Laura Bates on her new book Everyday Sexism

Fed up with being harassed in public, groped on the bus and followed home, Laura Bates took action and launched The Everyday Sexism Project in 2012 to provide women with a forum for the daily incidents they were enduring.

Expecting a trickle of posts, she was inundated with women’s personal accounts, sparking a worldwide movement.

If you haven’t come across it online, on Twitter or even in Laura’s new book Everyday Sexism, it makes for fascinating reading. While on the face of things women seem to be making in-roads equality-wise, the stark daily reality is indisputable.

Featuring 80,000 reports to date, featuring everyone from schoolgirls to grannies, the posts could not be ignored and Laura found herself as the new and inadvertent face of feminism. Why? Perhaps because she removed the feminism debate from the hands of the academics and statisticians and took it into a more contemporary arena. Or maybe she has made feminism an issue we can all identify with — something more relevant.

“We just didn’t realise how massive the problem was and how big a change was needed to combat that,” says Laura. “So, initially the goal was to raise awareness of the problem, to make people acknowledge it existed, to get people talking about it so women could no longer be dismissed and belittled.

“But the sheer volume and scale of the problem was unexpected. When the media started to pick up on it we knew something positive and exciting could come from it, and it’s been a real roller coaster ever since.”

That the movement has taken her by surprise is obvious, becoming a full-time job overnight. But with good grace Laura, 28, gave up her acting career to concentrate on Everyday Sexism full-time, producing some spectacular results.

For example, the British Transport Police has retrained 2,000 of their officers to spot and deal with sexual assaults on public transport as a result, sex and relationship programmes are being taken into schools and anti-lad culture campaigns into universities. In short, Laura Bates is making progress.

But who is this unlikely role model who came from nowhere to spear-head feminism and take it to a whole new audience? The Cambridge University English graduate says: “The impetus for the project was a combination of events over a period of about a week; being shouted at in the street, being followed off the bus and all the way home, being groped on the bus (and everybody looking away when I said what had happened). What suddenly struck me was that if these things hadn’t all happened to occur within a short space of time, I never would’ve thought twice about any of them. It made me realise how many similar things I’d put up with without protesting — it was so normalised.”

So, does Laura mind her life being taken over to this extent? “No: it is so much more interesting now.

“I’m passionate about what I do and feel lucky to be involved.”

Of course there have also been some darker sides: the constant death and rape threats taking their toll, but Laura feels the positives outweigh the negatives. “Reports and prosecutions of sexual offences are up 25 per cent and it’s powerful. People are starting to stand up and take action,” she says.

Neither will Laura be pitched against her fellow feminists, saying it’s an exciting time for what they are calling the ‘fourth’ wave of feminism, tying in nicely with Lucy Ann Holmes’ No More Page 3 campaign, the move against female genital mutilation and other political issues taking centre stage: “The Everyday Sexism Project provides real-life anecdotal evidence that backs up the statistics so we need to work alongside academic feminists and researchers to combine our work,” she says. “It’s an accumulative weight.”

And her advice? “Just that women should be aware of their rights. We need to chip away at the norm and demonstrate what is and isn’t acceptable.” As for Everyday Sexism itself, Laura says that, if nothing else, it is empowering for the 80,000 women, and inspiring to others.

Laura is in this for the long run. “It all feels so unfinished it terms of what needs to be done. There is so much positive stuff to do — this is the tip of the iceberg, because it’s an epidemic.

“But there has been a real buzz around the resurgence of feminism and there are so many positives because this is a universal problem.”

Laura Bates
To discuss her work and book Everday Sexism
Waterstones, Oxford
Thursday, October 16, 7pm
Call 01865 790212 or visit waterstones.com