Laura gave two lectures, one to sixth formers on Monday night and one to the whole school at assembly on Tuesday. Bringing a speaker like Laura Bates into our space is a deliberate choice to raise awareness amongst all our pupils and provides several educational and social benefits, primarily by helping pupils identify and challenge gender inequality in their own lives.
Laura explained how she became a campaigner. She described having a ‘really bad week’ where she experienced multiple incidents of harassment in a short period, including being followed home by a man and being groped on a bus. When she spoke out on the bus, other passengers ignored the situation, sending the message that this behaviour was simply ‘the way things are.’
After these incidents, Bates began asking other women about their experiences. She was overwhelmed to find that almost every woman she spoke to had similar stories but felt they shouldn’t ‘make a fuss’ because society largely believed sexism no longer existed.
To combat the narrative that gender equality had already been achieved, she launched The Everyday Sexism Project website in April 2012. It was initially an awareness-raising tool but quickly grew into a viral movement, collecting over 25,000 stories in its first year and eventually amassing hundreds of thousands of entries in multiple languages.
Since its inception, the project has evolved into a powerful campaigning tool. It has been used to collaborate with the British Transport Police to increase the reporting of sexual offenses, to successfully lobby Facebook to change its policies regarding content that promotes domestic and sexual violence, and to influence the UK Department for Education to overhaul the relationships and sex education curriculum.
Laura’s powerful and resonant talks at Cranleigh helped pupils to understand what sexism looks and feels like so that they can protect themselves and each other. In particular, she offers guidance on recognising that so-called ‘low-level’ incidents, such as sexist language, ‘banter’ or street harassment, should not be normalised because they can become the foundation for more serious abuse. She encouraged pupils to think critically about the sexist portrayals of women in mainstream and social media and elsewhere online. Laura’s talk also addressed the impact of AI, highlighting inbuilt gender inequalities and stereotypes within emerging technologies.
Inviting Laura Bates to Cranleigh is a powerful way to put our core values into practice. Her work challenges pupils to ‘aspire boldly’ by envisioning and building a world free from the limitations of gender stereotypes, while empowering them to ‘be yourself’ with the confidence that their identity should never be defined or diminished by the prejudice of others. Ultimately, her insights teach our community how to ‘care for others’ more deeply by recognising the harms of casual sexism and developing the courage to act as active, empathetic allies for one another.
