Everyday Sexism: Do We Really Need Feminism in 2014?

It started as a reaction to the inherent prejudice women in the UK face everyday.

Now, 135,000 Twitter followers later and The Everyday Sexism Project has gone worldwide.

Launched by journalist Laura Bates two years ago, the website was designed as a platform for women to share their stories of everyday sexism, from wolf whistles in the street to sexual harassment in the workplace, even stories of rape.

The hashtag #shoutingback became their calling card as the site spread across the world to 18 countries and today saw the release of the Everyday Sexism book.

‘I thought perhaps 50 or 60 women would add their stories and that it would be cathartic for them to share them,’ claimed Laura.

‘I thought that, if I could bring all these stories together in one place, then people would be convinced that there was a problem to be solved. I never imagined it would go viral.’

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Stories range from the everyday occurrence of men making jokes at their wives' expense to women admitting they’ve slowed down their career to let their partner progress so they can become a stay at home mum ‘before someone else does it first’.

‘People sometimes assume the project is dominated by street harassment, but it’s the sexism women face at work that is most common, from low-level sexism like assuming she must be the secretary, to illegal discrimination surrounding family planning, to actually being groped or assaulted,’ said Laura. 

But does sexism still really exist in 2014? Just last month Lily Allen, paradigm of equality and sisterhood, claimed ‘Everyone is equal so why is there even a conversation about feminism?’

While everything is obviously rosy in Lily’s world of fake nails, weight loss and impressive weaves, 60,000 stories from women around the world who have suffered some form of prejudice or discrimination beg to differ.

Here are just a few facts to highlight the everyday sexism women still face in the 21st century:

-    Only two of the top 10 entries on The Sunday Times Rich List 2013 were women
-    Out of the 500 richest companies in the US (Fortune 500) only 22 have a female CEO
-    Only 18 out of 108 high court judges are women
-    Out of 22 current cabinet positions within the government, only three of them are filled by women
-    85,000 women are raped in England and Wales every year
-    Over 400,000 women are sexually assaulted in England and Wales every year
-    There are 89,000reported cases of rape in the US every year
-    But the US Justice Department claims the actual number of women raped is closer to 300,000 while the Centres for Disease Control put the real figure at 1.3 million.
-    In the US, 60 per cent of rape cases go unreported. That’s compared to 95 per cent of university rapes.
-    The countries in the world with the highest rates of rape are Lesotho, Trinidad & Tobago and Sweden
-    The countries with the lowest rates of rape are Egypt, Azerbaijan and Armenia. These are only reported rapes. In Egypt, before the Arab Spring, the actual number of rapes every year was estimated at 200,000. This has believed to have gone up since. Also worth noting - marital rape is not illegal in Egypt.