Two of the UK’s finest feminist firebrands will discuss the evolution of 21st Century feminist campaigning and how to solve the problem of institutionalised sexism in society.
Caroline Criado-Perez is a freelance journalist and feminist campaigner. She is co-founder of The Women’s Room, an organisation and database that campaigns for more women experts in the media, and she led the campaign to keep women on banknotes, for which she received a barrage of rape and death threats. She has a degree in English Language & Literature from Keble College, Oxford, is completing an MSc in Gender at LSE, and is currently writing a book about inspiring women around the world, called Do It Like A Woman: The New Pioneers, which will be published by Granta in 2015. Caroline was the recipient of the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the Year Award 2013.
The Everyday Sexism Project was founded by writer and activist Laura Bates in April 2012. It started out as a website where people could share their experiences of daily, normalised sexism, from street harassment to workplace discrimination to sexual assault and rape. Despite having no funding or advertising, it quickly became a viral sensation, attracting international press attention, and putting the problem of sexism and gender imbalance firmly on the international media agenda, helping to spark a new wave of feminism in the UK. Laura Bates talks about her experiences, the offline projects, such as working in schools and universities, the collaboration with the British Transport Police and the tricky business of being a woman with an online and public profile.
The event will be chaired by Samira Ahmed.
Samira has worked as a News Correspondent and a reporter on the Today programme and Newsnight, where she was one of the first broadcast journalists to investigate the rise of Islamic radicalism on British university campuses in the early 1990s.
She covered the OJ Simpson case as BBC Los Angeles Correspondent and was a presenter and reporter at Channel 4 News from 2000 to 2011.
Samira won the Stonewall Broadcast of the Year Award in 2009 for her film on so-called “corrective” rape in South Africa, and made the acclaimed Channel 4 documentary series Islam Unveiled. Samira has also worked as a news anchor for BBC World and for Deutsche Welle TV in Berlin, and writes regularly for newspapers and magazines including The Guardian, The Independent and The Big Issue.