Caroline Criado Perez’s campaigns have made it harder for British institutions to treat women’s absence as an incidental detail. She challenged a Bank of England decision that would have left no non-royal woman on the reverse of its banknotes, helped bring a statue of suffragist Millicent Fawcett to Parliament Square, and built a practical response to the shortage of women’s voices in broadcast discussions. Her work also reaches beyond public symbols. In Invisible Women, she showed how gaps in data can leave women poorly served by systems presented as universal. Across these causes, her method has been consistent: identify an omission, explain its consequences and press for a change that can be seen or used.

Learning to spot the absence

Criado Perez was born in Brazil in 1984 and later studied in Britain. Her education included Keble College, Oxford, where she studied English Language and Literature as a mature student, graduating in 2012. During her studies she became interested in the relationship between language and gender. She also undertook postgraduate study in gender studies at the London School of Economics. Those interests would inform a career concerned not just with how women are represented, but with the assumptions built into the systems that represent them.

Her first major campaign focused on the people heard in the media. In 2012, after hearing BBC Radio 4’s Today programme discuss teenage pregnancy and breast-cancer screening without female experts, she co-founded The Women’s Room with Catherine Smith. The immediate problem was plain: discussions about women’s lives were taking place without women specialists among the voices explaining them. But the issue was not simply a matter of balance in one broadcast. Repeated reliance on the same voices could make men appear to be the natural authorities and women the subjects of debate rather than its experts.

The Women’s Room was designed to offer a practical answer. It created a resource of women professionals willing to speak to the media, making it easier for journalists and producers to find female experts. That approach distinguished the project from criticism alone. If a newsroom said it could not find a woman to interview, the database challenged that excuse directly. It also reflected a pattern in Criado Perez’s later work: pair a public argument about exclusion with a concrete way to make the omitted voices or experiences harder to overlook.

She had not followed a straightforward route into campaigning. After beginning a history course at university, she left and worked in digital marketing. She later returned to study, taking an English Literature A-level before entering Oxford as a mature student. In 2012 she was runner-up in the London Library Student Writing competition. Her developing interest in language and gender gave her a way to examine how apparently ordinary choices can reinforce assumptions about whose experience is typical. The campaigns that followed would take that question into broadcasting, currency, public monuments and the collection of data.

The banknote campaign

In 2013, the Bank of England’s plan to replace Elizabeth Fry with Winston Churchill on the £5 note prompted Criado Perez to challenge the decision. The change would have removed the last non-royal woman from the reverse of Bank of England notes. Queen Elizabeth II appeared on the front, but the historical figures on the reverse would then all have been men. Criado Perez argued that this was not a trivial design choice: banknotes are among the most familiar objects issued by a national institution, and the people depicted on them become part of the country’s everyday public memory.

She also questioned the process behind the decision. Her argument invoked the Equality Act 2010 and the Bank’s obligation to give due regard to equality, while criticising the lack of public information about how the choice had been made. The campaign gathered 35,000 petitioners and financial support for a possible legal challenge. Criado Perez met representatives of the Bank, including Head of Notes Victoria Cleland and Chief Cashier Chris Salmon. The dispute became a test of whether an established institution would explain and reconsider a decision that had appeared routine.

The Bank announced that Jane Austen would appear on a new £10 note, replacing Charles Darwin. Criado Perez had not made Austen her preferred choice, but welcomed the decision. In 2017 she wrote that she intended to donate her first Austen tenner to a local women’s shelter; other people subsequently donated their notes to charities. The campaign’s outcome was more than the addition of one writer’s portrait. It showed that a public challenge, grounded in a specific institutional decision, could make representation part of the Bank’s responsibilities and public conversation.

That success carried a disturbing consequence. After the Bank’s announcement, Criado Perez and other women received threats on Twitter, including rape and murder threats. She reported receiving about 50 threats an hour at the height of the abuse. The targeting turned a campaign about currency into a wider argument about who could speak in public without being subjected to intimidation. Labour MP Stella Creasy, who had been involved in the banknote campaign, also faced harassment.

Twitter’s response became a focus of public pressure. An online petition calling for a way to report abuse received substantial support, and on 3 August 2013 the company’s general manager in Britain announced a one-click reporting option and apologised to women who had received abuse. The change did not resolve online harassment, and Criado Perez criticised the inadequacy of platform responses. She later deleted her account for a time. The episode remains part of the campaign’s history because it exposed how abuse can be used to deter women from participating in public debate, and how platforms’ reporting procedures shape the conditions of that participation.

A woman in Parliament Square

On International Women’s Day in 2016, Criado Perez noticed that Parliament Square had no statue of a woman. Its existing statues commemorated men, despite the Square’s position beside the UK Parliament and its prominence in national civic life. She began campaigning for a woman to be represented there, initially pressing for a statue to mark the centenary of the Representation of the People Act 1918. The campaign brought a visible question of historical memory into a place where monuments stand close to the institutions of government.

Millicent Fawcett became the figure proposed for the monument. Fawcett was a suffragist, not a suffragette: she worked for women’s political rights through constitutional campaigning and organisation. The distinction matters. Commemorating Fawcett made room in public memory for a strand of the suffrage movement associated with sustained political argument and institution-building, alongside the better-known story of suffragette militancy.

Criado Perez presented a petition signed by 74,000 people at an event hosted by the Fawcett Society. London mayor Sadiq Khan later announced that artist Gillian Wearing would create the statue. It was unveiled in Parliament Square on 24 April 2018, during the centenary commemorations of women gaining the vote in 1918. Fawcett became the first woman represented by a statue in the Square; Wearing was its first female sculptor. The monument’s plinth includes the names and images of 55 women and four men who fought for women’s suffrage.

The achievement therefore altered more than the line-up of figures in a public space. It made the absence of women in that setting visible, then helped turn a campaign into a permanent feature of the Square. The choice of Fawcett and the commissioning of Wearing also drew attention to two questions: which women are remembered, and who is invited to shape the public art through which they are remembered.

Invisible Women and the data gap

Criado Perez’s book Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men, published in 2019, took the question of omission from public representation into the design of everyday systems. Its central argument is that data is often collected or applied as though men’s bodies, lives and patterns of behaviour were the human default. When information about women is missing, a design or policy can appear neutral while working less well for a substantial part of the population.

The book examines the consequences across fields including healthcare, technology and urban planning. Examples discussed in the supplied account include phones that are too large for many women’s hands, medical assumptions better suited to male bodies, transport planning based on men’s travel patterns and safety testing that uses a man-sized body as the standard. The point is not that every instance of poor design has the same cause. It is that missing or inadequate data can become embedded in decisions, with real consequences for how well products, services and public systems work.

By gathering evidence across different subjects, Criado Perez made the gender data gap legible to a general readership. The book argues that bias need not take the form of an explicit rule excluding women. It can also arise through the repeated use of incomplete information and standards treated as universal. That distinction broadened the discussion from representation to the consequences of how research is conducted, evidence is interpreted and systems are planned.

Invisible Women became a Sunday Times number one bestseller and won the Royal Society Insight Investment Science Book Prize and the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year Award in 2019. These honours reflected the book’s reach across areas often kept separate: science, business, public policy and design. Criado Perez had turned a pattern of omissions into an argument that readers could follow across institutions and everyday experience.

Recognition and continuing work

In 2013, Criado Perez was named one of the BBC’s 100 Women and received Liberty’s human rights campaigner of the year award. She was appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in the 2015 Birthday Honours for services to equality and diversity, particularly in the media. In April 2025, the Publishers Association awarded her its inaugural Unwin Prize. The recognition spans both campaigning and writing, but the continuity between them is more revealing than the list of honours: her work repeatedly asks how an institution’s routine choices affect who is represented and whose needs are included.

Her earlier book, Do It Like a Woman … and Change the World, was published in 2015. Together with Invisible Women, it forms part of a body of writing connected to her public campaigns. The books, the Women’s Room project and the campaigns over currency and monuments have different immediate aims. Yet each makes an argument about what is taken for granted: who is treated as an expert, whose history is commemorated, and whose experience is used to define the standard.

That consistency helps explain why her campaigns have often moved beyond individual symbols. A banknote can prompt questions about a public institution’s decision-making; a missing statue can expose the limits of the historical story told in a civic space; a broadcast without women experts can reveal how authority is distributed. Criado Perez has repeatedly used a specific absence as an entry point to a broader discussion, without losing sight of the practical change sought in each case.

Why Caroline Criado Perez deserves a place in British Legacy

Caroline Criado Perez deserves a place in British Legacy because her campaigns have changed what people encounter in British public life and what they are equipped to question. Her challenge to the Bank of England helped secure Jane Austen’s place on the £10 note after the planned removal of Elizabeth Fry would have left no non-royal woman on the reverse of its notes. Her campaign for Millicent Fawcett brought the first statue of a woman to Parliament Square. These are specific, lasting changes to familiar national symbols, not abstract endorsements of equality. The Women’s Room addressed a different but related absence by building a resource that helped media organisations find women experts.

Her contribution also lies in showing that visibility is only one part of the problem. Invisible Women explains how incomplete data can shape design, research and planning in ways that fail to account for women’s lives. That argument gives readers and decision-makers a way to question standards that may look neutral but rest on limited evidence. The harassment that followed the banknote campaign, and the ensuing pressure on Twitter to make abuse easier to report, also exposed the barriers that women can face when they speak publicly. Taken together, these achievements connect symbols, institutions and everyday systems. Criado Perez’s British legacy is not simply that women have appeared on a note or in a square; it is that she has made omissions harder to pass off as natural, and supplied practical ways to challenge them.

Sources

Caroline Criado Perez — Wikipedia revision

Adapted in part from Caroline Criado Perez by Wikipedia contributors, under CC BY-SA 4.0. Text has been edited and combined with the existing article; this adapted text is shared under the same licence. Contributor history.