Kerolayn Kriado-Peres

Caroline Emma Criado Perez is a British feminist, activist, and journalist. Her first campaign, “The Women’s Room,” aimed to increase the representation of female experts in the media. She also campaigned against the removal of the only woman on British banknotes, as a result of which the Bank of England placed an image of Jane Austen on the £10 note. In addition, she succeeded in having a statue of Millicent Fawcett, a well-known suffragist, installed in Parliament Square in London. She was born in Brazil to Argentine businessman Carlos Criado Perez and an English nurse who worked for Médecins Sans Frontières. She spent her childhood in various countries, including the United Kingdom, Spain, Portugal, and Taiwan. When Criado Perez was 11, she was sent to the private school Oundle School in the town of Oundle. According to Perez, there was a “culture of bullying” at the school. Perez then studied history at a university in London for a year, but left her studies. Since her youth, she had dreamed of an opera career and took private singing lessons. For several years she worked in digital marketing, then studied English literature at Keble College, Oxford as a “mature student”; she graduated in 2012. Her study of gender linguistics, as well as the work of linguist Deborah Cameron, led Perez to feminism. She worked as an editor for a pharmaceutical website. In 2013, she received a master’s degree in gender studies from the London School of Economics. In November 2012, together with Catherine Smith, she founded the website The Women’s Room, whose goal was to increase the presence of female experts in the media. The impetus for creating the site came from two BBC Radio 4 programs on preventing teenage pregnancy and breast cancer, in which not a single female expert participated and all the interviewers were also men. One of the invited experts on teenage pregnancy was Anthony Seldon, principal of Wellington College. Perez later wrote that Seldon may be an authority on modern British political history, but not on teenage pregnancy.