9. Laura Bates

Laura Bates is the founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, a collection of over 10,000 women’s daily experiences of gender inequality. She started the project in 2012 after finding it difficult to speak out about sexism. By December 2013 the site had 50,000 entries, thousands from girls under the age of 18.

She was inspired by observing the behavior of young girls while she was a nanny, whose female role models were only based on their appearance. Everyday Sexism successfully campaigned for the removal of a mobile app aimed at girls to use plastic surgery to make a game character “slim and beautiful” because of its promotion of a poor perspective about body image to those of a young age.

Laura Bates is also a contributor at Women under Siege, a New York-based project working to combat the use of sexualised violence as a tool of war. She has written for the Independent, the Huffington Post, the Women’s Media Center and JUMP! Magazine for girls. She has an MA in English Literature from the University of Cambridge.