With women’s rights drawing more attention internationally due to shocking stories coming out of India and Pakistan, a UK women is using social media to draw attention to the daily sexism women face all around the world. @EverydaySexism is a twitter feed and website started by actress and writer Laura Bates last April. The project asks women from around the world to submit stories of their everyday experiences with sexism and misogyny. The stories are then posted anonymously or not, based on the submitter’s wishes.

“I set up the project as I felt everyday sexism was a really invisible problem. So many women I knew were having similar experiences and were repeatedly being told ‘not to complain’ and ‘have a sense of humour’ if they brought up what had happened to them,” said Bates in conversation with The Telegraph.

Bates says that despite the initial negative reaction she received upon starting the project (at one point, Bates received 200 death threats a day online), the majority of feedback she now receives is supportive, including from fathers who are taking up the cause on behalf of their daughters. An alarming amount of the entries received by the site come from teenage girls.

An example of a tweet from @EverydaySexism

Today, the project reached 20,000 tweets. Bates is now working to expand the project into an educational tool that allows people to search by location or topic and hopes to one day create a foundation.

[via The Telegraph]

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Eva Voinigescu is an intern at Toronto Standard. Follow her on Twitter @EvaVoinigescu.

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