Everydaysexism.com is a website set up by Laura Bates, where women can upload their experiences so that people would start to see the connections and the bigger picture.
The website states: The Everyday Sexism Project exists to catalogue instances of sexism
experienced by women on a day to day basis. They might be serious or
minor, outrageously offensive or so niggling and normalised that you
don’t even feel able to protest.
The Everyday Sexism project aims to take a step towards gender equality,
by proving wrong those who tell women that they can’t complain because
we are equal. It is a place to record stories of sexism faced on a daily
basis, by ordinary women, in ordinary places. To show that sexism
exists in abundance in the UK workplace and that it is very far from
being a problem we no longer need to discuss. To provoke responses so
numerous and wide-ranging that the problem becomes impossible to ignore.
To report the way you have been treated, even if it has not been taken
seriously elsewhere. To stand up and say ‘this isn’t right’, even if it
isn’t big or outrageous or shocking. Even if you’ve got used to thinking
that it is ‘just the way things are’.
Women who complain about disrespectful comments being made to female
members in the House of Commons are accused of ‘overreacting’, yet only
22% of MPs are female. Those who object to the sexist portrayal of women
in the media are branded ‘killjoys’, yet nearly 70% of speaking parts
in Hollywood films are taken by men, (though female characters are five
times more likely to strip down to sexy clothing.) Women who object to
the over-sexualisation of female celebrities are told ‘it’s a choice’,
yet it is almost impossible to think of a modern female singer who
hasn’t bared all. Women are told that modern ‘equality’ means career
girls can have their cake and eat it, yet only around 13% of FTSE 100
corporate board members are female.
We are encouraged to celebrate the advance of women into the cockpit,
yet Ryanair still releases an all-female nude calendar and Virgin flight
attendants go to work every day on a plane emblazoned with a cleavage
baring, swimsuit clad caricature. We simply aren’t living in an equal
society, but we are blasted for ‘whining’ or ‘not knowing how lucky we
are’ if we try to point it out.
