Caroline Criado-Perez

Caroline Criado-Perez OBE
at Conway Hall in 2014
Born	1984 (age 32–33) Brazil
Nationality	British
Occupation	Journalist
Known for	Feminist
Awards	Human rights campaigner of the year award, 2013 (Liberty)

Caroline Criado-Perez, OBE (born 1984) is a Brazilian-born British feminist activist and journalist. She has been involved in campaigns for women to gain better representation in the British media and to be depicted on banknotes. Her efforts in part led to a decision by the Bank of England to review the selection process for future banknotes. Since this decision, the Bank of England announced in July 2013 that the image of Jane Austen will appear on the £10 note by around 2017.

The later campaign led to sustained harassment on the social networking website Twitter of Criado-Perez and other women. Twitter announced plans to improve its complaint procedures as a result.

Born in Brazil, she is the daughter of Carlos Criado-Perez, an Argentinian-born businessman and who rose to be CEO of the UK's Safeway chain. Her mother is English. Her father's work in the supermarket industry necessitated the family live in several countries during her childhood, including Spain, Portugal and Taiwan, as well as the UK. When she was 11, her father moved to the Netherlands and she was sent to a public school in England with her two brothers, but disliked the bullying culture.

Criado-Perez left school at 18, and spent a year at university, before leaving her studies. Having developed a passion for opera during her teens, she wanted to become an opera singer, and various jobs subsidised her singing lessons. Her parents divorced.

Criado-Perez worked in digital marketing for some years, but found she wanted to change her career path and studied for her English Literature A-level in the evenings and at weekends, having dropped out of completing the qualification at school. She gained a place to study English Language and Literature at Keble College, Oxford as a mature learner, and graduated from Oxford University in 2012. A participant in the London Library Student Writing Prize in 2012, she was one of the runners-up who received £1,000 and other prizes. Since then, she worked, in 2012, as an editor for an information and networking portal of the pharmaceutical industry and is in the process of gaining a master's degree in Gender Studies from the London School of Economics.