Caroline Criado-Perez is an activist and journalist who has led several high-profile campaigns focused on social justice and greater representation of women in the media and society. For her work, she was been awarded the Human Rights Campaigner of the Year award by Liberty, was featured in the BBC’s 100 Women, and was honoured with an OBE in 2015.
Alongside Catherine Smith, Criado-Perez came to prominence when she founded the website Women’s Room. The website connects journalists with female experts in a variety of fields, in an effort to overcome the fact that three-quarters of such experts featured in the media are men. Later, Criado-Perez led the effort to ensure that the new £10 bank note would feature a woman, and after the notes featuring the author Jane Austen were printed she encouraged others to follow her example and donate their first ‘Austen tenner’ to women’s charities. In 2016, she launched a campaign for a statue of a representative of the women’s suffrage movement to be added to the 11 statues of men in Parliament Square. Following the campaign, and her open letter to the Mayor of London Sadiq Khan, a statue of Millicent Fawcett was announced and was unveiled in 2018.
Criado-Perez has written extensively in the media, not only on social justice and political issues, but also reviews and lifestyle features. Her words have been featured in The Guardian, The New Statesman, The Times, Grazia and Marie Claire. Her books Do It Like a Woman, and 2019’s Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men have both been released to popular and critical acclaim, the latter winning the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Books Prize. She is frequently interviewed in the media, across television and radio, and is invited to speak across the world.
