century after women’s suffrage, Parliament Square is still a male-only zone, and I’m thrilled that this is soon to change thanks to Caroline’s inspired campaign". The statue was unveiled on 24 April 2018 for the commemoration of the extension of the franchise to women in 1918 - though this extension was at first on unequal terms to men. On the plinth of the statue are the names and pictures of 55 women (and 4 men) who fought for women's right to vote.

In an article in the London Evening Standard in September 2017, Criado-Perez wrote that she would donate her first "Austen tenner" to her local women's shelter: "It feels like the right way to end this chapter of my life". Others followed suit, donating their tenners to charities ranging from large ones such as Women's Aid to start-ups such as Bloody Good Period.

On 8 March 2016, International Women's Day, Criado-Perez noticed the absence of any statue of a woman in Parliament Square, Westminster. The eleven statues, including Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela, were all commemorating men.

After Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in September 2015, Criado-Perez tweeted: "I really thought Corbyn would have the sense to give top [shadow] cabinet jobs to women. You're a white male leader with a white male deputy". Corbyn's shadow Chancellor, Foreign and Home Secretaries were also men. In the context of threatening behaviour suffered predominantly by female Labour MPs before and during the 2016 Labour leadership crisis, Criado-Perez has written about the subject for The Pool website.

In September 2013, Criado-Perez felt that the Metropolitan Police had not treated her honourably, and reported that they had lost evidence. The following day, the Metropolitan Police said they had not lost evidence in this case. Meanwhile, Criado-Perez deleted her Twitter account for a time. On 16 December, it emerged that a woman and a man from Tyne and Wear would appear in court in early January having been charged with the improper use of a communications network. It was announced at this time that two other suspects were not going to be charged, and of a fifth a decision was yet to be made. On 7 January 2014, John Nimmo (25) and Isabella Sorley (23) pleaded guilty to the charges brought against them. Sorley was sentenced to 12 weeks and Nimmo 8 weeks on 24 January. When asked on the BBC's Newsnight programme in early January whether she was surprised that one of the convicted Twitter abusers was female, Criado-Perez said that the woman in question had internalised misogyny already rampant in society as a whole. A second man, Peter Nunn, 33, was found guilty of sending threatening tweets to Creasy on 2 September, and was blocked from contacting either woman when he was imprisoned for 18 weeks on 29 September 2014.

In a June 2013 profile by journalist Cathy Newman in The Telegraph, Criado-Perez commented: "the culture we live in is made up of little tiny sexist acts which you can just ignore but when you think of them collectively you start to see a pattern."

On the Wikipedia controversy in April 2013 concerning the creation of a sub-category for American women novelists, she was reported as saying: "It perpetuates the idea that men are the default and don’t need to be marked in any way, whereas women are still seen as the outliers."

This decision by the Bank of England resulted in numerous threats, including threats of rape and murder, made against Criado-Perez and other women on Twitter from the day of the Bank of England's announcement in July 2013. At this point, Criado-Perez said that she was receiving about 50 such threats each hour, and found somewhat inadequate the suggestion that she fill in an on-line form for Twitter detailing the behaviour she had experienced. At the height of the abuse, Criado-Perez "lost half a stone in two days" and "couldn't eat or sleep". She commented later: "I don't know if I had a kind of breakdown. I was unable to function, unable to have normal interactions."

As a result of her campaign against Twitter policies, columnist Owen Jones in July 2013 described Criado-Perez as "a brilliant fighter".

For her successful activism over depicting women on bank notes, Criado-Perez won the human rights campaigner of the year award from the pressure group Liberty in November 2013. In 2013, she was also named one of BBC's 100 Women. Criado-Perez was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to equality and diversity, particularly in the media. In 2019, Criado-Perez won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Books Prize and the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award for Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

Criado-Perez worked in digital marketing for some years, then studied for an English Literature A-level. She gained a place to study English Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford as a mature student, graduating from Oxford University in 2012. Study of language and gender and a book by Deborah Cameron discussing gender's relationship to pronouns, led to Criado-Perez becoming a feminist.

She was a runner-up in the London Library Student Writing competition in 2012, receiving £1,000 and other prizes. Since then, she worked, in 2012, as an editor for an information and networking portal of the pharmaceutical industry and in 2013 was in the process of completing a master's degree in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics.

In November 2012, with Catherine Smith, she founded the website Women's Room, whose goal is to collect suggestions for female professionals and to convey to journalists to increase the proportion of women in the media. The immediate reason for this development were two features on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme broadcast on consecutive days in October 2012, on the prevention of teenage pregnancies and breast cancer, in which no female expert was interviewed – the interviewers were also male. As a result, presenter John Humphrys had to ask during the latter item: "if you were a woman you would have no hesitation about being screened"? One of the interviewees on the item about teenage pregnancies was Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College, a public school. Criado-Perez wrote that Seldon might be an authority on contemporary British political history, but not on the immediate subject under discussion. She commented on the rather narrow selection of voices, on social lines as well as gender, in such broadcast debates in early November 2012: "These voices are shaping the debate, and they therefore wield a huge influence over our currently populist public policy. If public policy is going to be so responsive to the media, let's make the media truly representative of the public."

Caroline Emma Criado-Perez OBE (born June 1984) is a British feminist, activist, author and journalist. Her first national campaign, the Women's Room project, was for female experts to be better represented in the media. She opposed the removal of the only woman from British banknotes (other than The Queen), leading to the Bank of England's swift announcement that the image of Jane Austen would appear on the £10 note by 2017. That campaign led to sustained harassment on the social networking website Twitter of Criado-Perez and other women; as a result, Twitter announced plans to improve its complaint procedures. Her most recent campaign was for a sculpture of a woman in Parliament Square; the statue of Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in April 2018, as part of the centenary celebrations of the winning of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. Her 2019 book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men was a Sunday Times bestseller.

She launched a campaign for a statue of a suffragette to be erected in Parliament Square for the centennial anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. "If we lived in a fair world, historical, non-royal women would not make up a paltry 2,7 per cent of all the statues in the UK", she wrote in the New Statesman. "But we do not live in a fair world. And I'm realistic about the pace of change". Her open letter to the newly elected London Mayor Sadiq Khan, published by The Daily Telegraph the following May, was signed by a number of prominent women. Khan soon indicated his agreement to such a development, but did not at that stage commit to the location she wished, Parliament Square. A petition signed by 74,000 people was presented by Criado-Perez in June at an event in the Speaker's House State Rooms hosted by the Fawcett Society, with Millicent Fawcett now suggested as the figure to be represented. Criado-Perez agreed.