Caroline Criado-Perez

BA English 2009
Writer and Broadcaster
OBE

When Caroline Criado-Perez was a teenager, she wanted to be an opera singer. Today she uses her voice to demand change and equality.

She arrived at Keble in her mid-20s and became politicised after studying gender in literature. Her first national campaign, the Women’s Room project, was for female experts to be better represented in the media. It was triggered after hearing two radio debates on women’s health issues, featuring only male contributors.

But it was her crusade to stop the Bank of England from removing the only woman (other than the Queen) from British banknotes that brought Caroline into the public eye. It was a bittersweet victory when the Bank capitulated and announced that Jane Austen would appear on the new £10 note. It unleashed a torrent of horrific abuse on social media, with threats of death and sexual violence. She spearheaded an online petition calling on Twitter to introduce a button to enable site users to report abuse.

She was awarded the Liberty Human Rights Campaigner of the

Year Award 2013 and later bestowed an OBE for services to equality and diversity.

She successfully campaigned for a statue of suffragette Millicent Fawcett to be erected in Parliament Square. Unveiled in 2018, it was the first statue of a woman and the first by a woman.

She has written two books, Do It Like a Woman (2015) and Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men (2019). Using data and case studies it clearly illustrates the hidden ways in which women are forgotten and the impact that can have on their health. It spent 14 weeks in the Sunday Times bestseller list and Nicola Sturgeon described it as “revelatory and should be required reading for policy and decision makers everywhere.”