S03E02 Transcript: Laura Bates on Sexism

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Gemma Styles [00:00:01] Hello, I'm Gemma and welcome to another episode of Good Influence. This is the podcast where each week you and I meet a guest who will help us pay attention to something we should know about as well as answer some of your questions. This week we're talking about sexism: daily examples of sexism, how those linked together and linked to other forms of discrimination in the systems we have to tackle to make change. This episode does feature issues and language related to gender discrimination as well as serious sexual and physical violence. Please listen with care and put your mental health first. Joining me this week is Laura Bates. Laura is an author, journalist and is founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, which launched in 2012 and now consists of hundreds of thousands of readers submitted stories of gender inequality. Laura is also a contributor to Women Under Siege, an organisation working to combat sexual violence in war and conflict zones around the world have published. Books include titles such as Everyday Sexism, Men Who Hate Women, and her latest release, Fix the System Not the Women, which lays out patterns of systemic misogyny and debunks the myth that acts of violence towards women are ever just isolated incidents. So your kind of initial, maybe most public work in this kind of area started with the Everyday Sexism Project, which launched back in 2012. So as a whole ten years ago now, can we believe it? Could you give us a bit of background on how that started?

Laura Bates [00:01:48] Yeah, I started the project in spring 2012 after a really awful week where by total coincidence, I had a number of really bad experiences that happened together. I was on my way home one day when a man started following me quite aggressively, sexually propositioning me, refusing to take no for an answer, saying that he would follow me home and always know where I lived. And a few nights later, I was on the bus quite late at night on the phone to my mum, and suddenly looked down to realise that the man sitting next to me had his hand on my thigh and was moving it upwards between my legs and I moved away from him and in complete shock. And I said what was happening out loud because I was on the phone to my mum, I kind of blurted out, Mum, I'm on the bus. This guy just gropes me and everybody on the bus heard and everybody looked out the window. Nobody stepped in, nobody challenged it. Nobody even made eye contact with me. And a few days later, I was walking down the street and some guy started sort of shouting stuff about my body. And I was just thinking about these things that had happened at the end of this week. And the thing that suddenly struck me was that if they hadn't happened so close together and might never have thought twice about any one of them because it is normal. I was used to it and I started asking myself why it was normal and I started asking other women, Is this normal for you too? I couldn't believe how many stories they had to share. I thought a few people would have one or two stories. And of course it was everyone I spoke to and it was the million stories. It was on my way to meet you just now, every day at work. And I started the project because there was this really frustrating and bizarre gap between that reality of the women I was talking to and how much this was affecting their lives every day, and the kind of public perception that when I tried to talk about it and when I use the word sexism, people going, no, sexism doesn't exist. Women are equal. Now, you know, sexism is not a problem anymore is back in the seventies, the other countries around the world, if you want to find real problems affecting women, you know all of this stuff. Yeah. Women here don't have anything major to deal with. So I started this project very simply, not because I thought I could fix sexism overnight, but I thought, what if I could get people to see it? What if I could force people to acknowledge that actually this was a major issue impacting women and girls lives every day? And I thought if 100 women share their stories online in one place, it be somewhere to do that. And of course, what actually happened was that hundreds of thousands of testimonies poured in and it became the largest dataset of its kind. It's everything.

Gemma Styles [00:04:17] It really is. I mean, if you go on the website and just kind of look back through even the most recent posts. It's kind of it's not. I mean, it's not that it's not surprising, but it also kind of it does give you a kind of scope of what is happening every day. And I mean, even when people were sending in questions for this episode, there were a couple of people who would send in examples of how they'd been spoken to those one those one woman who replied to a tweet and said that she had heart surgery recently. And when she asked her doctor when she could think about resuming exercise, they told her that she could do light housework after a month, but maybe wait a while longer before you start hoovering, which, I mean, you kind of have to laugh because it just is so ridiculous. And that's obviously one example that we can look at and sort of shake our heads and go, how, how ridiculous. But in that situation, obviously, these are small things that happened to two women and two people throughout their lives and then add up, as you say, into a much larger problem.

Laura Bates [00:05:26] Yeah, absolutely. And that's why I wanted to put more side by side, because it's so easy to dismiss women and to belittle them and to ignore them and to disbelieve them. And that's what we've all faced, all our lives. You're overreacting. You're making a fuss about nothing. It wasn't because you a woman. It's just a coincidence. You've got the wrong end of the stick. I'm sure he didn't mean it like that. It was just a compliment. Lighten up, get a sense of humour. And it's not until you put these apparently minor things side by side that you recognise the weight of them and also that you recognise that it's a continuum and that that minor everyday stuff that we're never allowed to protest creates a kind of atmosphere, a power imbalance essentially. That is the ground from which the most serious of theses spring recognising those connexions has always been important to me.

Gemma Styles [00:06:09] Yeah, absolutely. And I think, yeah, in the examples that I read on the site, it does range from. You know, what people might look at as an offhand comment to the most serious kind of acts of violence.

Laura Bates [00:06:24] Yeah.

Gemma Styles [00:06:24] How have you. Because obviously you've been doing this work for some time now. How? How have things changed or what kind of range are you dealing with in this way? I don't know how to phrase that question particularly well, because obviously these things are still happening.

Laura Bates [00:06:40] Yeah, but.

Gemma Styles [00:06:41] How does that connect into the wider issues that you write about?

Laura Bates [00:06:46] Well, I think that what we've seen is that people are talking about them more now. They haven't stopped happening. And that's really important to say, because I think sometimes people think the conversation is the solution and it's not the fact that this stuff is more in the news, the fact that we're talking about it, the fact that we've had other things like MeToo and everyone's invited is is brilliant and powerful. And these conversations are happening. But the stories that are still flooding in make it very clear that the conversation itself isn't the solution as the starting point. But what we've seen is that there is enormous power in those stories, and I've tried to use them in offline, very targeted ways to kind of create shifts. So, for example, we took all the stories that we've received from girls, from girls at school being sexually harassed and assaulted and raped and grabbed and touched and slapped. And we took them into parliament and put them in front of ministers who were considering the curriculum and really campaigned very hard based on what these girls were facing for the curriculum to change, to include sexual consent and healthy relationships and so on, which it now does. And we took the stories that came from women on buses and trains and tubes to the British Transport Police and used those stories in women's own words directly to retrain 2000 British transport police officers and frontline staff to really understand the experience and why people might be reluctant to come forward, why people might not trust themselves and to really transform the way that they police and deal with sexual offences. On the transport network which raised the number of reports by almost 30% and the number of offenders who were caught by around the same amount so that it is possible for change to come and it is possible for stories to be the starting point of that change. But I think what's really frustrating now, ten years on, is looking at the public narrative around this and recognising that even after so many women have been so brave and have spoken out and have come forward, we're still looking in the wrong direction when we talk about this stuff. We're not seeing system change suggested as a preventative measure. Instead, we're seeing people still fixing on women and their dress and their behaviour and their choices and that's really frustrating.

Gemma Styles [00:08:56] Yeah, I mean we've had on the podcast before, we've had Ben Hirst on who we talked about, you know, gender and well he just disputed my use of the term, but toxic masculinity if you like, and kind of going into schools and seeing where that comes from. I understand you do a lot of work in schools as well with young people. What does that tend to look like? Those kind of sessions? Is there is that the kind of environment where you see certain themes on where we can maybe intervene earlier ages? Or is it is it is it ingrained in those young people already by the time you get into the schools?

Laura Bates [00:09:31] Yes, absolutely. And it's really shocking, but it's also very illuminating. So I think that that work is vital because it's where you start to understand exactly what the problem is and how it's manifesting. So it's really common for me to hear in school sessions with children of 13 or 14, phrases like rape is a compliment, really, it's not rape if she enjoys it to meet young people who don't think it's possible for a boyfriend to rape his girlfriend because a rapist is just a stranger in a dark alleyway to meet girls of 13 or 14, he'll talk about whipping that hockey sticks between their hands as they walk home at night. Because they're so scared, because they recognise that they are the ones who are expected to protect themselves from attack. I was in a school, one of the sort of stories that's always haunted me more than anything. I was in a school where they had a rape case involving a 14 year old boy and a teacher had asked him, Why didn't you stop when she was crying? And he had said, Because it's normal for girls to cry during sex. So a lot of what they've seen online in online pornography is informing some of these really mistaken ideas about sex and what it looks like and what's expected of them and what a relationship looks like. And there's a really big gap, I think, between adult understanding of young people's online lives and the reality of the kind of content that they're exposed to.

Gemma Styles [00:10:50] Yeah, I mean, I thought my whole body just got shivers. It's the kind of thing where you just. It's not surprising in the way that we know there were all these kind of raid damaging attitudes and horrible things out there. But, you know, hearing it, it filters down into like teenagers, even, for example, and how soon that happens. Because I know you've written a lot about. Kind of how these messages are spread and how deliberately desperate in terms of when I for example, when you think about the we hear in the news now as more and more common term, the kind of incel movement and these things that which are portrayed as very kind of underground, seedy, dark web places where you think, okay, well, there are certain individuals and you would have to really seek out these kind of ideas and then go and find them. Yeah, but that seems to suggest, you know, it's filtering into what is more mainstream, maybe more than we consciously realise. Would you say that's the case?

Laura Bates [00:11:56] Absolutely. And particularly for young people, because young people spend a lot of that online lives on on social media sites like YouTube, where the algorithm, we know, pushes you towards more and more extreme content, but also because those particular communities and incels are one of them. But Incels and other kind of extreme misogynistic communities online. I spent about two and a half years undercover in those websites studying them for my book, Men Who Hate Women. And what I learnt was that they are actively and deliberately recruiting voices around 11 and that they target them in places where they'll expect these boys to be. So they will find them on gaming livestreams, gaming chat rooms, bodybuilding forums, places where young, vulnerable teenage boys, particularly, who are already worried about kind of societal ideas of masculinity and bulking up, might be found. And it doesn't it doesn't start as a teenage boy searching. I hate women and looking for an insult website. Of course it doesn't. Yeah, it starts with Jake's and Instagram names and cultural touchpoints, and they know exactly what they're doing. They actually describe using those cultural touchpoints in means as adding cherry flavour to children's medicine. They use it to suck them in. And of course, there's a huge amount of racism intermingled that is big crossover with the far right. And it starts with banter and irony and kind of letting off steam and and echoing points of view that they would have had in the mainstream media. You know, is this hysteria? Is it a witch hunt? Is MeToo going too far? Innocent men losing their lives, which they could have seen in mainstream radio and newspapers. So it doesn't sound that shocking at first. And then very gradually it sort of becomes a slippery slope and things get a bit more extreme. And it's all irony and it's okay because you're joking. And somewhere down the road it's not a joke anymore. But you couldn't put your finger on where it stopped being ironic.

Gemma Styles [00:13:48] Yeah, I mean, that must be. Yeah. I mean, how do you even start to. Solve that problem. That must be I mean, it's one of those things where obviously we want to look for solutions. But having been, you know, undercover, as you say, and kind of really into what's happening daily on those forums. Did that give you any kind of insight as to where we might start to dismantle that kind of thing?

Laura Bates [00:14:12] Yeah, I think the good news is that there is a lot that we could do. There's lots of positive work we could do that would make a difference. The first thing I think is trying to prevent it happening in the first place because it's much easier to prevent radicalisation happening than to de-radicalize people afterwards. So starting these conversations in school from a much younger age about gender stereotypes and about misogyny and sexism would help to give young people a layer of kind of resistance to those sort of myths and misconceptions when they're bombarded with them online and actually a degree of kind of Internet literacy and supporting young people to be a little bit more careful about what they consume online and and a little bit more suspicious about the online sources they come into contact with. But also, a lot of what attracts boys to these sites is this sense of kind of brotherhood in arms and being kind of loyal to a cause and having a community and being kind of, you know, part of a club. And a lot of that is actually the kind of sentiment that young boys would have got from offline activities and support groups, youth clubs, for example. Yeah, loads of which have been closed down and had their funding slashed in the last ten years. So giving boys healthy places to enjoy that sense of community and purpose offline is a really simple way to tackle it. But also, I think for me what's really important and what we're not doing at all is simply labelling and recognising that this is extremism, that this is a form of terrorism, that it is radicalisation and grooming. When boys is sucked into these sites, it is hatred of a specific demographic group. In this case, women, based on myths and misconceptions and propaganda which encourages boys in these sites, literally are encouraging them to go offline and to women, massacre women, rape women. And it sounds so extreme and unlikely, but we're talking about membership of these groups being in the tens of thousands in the UK alone and around the world, about 100 people have been murdered or seriously injured by them in the last ten years. So these are boys who do sometimes get so immersed in this ideology that they do then come offline and and commit mass murders. And if that was any other situation where someone had been radicalised to hate a particular demographic and then they came offline, as in the case of Messiaen, for example, the 20 van attack drives a speeding rental van into pedestrians killing people. That 80% of his victims were women. We would call it terrorism because we would. But we're so used to violence against women as a normal fact of our life that we really struggle to recognise that this is extremism like any other.

Gemma Styles [00:16:46] Yeah, I mean, even that as a phrase I've seen, there's been a lot more conversation around, you know, using the term violence against women.

Laura Bates [00:16:54] Yeah.

Gemma Styles [00:16:55] Which. We do, obviously, because that's what we're talking about. But even, you know, the conversation moving to where well, who's committing that violence and it kind of the way describing it that way takes away who's actually committing the crime and kind of still makes it all about the women. I don't I'm not saying that. Right.

Laura Bates [00:17:12] Well, yeah, absolutely. No, you're completely right. And it's so normalised in our society we don't even realise we're doing it. So we're starting from this point of looking at everything backwards and that makes it so hard to tackle. You can see it really clearly. The fact that we see violence against women instead of male violence, which is the problem that we're talking about, even when there's an outcry, even when we are furious and devastated about what's happening. You can see in recent cases where this has happened that we're still framing it in a very particular way. Say, for example, after Nora Ephron's death, the thing that trended more than anything else online was she was just walking home and she did all the right thing. Yeah. And after Ashley Murphy's death, the thing that trended everywhere was she was just going for a run. And look, I totally understand where that comes from in that it was an expression of grief and anger and frustration. I get that nobody intended it like this. But really the context in which those were the words people reached for is a context in which it was most horrifying because these women didn't do anything to deserve it. That's what we're really saying. Yeah. You know, as if to say, if she'd been out at 2:00 in the morning in a miniskirt, partying or drinking or doing drugs or whatever, it would have been kind of understandable. But because she was just walking home, this is horrendous because we do live in a society still where that sort of response you need. The police told women in Clapham, don't go out alone at night after service disappear. Yeah. When Sabina, Nessa was murdered, they handed out articles to women in the local area and the government started talking about drones and apps that women could track to try and make themselves safer to download at night. Everywhere you look, you've got a police commissioner saying Sarah Everard shouldn't have submitted to the false arrest that her attacker used. When we lost Bobby McLeod, her male city council leader said, everyone has a responsibility not to put themselves in a compromising position. So everywhere you look, even when women are dying, our societal response is to talk about whether they were asking for it and what other women can do to work harder to try and avoid male violence instead of focussing on the violence and on the men.

Gemma Styles [00:19:22] Yeah, exactly. And putting that responsibility back on to people. I remember seeing Gina martin talking on Instagram a while ago about kind of coming to the really horrifying, uncomfortable realisation that all of this advice that we get as women on, you know, how what not to do and how to conduct ourselves in order to stay safe is still. Taking the fact that the male violence is going to happen as kind of an inevitability. And all of those things that we're supposed to do are basically supposed to make sure that it happens to someone else and not us. Which.

Laura Bates [00:19:58] Yeah.

Gemma Styles [00:19:59] Which I found. You know, this is something that Gina had obviously realised I was talking about. And when you think about that is just it's just horrific.

Laura Bates [00:20:07] Yeah, absolutely. And it means that we're never doing anything to even attempt stopping it at the source because of that sense of inevitability. And you see that everywhere you see it. When they propose women in train carriages, which comes around about once every two years, everyone starts talking about, well, this would be a good idea. Let's have women 80 train carriages. And what that means is that you're starting from a point of saying male violence is inevitable. So let's sort of corral all the women up to try and keep them safe. And our society has an incredibly high tolerance for this idea that we should disrupt women's lives and constrain women in order to keep them safe because of male violence. But we have zero tolerance for the idea that all men should be constrained because of male violence. So when we talk about women only train carriages, people go, well, you know, it's just common sense. So, you know, women not going out at night on their own after an attack. Well, you know, it's just sensible to be safe. But if you suggested that because men are attacking women, we should make sure that all men are put together in one train carriage so that they're in one place and they won't do any attacking. People go, That's outrageous. If you say men should only go out in groups in Clapham because we know that one of them has been attacking people, people are outraged, you know, not all men, that's despicable. And actually what that shows you is how ready we are to accept that women's liberty simply has to be sacrificed because of male violence. But we're just not ready to look at it. The other way around.

Gemma Styles [00:21:28] Is I mean, it's one of those things where it's like trying to kind of listen to a podcast episode. I'm like, Oh, we're going to have to come back and do seven more because it's obviously just such a huge. All pervasive sort of thing. But to try and I mean, your new book is called Fix the System Not the Women. In that book, you are looking at what we can actually do rather than just changing women's behaviour, which is always our sort of go to response. Yeah. How to systematically tackle.

Laura Bates [00:22:02] This year.

Gemma Styles [00:22:04] Could you tell us a bit about the book, kind of how I mean, how did you even begin to try to try and sort of dig into this?

Laura Bates [00:22:12] Well, the book came out of my fury that even when women's safety and male violence was suddenly on the agenda in the last 18 months or so, we were still seeing these solutions proposed by the government and the police that was so focussed on women and fixing women's behaviour. And it was also wider than that because it was patterns that I was seeing in the Everyday Sexism Project as well, where we were hearing stories, for example, of women being discriminated against, being sacked at work because they were pregnant, that kind of thing. And seeing the solutions being suggested by companies around International Women's Day and through the year, as you know, women's networking and empowerment courses for women as if again, women were the problem, as if women just needed to be that little bit braver instead of recognising that systemic discrimination was going on. So I felt really strongly that I wanted to kind of flip that narrative and I wanted to look at the stories that we've received from women and how if you join the dots between your experiences, you can recognise that it's not your fault. It's not that you were just too silly or you've got something wrong, or you're just not that kind of person. It's that we live in a society where we are experiencing systemic oppression, and that's a really hard thing to get your head around. And then I wanted to say that actually the solutions are there, because when we talk about these issues, people tend to shrug their shoulders and kind of throw out sort of random ideas as if it's such a huge issue. How could we possibly tackle it? And that's how you get these ridiculous things, like the Met police telling us that women should think about flagging down a bus if a lone officer arrests them. I mean, but the reality is that the solutions are that the solutions are there at a political level like the Istanbul convention, which would make a massive difference but hasn't been ratified by the UK government. They're there at the educational level with the kind of things that we should be teaching in schools. That could make a really big difference. And particularly I think they're there when it comes to looking at reform of policing and criminal justice. If we can't recognise that the system is rotten and completely failing women, then we can't demand system change. And I wanted this book to give people the kind of tools and information that they needed to understand that the system is institutionally misogynistic and that we have the right to actually demand complete overhaul and change. You know, because we're told it's bad apples all the time. They actually use the phrase bad apples, wrong ends. We heard that when Cousins met with Sarah Everard was a bad apple, that his colleagues literally nicknamed him the rapist and he'd been reported three times for indecent exposure without facing any repercussions. We were told that it was a shocking operation, that officers shared photos of the dead bodies of the head manacles woman but they shared those photos in a WhatsApp group with 41 other met offices. And in fact 2000 met offices have been accused of sexual misconduct over the last four years alone. So this idea that it's bad apples, it's isolated incidents is unconnected. There's nothing wrong with the system. It's just the women that need to try a bit harder. It's really frustrating and I wanted to put down in one place all the proof that the system is misogynistic and needs to change, not us.

Gemma Styles [00:25:21] Yeah, absolutely. And you focus on five different areas and how they all kind of link Lincoln, is that right? Yes. Where have we started? With the five areas.

Laura Bates [00:25:31] So what we've talked a little bit about education and policing and criminal justice. And the other two areas I look at in the book are politics and media. And the reason they're so interlinked is because if you think about the problems that we've talked about with education and policing, well, how do we change that? We need support from politicians, right? We need political will to change it. But then you come up against the fact that only six out of 23 of our cabinet ministers are women. Only a third of our MPs. We've got a system where reportedly the government gave out a Sexist of the year award in celebration at one of their favoured bill breaking parties. Well we've got to end up is watching porn in parliament. We've got 56 MPs under investigation at the moment for sexual misconduct, which is about a 10th of all MPPs. So you can't kind of fix one system without recognising another system is broken. And of course, if you want to put pressure on politicians to make those changes, what do you need? You need the media. You need the media to cover this in a responsible and a powerful way. And then you go, oh, but hang on a minute, because actually within the media you suddenly realise that on national newspapers there are only five female editors and 14 men that remain. And you write one quarter of front page stories that 20% of young women working in UK media are sexually harassed in their first few years on the job. And you think there's a systemic problem there that needs fixing? It's all kind of a vicious circle, and it's all. In these systems, all interlinked.

Gemma Styles [00:27:04] And I think even, you know, we talk about the systems that contribute to sexism, but that also then obviously links to all of these other isms, if you like, that all the other systems that aren't working that we need to. To look at. I mean, obviously we talk about things like policing. Yeah, the criminal justice system is obviously quite hard to even talk about those things without them talking about the racism that then comes in and Islington and other examples, you know, things like health care where there are obvious racial disparities, things that trans women are more at risk of sort of more risk, but are obviously very at risk of certain types of violence. Yeah, disabled women are discriminated against in all these ways as well. How important do you think it is that we see the links between all of these things and kind of making progress in one area? Should then be knocking onto all of these other areas as well.

Laura Bates [00:28:00] Absolutely. I mean, it's hugely important because otherwise we're only making progress for a very small, specific group of people and leaving behind everybody who lives at these intersections. And you see the impact of these intersections on people's lives so clearly in the everyday sexism project, because I think in our society we tend to think of them like they're totally separate problems. You know, we have a disability commission or we have Black History Month or we have International Women's Day. And it's like these are totally separate issues. But of course, in the stories that we receive, we see how in women's lived experience, of course, they're intermingled. A woman doesn't one day experience racism walking down the street and on a separate day. Sexism. And they're completely different problems. It's it's a black woman waiting to give the keynote speech at a conference and constantly being interrupted by attendees asking if they can get a coffee or she can shave into the bathroom. Assuming that she's a member of staff at the venue. It's a disabled woman being told to dance around her walking stick in the street. It's women in the street with female partners who are not only sexually harassed but also hounded by men asking if they can videotape them or join in, or transwomen who see sexual harassment escalate into physical violence when the harasser realises that they're transgender. So those kind of issues with the systems that we're talking about, if you want to reform policing, if you want to create root and branch change there, you've got to recognise it's also an institutionally racist system where black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than white people. If you want to tackle the kind of the face of the way that we deal with male violence, and I think a big part of that is funding for the women's sector. You've got to build into that the fact that one in four women will experience domestic abuse, but the number rises to one in two for disabled women. But even though disabled women are one in five of women in the UK, only 10% of refuge places are accessible. So all of these problems have an additional layer dimension to them, which is intersectional. And if we don't take that into account in looking for solutions, we might as well not bother trying to fix it in the first place.

Gemma Styles [00:30:03] Yeah, absolutely. All that being sad and trying to you know, in the time that we've got. In your position, what would you say our current outlook is on all the work that you've done, on looking at how these systems need to change and how they might possibly be changed. Have you seen much hope that things are changing? Is there a direction that you think we're moving towards or are we still very much in the phase of, you know, we need to shout about this much more before people are going to take the kind of action that we know they need to?

Laura Bates [00:30:37] Well, I think it's fair to say that we're kind of at crisis point at the moment. I mean, if there's one statistic that really sums up for me is the fact that we are living in a country where only 1.4% of cases that are actually reported to the police result in a charge or a summons or even a conviction, but just someone being charged and summoned. So it really is hysterical or overreacting to say that rape has essentially been decriminalised in the country that we live in. And I think that is really, really short. I think that should be a national scandal and it isn't. So I think we are still at the beginning in terms of the change that we need to see. I think we do need to shout more about it. I feel very frustrated that there doesn't seem to be political appetite to tackle this on a very kind of grand scale, a kind of joined up solution to tackle the joined up problem. But I do think that there have been recent shifts that have suggested perhaps that we are moving in the right direction. I think that Cressida Dick's resignation was the first time in a very long time that it seemed like there was going to be some accountability within policing. The fact that you just couldn't carry on brushing this stuff under the carpet and saying, no, no, it's just bad apples. It's just bad apples. And that actually there is an institutional crisis with misogyny in policing. And that was the first acknowledgement. It felt like to me from within the system that actually you couldn't just carry on looking the other way anymore. I think what that suggests is that public pressure is starting to play a role, but I think we need more of it, particularly on this current government. We don't necessarily have the best track record when it comes to listening to and tackling these issues. We have a prime minister who has said that if a woman bothers you in the workplace, you should pat her on the bottom and send her on her way. Who has described Muslim women as letterboxes and bank copies and said that you should vote Tory to make your wife's breasts bigger and so on. So it's difficult to be particularly optimistic with somebody like that at the helm that we're really going to see meaningful, systemic change. But we just have to keep the pressure on. We have to keep shouting about it and we have to keep our eye on the ball, which is the systems, not the women.

Gemma Styles [00:32:49] I mean, even unless is very UK focussed, just just because obviously that's about where we live and we're currently talking about. But I mean you have to hope no election results that we've seen even, you know, kind of in the past few days where the Conservatives have taken, taken a bit of a knock in their seats, which hopefully, as you say, means that we're looking at the people who are in charge and actually making our voices heard to say that this is not acceptable. We want changes.

Laura Bates [00:33:15] Absolutely.

Gemma Styles [00:33:19] Every week, my guests and I will be answering your questions. The first one comes in from Paula. Recently, MP We The Girls had a problem with all male classmates. They were very disrespectful about how we play certain games like basketball or football because we were girls. We asked if we could play just the girls in a separate group, and even though we got to do it since then, the boys have been made to us because, quote, We get offended by everything and they can't even talk to us anymore. And so I feel that we did the right thing, but the reaction is bothering me. Do you have tips on how to improve this or at least on how not to feel guilty about it?

Laura Bates [00:33:58] I think definitely don't feel guilty. You I think you did do the right thing. You had a situation where you were being made to feel uncomfortable and harassed by something and you stood up for yourselves together and asked for a solution, which is amazing. And I think what happens when we see people standing up against different forms of inequality is that people get frustrated and there's often a kind of defensive, knee jerk reaction from the dominant group. They don't like that. They don't like that. They don't just get away with it. They don't like the idea that people fight back. So I think the first thing to say is good for you and your friends and don't feel bad about it. Don't feel guilty. You have done something right. You have made a difference to your experience and your friends experiences. And I think what I'd say is that progress can be uncomfortable. And just because there's that sort of backlash in that sense of annoyance from the boys doesn't mean that you might have changed their minds and made them think twice before making those kinds of comments in the future. I'd say that if it gets worse or it doesn't improve, then don't be afraid to talk to the school about it because the school should be supporting you and dealing with something like this. You shouldn't have to deal with it on your own. So if there's a teacher that you trust to talk about it and don't be afraid to let them know what's happening.

Gemma Styles [00:35:08] Yeah, I think that's good advice and I think it. Kind of question that I find interesting because it it's something that, you know, we talk about girls in schools who are already dealing with these issues. And it kind of brings in then conversations that, you know, are still happening all the time, like the whole idea of bingo, you can't even talk to women anymore because nobody can take a joke. Whereas that, you know, not even considering that what they thought was a joke wasn't funny and actually wasn't a joke in the first place. So I think, yeah, yeah. The fact that Paula, who's in school and is already, you know, kind of figuring out how to how to try and combat these issues. I thought it was. Yeah. Was a good one to include.

Laura Bates [00:35:47] Good for her. Yeah.

Gemma Styles [00:35:49] Next question from Earl, who says, How do we rid ourselves of misogynistic thoughts that become built in, for example, the instinct to criticise what a girl's wearing before we then remind ourselves not to think?

Laura Bates [00:36:02] That's a great question. I think that it's a process. I think that ingrained misogyny and sexism is in all of us because we've grown up in a society where it is just completely the norm. I've been getting these messages since we were so young. Five is the age when girls first start to worry about the size and shape of their bodies and the culture of seven year old girls have dieted to lose weight. By the time that we're ten years old, that goes up to 80%. So I think the first thing is not to blame yourself. We live in a world that has taught us that our size and our shape and our looks are the most important thing about us since before we were anywhere near old enough to kind of respond to that critically. And we've also grown up with media that has taught us that it's all about shaming other women, about catfights, about the idea that other women are our competition rather than our allies. So all of this is to say that those thoughts are understandable. And I think that the fact that you're recognising them is the first step. I think recognising the thoughts when you have them and then trying to move to a place of replacing them with more positive ideas. And I think one way to do that is to try and really kind of surround yourself with positivity, positive role models with women who are challenging things and questioning them and looking at them differently. I think that there are lots of great ways to kind of do that online. The female lead has a great campaign on Instagram, actually. That's all about kind of changing your feed to reflect different values. That might be a place to look to sort of get ideas and inspiration from.

Gemma Styles [00:37:32] So kind of related to what we were talking about before and kind of speaking to people in schools. This question from Ana, who says, I'm leading the equality group with my school. I'm in year 13 and I'm wondering how to educate and present sexism to the younger years. So from kind of age 11 and says, I had a meeting today and realised how undereducated they all say for any advice.

Laura Bates [00:37:53] Well, brilliant that you're doing it. Good for you and thank you. That's amazing. I think there's lots of different ways to tackle it. I think that sometimes kind of facts and figures can be helpful because a lot of the young people I work with are quite unaware of how unequal the world around us is. There's lots of stats online. My TEDx talk has a kind of easy view of stats on gender inequality in the UK that might be useful. There are external organisations you can help save the UN. The quality, for example, is brilliant. It happens is a really good sex education charity that goes into schools and talks to young people about these issues if you need some backup. And beyond that, I think don't be afraid to take it one step at a time. It's not going to be possible to kind of deal with it all overnight. But starting conversations with young people, in my experience, is much more useful than trying to kind of preach at them. So ask them to start a conversation with them about how their lives are impacted by being girls and see what comes out. And I think in a way, they might find the answers themselves even more than you are able to kind of feed them to them. And that might be even more powerful.

Gemma Styles [00:39:00] Yeah, absolutely. I'm kind of actually going to follow up with my own question from that, because I feel like when we talk about. You know, we were discussing earlier education in schools and kind of conversations that you've had with boys. And I know that that we had questions sent in as well about how to speak to young girls and give them that sort of bolstered. Sense of self-worth and kind of acknowledgement of these issues from a young age. Then hearing about that and a kind of like a school group. In your experience, do you find. I mean, do you tend to split these kind of groups in an education, setting down gender lines? Or do you feel like mixed gendered groups are the way to do this in a school setting or, you know, what does everybody need to be hearing all of the stuff? Or does, you know, split in groups sometimes? Is that more beneficial? That's such a good question.

Laura Bates [00:39:58] There's actually really good research on this. And what the research suggests is that doing both is the best outcome of all. So giving spaces where people can be in separate breeds, where girls are able to perhaps talk about experiences that they've had without necessarily feeling intimidated or worried that there'll be backlash from talking about it in front of the boys. That can be really beneficial. Giving boys a space to talk about these things where they feel that they can be vulnerable just amongst themselves and kind of talk about their anxieties. But then also having mixed gender groups where young people have the opportunity to come together, it's important for the boys to hear what the girls experiences are. It's important for them all to recognise that these are issues that affect all of them, especially when you're kind of debunking some of the myths that young people have heard about feminism and sexism. I think that's a kind of mixed group sort of issue. So yeah, the research suggests that if possible, doing both has the best possible outcome. So giving space for both.

Gemma Styles [00:40:59] Interesting. Yeah, I've wondered that before. And then kind of forgotten because I think we do talk about it as being so split up. But then it's almost like how I remember. Kind of a health based sort of sex education at school. And you kind of miss out on the whole other half of the conversation and especially, you know, yeah, whichever gender or, you know, there are other marginalised genders and I think, you know, having more of that conversation actually being less split up. Yeah, kind of seems to me like it would make sense, but I don't, I don't really hear it discussed as much.

Laura Bates [00:41:31] Yeah, I think so too. I mean, it's been for so long the case that girls would have a talk about rape and how to avoid it while boys were sent out to play football. You know that girls would learn about periods and it just wasn't considered to be something that boys ever needed to know about or hear about and that kind of stigma and to be in secrecy. So I think that the mixed conversations with young people of all genders is really important, but that sometimes having those kind of opportunities for breakaway groups can be really important as well to provide a very kind of safe space for certain sensitive discussions.

Gemma Styles [00:42:46] If you want to know about opportunities to send in questions for upcoming guests, follow us on Instagram or Twitter at good influence. Yes. And you can email me at good influence pod at gmail.com. Before you go, I've got three things I ask every guest. That's if people listening want to find out more about what we've been talking about. Could you please recommend us? Something to read, something to listen to and something to watch?

Laura Bates [00:43:12] Absolutely. Say something to read. I would recommend a book called Rage Becomes Her by Soraya Shomali. I think that we are approaching a moment of real rage and righteous anger in response to some of the issues that women are facing all around the world, not least in the US, with the recent restrictions on abortion. And this book is all about how women have been told that we're not allowed to be angry, that it's not ladylike and the power of reclaiming outrage. Something to listen to. A podcast I'd recommend is called Women Resisting Violence, and it's a podcast from the Latin America Bureau and King's College, London. I particularly would recommend episode three Step Up Migrant Women, which explores the issues where we have a huge blindspot in the UK, basically where migrant women are not afforded any of the same protections or support when they experience domestic abuse because of the kind of hostile environment policy, the fact that they have no recourse to public funds. So it's a really good kind of primer for understanding that issue and something to watch. I recommend Unbelievable on Netflix, which is a true story that gives a real insight into just how badly women can be let down by the system.

Gemma Styles [00:44:22] Thank you for listening and thank you, Laura, for joining me. If you enjoyed the episode, I'd love you to subscribe to the podcast on whichever platform you're using. If you've got an extra minute, you can leave a rating under review as well. These make a big difference and help other people find the podcast. See you next week.