Caroline Criado-Perez

Caroline Emma Criado Perez (born 1984) is a British feminist author, journalist and activist.

Her first national campaign, the Women's Room project, aimed to increase the presence of female experts in the media.

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 Observer's Vanessa Thorpe.

"I just saw the [proposed] 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".

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 an active 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 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."

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."

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."

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.

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."

She opposed the removal of the only woman from British banknotes (other than The Queen), 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.

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.

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.

Born in Brazil, she is the daughter of Carlos Criado Perez, an Argentinian-born businessman and former 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 in Northamptonshire, England.

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.