Laura Bates
Most organisations now have policies on harassment, inclusion and respect at work. Few can explain why the same behaviours keep surfacing despite them. The gap between stated values and what people actually experience is where reputational risk, attrition and silence accumulate.
Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project and a writer who helps organisations understand how harassment, misogyny and gender inequality actually operate inside workplaces, schools and online spaces.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Laura Bates
- Over 200,000 firsthand testimonies collected through the Everyday Sexism Project give her an evidence base on workplace and institutional sexism that no consultancy or HR function can replicate.
- Two years of undercover research inside incel, pickup-artist and men’s rights forums, published as Men Who Hate Women, means she can speak credibly about how online radicalisation enters workplaces through younger employees and customers.
- Her work has produced operational outcomes, not just commentary: Facebook policy changes on rape and abuse content, sexual consent education added to the national curriculum, and revised British Transport Police protocols on sexual violence.
- She translates a politically charged subject into language senior leaders can act on, with the credibility of a BEM, a Royal Society of Literature fellowship and ten years of reporting in The Guardian and The New York Times behind her.
Biography highlights
- Founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, with over 200,000 testimonies collected globally since 2012.
- Author of Everyday Sexism (shortlisted for Waterstones Book of the Year), Sunday Times bestseller Girl Up, Men Who Hate Women, and Fix the System, Not the Women.
- British Empire Medal in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to gender equality.
- Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge; Vice President of the Hay Festival.
- Regular contributor to The New York Times and The Guardian; named one of the BBC’s inaugural 100 Women and Woman of the Year by Cosmopolitan, Red and The Sunday Times Magazine.
- Recipient of the Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute alongside Sir Tim Berners-Lee.
Biography
Workplace sexism is rarely a single visible incident. It is the accumulation of small, normalised behaviours that policies on paper do not catch, and that employees, especially women and younger staff, stop reporting because they have learned reports go nowhere. The Everyday Sexism Project, founded in 2012, was built to make that accumulation visible. More than 200,000 testimonies later, it has become one of the largest qualitative datasets on gender inequality in existence.
The project’s founder, Laura Bates, has spent over a decade translating those testimonies into work that organisations can use. Her books, Everyday Sexism, Girl Up, Misogynation, Men Who Hate Women and Fix the System, Not the Women, move from individual experience to institutional pattern. The work has produced concrete policy outcomes: Facebook revised its rules on rape and abuse content, sexual consent education entered the national curriculum, and British Transport Police updated how it handles reports of sexual violence on public transport.
A second strand of her work is investigative. For Men Who Hate Women, Bates spent two years undercover in incel, pickup-artist and men’s rights forums, mapping how extreme misogyny is now produced and distributed online. That work matters for organisations because the audience for it is in classrooms now and entering workforces within a few years; HR leaders and school heads cannot afford to be unfamiliar with it.
The credentials are serious. A British Empire Medal in 2015 for services to gender equality. Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. Honorary Fellow of St John’s College, Cambridge. Vice President of the Hay Festival. Regular columns in The New York Times and The Guardian. The Internet and Society Award from the Oxford Internet Institute, shared with Tim Berners-Lee. The work has been judged on substance by serious institutions, which is what allows a sceptical executive committee to take the argument seriously.
Key speaking topics
- Everyday sexism and institutional inequality
- Workplace harassment and bystander response
- Male allyship and positive masculinity
- Online misogyny, incels and the manosphere
- Gender, consent and education
- Media representation of women
Ideal for
- CHROs, heads of DEI and culture leads designing policy that will hold up under scrutiny
- Senior leadership teams and boards examining harassment, retention and reputational risk
- Heads of school, university leadership and education policymakers
- Internal employee networks and male allyship programmes inside large organisations
Audience outcomes
- A clearer picture of how harassment patterns form in their own organisation, drawn from the largest qualitative dataset on the subject.
- Specific language for talking to men about allyship without defensiveness shutting the conversation down.
- A working understanding of incel and manosphere content that is influencing employees, students and customers.
- Confidence to challenge policies and processes that look good on paper but fail in practice.
Talks
A talk on how gender stereotypes, consent and inequality show up in schools and shape the workforce that follows.
Key takeaways:
- How early-stage sexism patterns travel into professional life
- Practical responses for teachers, parents and school leaders
- The role of curriculum and policy in interrupting the cycle
A session on what useful male participation in equality work actually looks like inside an organisation.
Key takeaways:
- Why most allyship efforts stall and how to fix the design
- Language and behaviours that move colleagues from silence to action
- How to hold allyship to operational outcomes, not statements
A keynote linking the cultural conditions outside the workplace to the harassment and inequality patterns inside it.
Key takeaways:
- The mechanisms by which everyday sexism becomes institutional risk
- What policy, training and reporting structures actually change behaviour
- Why retention and reputational risk now sit on the same axis
A talk drawn from two years of undercover research inside online misogynist communities.
Key takeaways:
- How young men are radicalised online and what they bring into work and study
- The link between online misogyny and offline violence
- What employers, schools and platforms can practically do about it