Caroline Criado-Perez


Caroline Emma Criado-Perez is a British feminist, activist, author and journalist. Her first national campaign, the Women's Room project, was for female experts to be better represented in the media. She opposed the removal of the only woman from British banknotes, leading to the Bank of England's swift announcement that the image of Jane Austen would appear on the £10 note by 2017. That campaign led to sustained harassment on the social networking website Twitter of Criado-Perez and other women; as a result, Twitter announced plans to improve its complaint procedures. Her most recent campaign was for a sculpture of a woman in Parliament Square; the statue of Millicent Fawcett was unveiled in April 2018, as part of the centenary celebrations of the winning of women's suffrage in the United Kingdom. Her 2019 book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men was a Sunday Times bestseller.

Early life and education

Born in Brazil, she is the daughter of Carlos Criado-Perez, an Argentinian-born businessman and CEO of the Safeway supermarket chain in the UK, and Alison, an English registered nurse who has worked with Medecins Sans Frontieres on a number of humanitarian aid missions. The family lived in several countries during her childhood, including Spain, Portugal and Taiwan, as well as the UK. When Criado-Perez was 11, her father moved to the Netherlands and she began to board at Oundle School, a public school. She disliked what she described as a bullying culture there.
Criado-Perez spent a year at university in London, then abandoned a history course. Having developed a passion for opera during her teens, she wanted to become an opera singer, and various jobs subsidised her singing lessons.
Criado-Perez worked in digital marketing for some years, then studied for an English Literature A-level. She gained a place to study English Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford as a mature student, graduating from Oxford University in 2012. Study of language and gender and a book by Deborah Cameron discussing gender's relationship to pronouns, led to Criado-Perez becoming a feminist.
She was a runner-up in the London Library Student Writing competition in 2012, receiving £1,000 and other prizes. Since then, she worked, in 2012, as an editor for an information and networking portal of the pharmaceutical industry and in 2013 was in the process of completing a master's degree in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics.
In a June 2013 profile by journalist Cathy Newman in The Telegraph, Criado-Perez commented: "the culture we live in is made up of little tiny sexist acts which you can just ignore but when you think of them collectively you start to see a pattern."

Campaigns

Female representation in the media

In November 2012, with Catherine Smith, she founded the website Women's Room, whose goal is to collect suggestions for female professionals and to convey to journalists to increase the proportion of women in the media. The immediate reason for this development were two features on the BBC Radio 4 Today programme broadcast on consecutive days in October 2012, on the prevention of teenage pregnancies and breast cancer, in which no female expert was interviewed – the interviewers were also male. As a result, presenter John Humphrys had to ask during the latter item: "if you were a woman you would have no hesitation about being screened"? One of the interviewees on the item about teenage pregnancies was Anthony Seldon, the headmaster of Wellington College, a public school. Criado-Perez wrote that Seldon might be an authority on contemporary British political history, but not on the immediate subject under discussion. She commented on the rather narrow selection of voices, on social lines as well as gender, in such broadcast debates in early November 2012: "These voices are shaping the debate, and they therefore wield a huge influence over our currently populist public policy. If public policy is going to be so responsive to the media, let's make the media truly representative of the public."
On the Wikipedia controversy in April 2013 concerning the creation of a sub-category for American women novelists, she was reported as saying: "It perpetuates the idea that men are the default and don’t need to be marked in any way, whereas women are still seen as the outliers."

Women on banknotes

In another campaign, she criticised the Bank of England’s decision to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on the £5 note, which left no women featured on the reverse of bank notes; the Queen is depicted on the front of bank notes, with historically prominent people on the reverse. Dismissing Churchill as "another white man", Criado-Perez pointed out that the Equality Act 2010 commits public institutions to "eliminate discrimination", whereas proof the Bank had acted with the required "due regard" was absent because details of the decision-making process were not made public. Criado-Perez met Head of Notes Victoria Cleland and Chief Cashier Chris Salmon at the Bank to discuss it.
The campaign, which gained the support of 35,000 petitioners, and financial support for a potential legal challenge led Mark Carney, the newly appointed Governor of the Bank of England, to announce that the image of Jane Austen would appear on a new £10 note, replacing that of Churchill. "People have said this was not such a big thing to tackle, but I didn't especially pick on banknotes", Criado-Perez commented to The Observers Vanessa Thorpe. "I just saw the new note and thought, 'I am not having this'. And the Bank of England is not a small institution." Jane Austen was not her preferred female historical figure, but Criado-Perez still approved of the choice: "She spent her time poking fun at the establishment. All her books are about how women are trapped and misrepresented. It is really sad that she was saying that 200 years ago and I am still having to say that today".
In an article in the London Evening Standard in September 2017, Criado-Perez wrote that she would donate her first "Austen tenner" to her local women's shelter: "It feels like the right way to end this chapter of my life". Others followed suit, donating their tenners to charities ranging from large ones such as Women's Aid to start-ups such as Bloody Good Period.

Harassment on Twitter

This decision by the Bank of England resulted in numerous threats, including threats of rape and murder, made against Criado-Perez and other women on Twitter from the day of the Bank of England's announcement in July 2013. At this point, Criado-Perez said that she was receiving about 50 such threats each hour, and found somewhat inadequate the suggestion that she fill in an on-line form for Twitter detailing the behaviour she had experienced. At the height of the abuse, Criado-Perez "lost half a stone in two days" and "couldn't eat or sleep". She commented later: "I don't know if I had a kind of breakdown. I was unable to function, unable to have normal interactions."
While she felt it was taking over her life, Twitter at the time was assuming no responsibility for the content of tweets, merely advising users to contact the relevant authorities. Criado-Perez said the campaign of abuse, provoked by a small issue, "shows it's not about what women are doing, not about feminism. It's that some men don't like women, and don't like women in the public domain." In her view: "Men get attacked because they’ve said or done something someone doesn’t like, whereas women get attacked because they’re visible."
The Labour MP Stella Creasy, who had been involved with Criado-Perez in the bank note campaign, was amongst those who suffered similar criminal harassment. A man and a woman were arrested towards the end of July. An on-line petition calling on Twitter to introduce a button to enable site users to report abuse had gained 110,000 signatures by 2 August.
Criado-Perez did not participate in the Twitter silence organised by Times journalist Caitlin Moran for 4 August to persuade Twitter to change its policies. "Sorry, but I won't be silenced by anyone", she said. Although she acknowledged that the boycott was a "mark of solidarity", she argued the need to "shout back" at trolls. On 3 August, the social media site's general manager in Britain, Tony Wang, announced a one-click option on all posts enabling users to easily report abusive tweets, and apologised to the women who had received abuse.
In September 2013, Criado-Perez felt that the Metropolitan Police had not treated her honourably, and reported that they had lost evidence. The following day, the Metropolitan Police said they had not lost evidence in this case. Meanwhile, Criado-Perez deleted her Twitter account for a time. On 16 December, it emerged that a woman and a man from Tyne and Wear would appear in court in early January having been charged with the improper use of a communications network. It was announced at this time that two other suspects were not going to be charged, and of a fifth a decision was yet to be made. On 7 January 2014, John Nimmo and Isabella Sorley pleaded guilty to the charges brought against them. Sorley was sentenced to 12 weeks and Nimmo 8 weeks on 24 January. When asked on the BBC's Newsnight programme in early January whether she was surprised that one of the convicted Twitter abusers was female, Criado-Perez said that the woman in question had internalised misogyny already rampant in society as a whole. A second man, Peter Nunn, 33, was found guilty of sending threatening tweets to Creasy on 2 September, and was blocked from contacting either woman when he was imprisoned for 18 weeks on 29 September 2014.
As a result of her campaign against Twitter policies, columnist Owen Jones in July 2013 described Criado-Perez as "a brilliant fighter".
After Jeremy Corbyn became Labour leader in September 2015, Criado-Perez tweeted: "I really thought Corbyn would have the sense to give top cabinet jobs to women. You're a white male leader with a white male deputy". Corbyn's shadow Chancellor, Foreign and Home Secretaries were also men. In the context of threatening behaviour suffered predominantly by female Labour MPs before and during the 2016 Labour leadership crisis, Criado-Perez has written about the subject for The Pool website.

Statue of Millicent Fawcett

On 8 March 2016, International Women's Day, Criado-Perez noticed the absence of any statue of a woman in Parliament Square, Westminster. The eleven statues, including Winston Churchill and Nelson Mandela, were all commemorating men.
She launched a campaign for a statue of a suffragette to be erected in Parliament Square for the centennial anniversary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. "If we lived in a fair world, historical, non-royal women would not make up a paltry 2,7 per cent of all the statues in the UK", she wrote in the New Statesman. "But we do not live in a fair world. And I'm realistic about the pace of change". Her open letter to the newly elected London Mayor Sadiq Khan, published by The Daily Telegraph the following May, was signed by a number of prominent women. Khan soon indicated his agreement to such a development, but did not at that stage commit to the location she wished, Parliament Square. A petition signed by 74,000 people was presented by Criado-Perez in June at an event in the Speaker's House State Rooms hosted by the Fawcett Society, with Millicent Fawcett — not a suffragette but a suffragist — now suggested as the figure to be represented. Criado-Perez agreed.
In April 2017, Sadiq Khan announced that Gillian Wearing had been commissioned to create a statue of Millicent Fawcett. Prime Minister Theresa May also signalled her approval. Fawcett is the first woman to be featured in a statue in the Square, and Wearing is the first female sculptor to have a statue located there. Announcing the plan for the statue of Fawcett, Khan said: "It’s simply not right that nearly a century after women’s suffrage, Parliament Square is still a male-only zone, and I’m thrilled that this is soon to change thanks to Caroline’s inspired campaign". The statue was unveiled on 24 April 2018 for the commemoration of the extension of the franchise to women in 1918 - though this extension was at first on unequal terms to men. On the plinth of the statue are the names and pictures of 55 women who fought for women's right to vote.

Honours

For her successful activism over depicting women on bank notes, Criado-Perez won the human rights campaigner of the year award from the pressure group Liberty in November 2013. In 2013, she was also named one of BBC's 100 Women. Criado-Perez was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to equality and diversity, particularly in the media. In 2019, Criado-Perez won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Books Prize and the Financial Times Business Book of the Year award for Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.

''Invisible Women''

The book received both the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award in 2019. It has on the whole been welcomed and positively reviewed in major publications.
This book is described by Professor Cordelia Fine and Dr Victor Sojo in the The Lancet as providing, "several fascinating case studies—from domains as varied as medicine, occupational health and safety, transport, technology, politics, and disaster relief".
The reviewer GrrrlScientist, writing in Forbes, calls Invisible Women an "intelligent, accessible and witty book" pointing out its status as the winner of the Royal Society Insight Investment science book prize for 2019, saying "as we the readers explore the subtle and ubiquitous nature of male-biased big data, we couldn’t find a more capable guide." It was an "intensively researched book" which "exposes a male-biased world and successfully argues that the lack of “big data” on women is equivalent to rendering half of the world’s population invisible".
Carol Tavris reviewed it for Skeptical Inquirer Magazine, stating that the "theoretical underpinning of this book is not new; every generation of feminist scholars rediscovers Simone de Beauvoir's 1949 observations that women are the second sex", referring to the French philosopher's book.
Angela Saini reviewed it in The Guardian, calling it "a dossier on gender inequality that demands urgent action." The book makes clear, she writes that "women aren’t a minority. They are the majority. They are absolutely everywhere and always have been. Yet as Criado Perez shows, women must live in a society built around men. From a lack of streetlights to allow us to feel safe, to an absence of workplace childcare facilities, almost everything seems to have been designed for the average white working man and the average stay-at-home white woman. Her answer is to think again, to collect more data, study that data, and ask women what they want." Still, writes Saini, for all the data that Criado Perez presents, it is unclear that governments "What should worry us more than the data gap, then, is that huge and seemingly intractable don’t-give-a-damn gap."
In a review for the Literary Review titled 'Female Unfriendly', the veteran feminist author Joan Smith, herself author of many books including Misogynies: Reflections on Myths and Malice and Home Grown: How Domestic Violence Turns Men Into Terrorists, lauds the book as essential reading, at least for those to whom Criado Perez's findings will be news. "This book, which demonstrates the bias men enjoy in both familiar and less obvious scenarios, sets the record straight. I knew, for instance, that women fare worse after heart attacks because they present with different symptoms from men; Criado Perez cites research showing that women are 50 per cent more likely to be misdiagnosed because they tend not to have the classic ‘Hollywood heart attack’, which begins with chest and left-arm pains. But I didn’t realise that women are also more likely to suffer serious injuries in a car crash because crash test dummies have traditionally been designed to reflect the ‘average’ male body." Smith concludes that "The cumulative effect of all this evidence is devastating, even if it confirms what most women already know."