Laura Bates wins Georgina Henry award

The founder of the Everyday Sexism Project, Johnian Laura Bates, has won the Georgina Henry Women in Journalism Prize for Innovation.

St Johns’s College alumna Laura Bates, who graduated in 2007 with a BA in English, was awarded the Georgina Henry Women in Journalism Prize for Innovation at the Press Awards, held at the London Marriott Grosvenor Square Hotel on Tuesday night. The award ceremony, organised by the Society of Editors, is the most prestigious event in the industry’s calendar, and sees more than 400 editors, journalists and writers coming together to celebrate national newspaper journalism.

The award, in its first year, was launched by Women in Journalism – a networking, campaigning, training and social organisation for women journalists – in honour of Georgina Henry, one of the founders of the organisation and the former deputy editor of the Guardian.

Laura, who writes for the Guardian’s women’s weekly blog about women’s experiences of sexism and founded the Everyday Sexism Project to draw attention to sexism faced by women on a daily basis, said upon receiving the award that she was honoured to be shortlisted alongside a list of such incredible writers; other nominees were the GroundTruth Project’s Middle East correspondent Lauren Bohn, reporter and blogger Iram Ramzan, and freelance journalist and Daily Mirror columnist Ros Wynne-Jones.

“I wasn’t lucky enough to know Georgina Henry,” Laura said, “but I feel incredibly lucky as a young woman working in journalism to benefit from her legacy, not least through the incredible and important work of women in journalism.

“We know that women only write one fifth of front page newspaper articles, and we know that 84% of those articles are dominated by male subjects or experts, and the reason we know that is because of the work of Women in Journalism who are spotlighting and tackling the issue.

“Everyday Sexism is the strength of a hundred thousand voices speaking together, so a huge thank you to every woman who shared her story and helped to make the world listen.”

Read more about the Everyday Sexism Project, Women in Journalism, and the Press Awards.