Everyday sexism | Laura Bates | TEDxCoventGardenWomen

In this fascinating talk, founder of the award-winning Everyday Sexism Project, Laura Bates, talks about her inspiring initiative. The EverydaySexism is an ever-increasing collection of over 50,000 women's experiences of gender imbalance. The stories come from women of all ages, races and sexual orientations, disabled and non-disabled, employed and unemployed, religious and non-religious.

This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at http://ted.com/tedx

About 18 months ago,
I had a really bad week.

I was on my way home from work one night,

and it was one of those hot evenings
where the traffic was at a standstill,

and as I walked down the road,
and the cars crawled next to me,

some guys started shouting
out of their car windows about my legs,

about the things
that they'd like to do to me.

And I ignored them, and I carried on home,
and I got on with it, like you do.

Then a few nights later,

I was on the way home,
on the bus, quite late at night,

and I was on the phone to my mom.

I thought, at first,
that the guy next to me

just accidentally brushed
my leg with his hand.

And I carried on talking to my mom.

Then I realized that, actually,
he was grabbing and groping my leg

and moving his hand up towards my crotch.

I stood up to move away,
but because I was on the phone,

I vocalized it, in a way I don't think
I would have done otherwise.

I said, "On the bus,
this guy's groping me."

Everybody on that bus
looked out the window,

or down at their feet,
or at their phone.

Certainly nobody stepped in,
but more than that,

there was a real sense of,
"Why make a fuss about this, woman?

This is your issue, deal with it;
don't make us have to think about it."

That immediately made me feel ashamed.

It made me feel like
I'd done something wrong,

or I shouldn't have been out that late,

or I shouldn't have been wearing
what I was wearing,

and all of those thoughts
that that reaction triggers.

And again, I carried on.

I went home, I didn't mention it.
I got on with it, like you do.

Then a couple days later, I was walking
down the street in broad daylight.

There was a big truck being unloaded,
scaffolding was coming off the back of it,

and there were two guys working together.

As I walked past, one of them
turned to the other and said,

"Look at the tits on that."

Not "her," "that."

They started discussing me
as if I wasn't there,

even though I was one meter away,
and I could really clearly hear them.

The thing that really hit me
about these three incidents

was if they hadn't happened
in the same week,

I never would have thought twice
about any one of them.

I started asking myself why that was:

Why was this so normal?
Why was I so used to them?

I started thinking back
about hundreds of incidents

that had happened over the weeks
and months and years

that I'd never said
anything about to anyone,

because it was normal.

I started talking
to other women and asking -

the women I knew, older women,
younger women, women I met -

saying, "Have you ever
experienced anything like this?"

And I honestly thought
that one or two women would have a story.

That one or two people would say,
"Yes, a few years ago this happened,"

or, "I once had a job
where this happened."

But it wasn't like that.

It was every woman I spoke to.

And it wasn't a few years ago,
this one incident.

It was hundreds of things.

"It was on my way here, this happened,

yesterday this happened,
most days this happens."

But just like me, until I asked them,
they'd never told those stories to anyone.

Because they were used to it,
because it was normal.

I started trying to speak up about this,

because I was realizing
there was this huge problem,

and I started trying to talk about it,

and again and again,
I got the same response.

People said, "Stop making a fuss.

Women are equal now, more or less."

If women are equal now,

then to talk about sexism,
to complain about sexism,

must be overreacting.

Or maybe you don't have a sense of humor,

or maybe you need to learn
to take a compliment,

or maybe you're a bit frigid or uptight
and you need to learn to take a joke.

I thought, maybe they were right,
maybe women are equal now, more or less;

perhaps I was overreacting.

I thought I'd look into it,
I'd interrogate that claim and I did.

These are some of the things that I found:

Women are equal now, more or less.

Except in our Houses of Parliament,

where the policies that affect all of us
are debated and defined,

less than one in four MPs is a woman.

Women make up one fifth
of the membership of the House of Lords.

The UK comes joint 57th in the world
for gender equality in Parliament.

Then I looked into the law,

and I found that just four
out of 35 Lord Justices of Appeal,

and just 18 out of 108
High Court judges are women.

I decided to look at the arts.

I found that it was reported in 2010,
that out of 2,300 works,

one of our most prestigious
art institutions, the National Gallery,

had paintings by just ten women.

I found that at the Royal Opera House,

it's been over 13 years
since a female choreographer

was commissioned to create
a piece for the main stage.

And that out of 573 listed statues
up and down the UK

commemorating people of interest,
just 15 per cent of them are of women.

I found that fewer than one in ten
of our engineers is female,

less than half the proportion
of France or Spain;

that our Royal Society,

one of our most prestigious
scientific institutions,

has never had a female president,

and just five per cent of the current
fellowship are women.

And that whilst women make up
50 per cent of chemistry undergraduates,

there're only six per cent of professors.

I found that women write only one fifth
of front page newspaper articles,

but 84 per cent of those articles
are dominated by male subjects or experts.

That women directed just five per cent
of the 250 major films of 2011,

and that only one in five
UK architects is female,

yet 63 per cent of them

report experiencing
sexual harassment in the workplace

during the course of their career.

And then I looked
into the crime statistics.

Women are equal now, more or less.

Except that in the UK
over two women a week

are killed by a current or former partner.

There's a phone call to the police
every minute about domestic violence.

Every six or seven minutes,
a woman is raped,

adding up to over 85,000 rapes
and 400,000 sexual assaults every year.

In the UK, a woman
has a one in four chance

of becoming a victim of domestic violence,

and has a one in five chance
of being a victim of a sexual offense.

Worldwide, one in three women
on the planet will be raped or beaten

in her lifetime.

I decided that that argument
that women were equal now

and we shouldn't be making a fuss,
really didn't stand up to scrutiny.

In fact, it seemed to me
that it really was time to make a fuss.

So I set up a simple website because
I realized we couldn't solve a problem

if people refused
even to acknowledge that it existed,

and that what I really wanted people
to have was that experience that I'd had

of seeing these things kind of rolled out
in front of them like a map,

and realizing how much there was
and how bad it still was.

I set up a very simple website
called "The Everyday Sexism Project,"

and I asked women and men

to add their experiences
of gender imbalance on a daily basis;

anything from the tiny
niggling normalized things,

all the way up the scale.

I didn't have any funding
or any way of publicizing it,

so I thought that maybe 20 or 30 women
would add their stories,

and I hoped it would build
a sense of solidarity,

and help to raise awareness.

But instead, things took off
a little more than I expected.

[75,000 Women To Take A Stand
Against Sexism]

50,000 women from all over the world
added their stories in 18 months.

They were women and men
from countries everywhere,

people of all ages, races, ethnicities,
sexual orientations, gender identities,

religious and non-religious,
disabled and non-disabled,

employed and unemployed.

We heard from a seven-year-old
disabled girl in a wheelchair

and a 74-year-old women
in a mobility scooter

who encountered
almost identical experiences

of screamed abuse about "female drivers."

A female Reverend
in the Church of England was asked

if there was a man available to perform
the wedding or funeral service -

"Nothing personal."

A man was congratulated
for babysitting his own children.

A woman working in the city was asked

if she would sit on her bosses lap
if she wanted her Christmas bonus.

A woman who worked in a video store found

that every time she went up
the ladder to the storeroom,

her boss would smack her on the bum,

and when she came down
he looked down her top and say:

"You know why I hired you."

A waitress was told to make a choice

between having an abortion
or resigning when she fell pregnant.

A 15-year-old girl wrote that she knew
that she was clever and funny,

and she could do anything
she wanted to do,

but really it didn't matter
if she became a doctor or a lawyer,

because she knew from the world
around her and from the media,

that the only thing that really mattered
was whether she was sexy,

whether her breasts grew
and her waist narrowed,

and whether boys found her attractive.

A 13-year-old girl wrote to say

that she'd been showed a video of sex,
at school on a boy's mobile phone,

a video of porn,

and that now she's scared
to have sex, she cries every night,

because she didn't realize
that what sex was

was the woman hurting and crying.

A woman in Pakistan talked about
hiding abuse for the sake of family honor.

A woman in Brazil tried to ignore
three men who catcalled her

only to find that they tried
to drag her into their car.

In Mexico a woman was told
by her university professor:

"Calladita te ves más bonita",

"You look prettier when you shut up."

This is what happened
when I gave a speech about politics -

[I think Laura should just get her tits
out so we can judge for ourselves.]

[I'm not sexist or anything
but she may be keeping a nice pair...]

This was what I got on a daily basis.

But not just once a day,
up to 200 times a day,

just for speaking out.

Ironically these people sending messages

because they wanted to shut
the project down

were showing
how vital and needed it was.

[fuck you stupid slut]

The fact that it was so scary
for some people,

for somebody just to want
to talk about equality,

just to want to raise women's voices
and give their stories a platform,

that they had to tell me exactly
how they wanted to disembowel me,

and with exactly which weapons
and in what order,

and not just that I should be raped,
but exactly how I should be raped,

and in which our orifices,
and where and when.

Then something else started to happen.

After we'd received
about ten thousand stories,

we started getting some
which had a very different tone.

We started getting success stories.

We started hearing from women

like one who said
that she was a keen runner,

who often experienced harassment,

but she thought it was
just the way things were.

Then after reading
the stories on the website,

she realized other women
were standing up to this,

and other people were acknowledging

that this shouldn't be normal,
and it wasn't okay.

The next time she went running,

a guy happened to call her over
from his car and ask for directions.

So she went over and helped him,

and then he reached out of the car window
and grabbed her breasts really hard,

really hurt her.

She said she felt all of the experiences,

the feelings wash over her
that she normally felt in that situation -

terror, embarrassment,
shame, the urge to run -

but she also felt something
she hadn't felt before,

and it was that feeling
of those women behind her standing up,

and it gave her the strength,
just for a moment,

to stop and take down
the guy's car number plate,

and now he's been charged with assault.

We were able to take
2,000 of the stories we collected

that specifically described

women's experiences of harassment
and assault on public transport

to the British Transport Police

when they decided to look at the way
that they police sexual offences.

We were able to break them down,
to hear from women's own voices

why they haven't felt able to report,

and then work
with the British Transport Police

to send out the message
to people everywhere

that they were taking this seriously
and they could report it.

So far we know that that project
- Project Guardian -

has raised reports of harassment
and assault on the tube

by up to 20 per cent.

We were able to start
talking to girls at universities

about the UK definition
of sexual assault, which is very simple.

Under UK law, if someone touches you
anywhere on your body,

and the touching is sexual,
and you don't consent,

and they don't have reason
to believe that you consent,

it's a form of sexual assault.

Girls came up to me saying,

"That can't be sexual assault
because it's normal."

"That can't be sexual assault

because that happens
when I go out with my friends."

"It can't be sexual assault

because I won't be able to call it that,

people won't take me seriously,
I couldn't go to the police."

We were able to start
to change that attitude

and able to start to get reports
of people who'd reported things

that previously, they'd had no idea
they had the right to object to.

We also started hearing people's
individual stories of standing up,

and that was really
fascinating and crucial,

because these weren't stories
of waving banners or going on marches

- as valuable as those are -

they were stories of women
and men around the world

finding that own very unique
and individual ways to stand up

that worked for them
and made a difference in their lives.

We heard from a woman who was being
sexually harassed in the office,

who printed off a copy of her workplace
sexual harassment policy

and put it on every single person's desk,
and the harassment stopped.

We heard from a woman who said
that she was sick of cold callers ringing.

She was a single mom
and sick of them ringing

and asking to speak
to the man of the house.

Now she puts them on
to her six-year old son,

(Laughter)

and apparently he sings them,
"I'm sexy and I know it."

(Laughter)

We heard from a guy
who was walking past a building site,

when two builders screamed
at two women across the road,

"Get your tits out!"

So he lifted up his T-shirt instead.

We heard from a woman who said

that every time someone screams
"Nice tits!" at her in the street,

she looks down at them, and screams
as if she'd never seen them before.

(Laughter)

(Applause)

We heard from a man who said

that he'd never really thought
about harassment before,

but after reading the stories

it gave him new insight
into what it actually felt like for women,

and the next time he saw another guy
in the street harassing two women,

he ran after him, tapped him
on the shoulder and said,

"Sorry, can I just ask you,
why did you do that?"

And the other guy had no answer,

because he'd never
been asked that question before,

because it was just normal, for him too.

He'd grown up in a world where that was
just normal and something that men did.

That's the really important thing here,

because sadly and frustratingly,

we can no longer point
to one specific policy change

or piece of legislation
that we need to solve this problem.

Particularly in the UK,
we have excellent legislation now,

a really good example
is workplace sexual harassment law,

which is fantastic.

The single biggest category
of entries that we receive

is from women being
harassed in the workplace,

being assaulted in the workplace,

being discriminated against
in the workplace.

What we need is a cultural
and a social shift

in our attitudes towards women,
and towards violence against women.

Because it's people in the workplace
that laugh along and call it "banter"

and just joke around
when someone grabs her breasts

that make her feel unable to report.

In a way that's the exciting thing,

because it means that we can all
be part of the solution.

If the Everyday Sexism Project
has shown anything,

it's that this is a continuum.

All of these things are connected.

The same ideas and attitudes about women

that underlie those more "minor" incidents
of sexism and harassment,

that we're often told to brush off
and not make a fuss about,

are the same ideas
and attitudes about women

that underlie the more
serious incidents of assault and rape.

What that means is
that by helping to contribute

to a cultural shift
in the way women are perceived -

whether it's in the media,
in the professional sphere,

in the social or economic sphere -
we help to shift the way

that they're perceived and treated
in the other spheres as well.

So that does mean that every one of us
can be part of the change.

It's not necessarily
about targeting perpetrators,

and it's certainly
not about telling victims

that they should be behaving
in a certain way

or reacting in a certain way.

It's about the people in the office

that made it difficult for that woman
to feel able to speak out;

it's about the people on that bus that day
that looked out of the window.

Be part of the change.

Be the cool aunt or uncle
who buys a chemistry set for their niece,

or a play cooker for their nephew.

Be the teenager that tells his friends

that actually it's not okay or funny
to refer to women as sluts or whores.

Be the person that lets somebody
who's been groped realize

that it will be taken seriously,
and they have the right to report it.

Be the tabloid editor
who commissions an article

that isn't illustrated
with a picture of a pair of women's tits.

Be the person at the bus stop

that steps in when they see
a woman being harassed.

Or be the person on the bus
that stands up and says it isn't okay.

Because our voices are the loudest
when we raise them together.

(Applause)