Due to unforeseen circumstances this event has been rescheduled. It will now take place on Mon 25 April at 19:00 and in a change of location the event will now be taking place at Waterstones, Union Street. Tickets are available here.

Women today are told they need to be thin and beautiful. They are told to wear longer skirts, to avoid going out late at night and to move in groups – to never accept drinks from a stranger, and to wear shoes they can run in more easily than heels. They are told to wear just enough make-up to look presentable, but not enough to be a slut. They are warned that if they try to be strong, or take control, they’ll be shrill and bossy. Laura Bates wants to tell them something different. She exposes the truth about the pressures surrounding body image, false representations in the media, the complexities of sex and relationships, the trials of social media, and the other lies women are told.

Speaker biography:

Laura Bates is the founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project, an ever-increasing collection of testimonies of gender inequality which has been described as ‘one of the biggest social media success stories on the internet’. She was the recipient of the Georgina Henry Women in Journalism award for Innovation at the 2015 British Press Awards. Her first book, Everyday Sexism, was shortlisted for the Waterstone’s Book of the Year award and Political Book Awards Polemic of the Year, and named one of the Bookseller’s Top 10 Non Fiction Books of the Year.

She is a contributor for Women Under Siege, a New York-based organisation working against the use of rape as a tool of war in conflict zones worldwide, and is a patron of Somerset and Avon Rape and Sexual Abuse Support, part of the Rape Crisis network. She was awarded a British Empire Medal in the 2015 Queen’s Birthday Honours List and has been named a Woman of the Year by The Sunday Times, Cosmopolitan, and Red magazine and was named ninth on the BBC Radio 4 Woman’s Hour Power List 2014. She received the 2014 Oxford Internet Institute Internet and Society Award alongside Tim Berners Lee.

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