Oprah Gail Winfrey, or simply Oprah, is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. She is best known for her talk show, The Oprah Winfrey Show, broadcast from Chicago, which ran in national syndication for 25 years, from 1986 to 2011.

Ruth Bader Ginsburg was an American lawyer and jurist who served as an associate justice of the Supreme Court of the United States from 1993 until her death in 2020.

Malala Yousafzai, often referred to mononymously as Malala, is a Pakistani activist for female education and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Awarded when she was 17, she is the world’s youngest Nobel Prize laureate, and the second Pakistani and the first Pashtun to ever receive a Nobel Prize.

Inna Braverman is an Israeli entrepreneur and businesswoman. She is the Co-Founder and CEO of Eco Wave Power, a renewable energy company with a patented technology for the generation of clean electricity from ocean and sea waves.

Michelle LaVaughn Robinson Obama is an American attorney and author who served as first lady of the United States from 2009 to 2017. She was the first African-American woman to serve in this position. She is married to former President Barack Obama.

Ayaan Hirsi Ali is a Somali-born Dutch-American activist, feminist, and former politician. She received international attention as a critic of Islam and advocate for the rights and self-determination of Muslim women, actively opposing forced marriage, honor killing, child marriage, and female genital mutilation

Casandra Brené Brown is an American professor, lecturer, author, and podcast host. Brown is known in particular for her research on shame, vulnerability, and leadership, and for her widely viewed TEDx talk in 2010.

Hedy Lamarr was an Austrian-born American film actress and inventor. A film star during Hollywood’s golden age, Lamarr has been described as one of the great movie actresses of all time.

At the beginning of World War II, she and avant-garde composer George Antheil developed a radio guidance system for Allied torpedoes that used spread spectrum and frequency hopping technology to defeat the threat of jamming by the Axis powers.  Although the U.S. Navy did not adopt the technology until the 1960s,[10] the principles of their work are incorporated into Bluetooth and GPS technology and are similar to methods used in legacy versions of CDMA and Wi-Fi.

Marie Salomea Skłodowska–Curie was a Polish and naturalized-French physicist and chemist who conducted pioneering research on radioactivity.

Bertha Sophie Felicitas Freifrau von Suttner was an Austrian-Bohemian pacifist and novelist. In 1905, she became the second female Nobel laureate, the first woman to be awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, and the first Austrian laureate.

Amelia Mary Earhart was an American aviation pioneer and writer. Earhart was the first female aviator to fly solo across the Atlantic Ocean.

Anna Eleanor Roosevelt was an American political figure, diplomat, and activist. She served as the first lady of the United States from 1933 to 1945, during her husband President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms in office, making her the longest-serving first lady of the United States.

Grace Brewster Murray Hopper was an American computer scientist and United States Navy rear admiral. One of the first programmers of the Harvard Mark I computer, she was a pioneer of computer programming who invented one of the first linkers.

Naomi Fern Parker Fraley was an American war worker who is now considered the most likely model for the iconic “We Can Do It!” poster. During World War II, she worked on aircraft assembly at the Naval Air Station Alameda.

Lucille Désirée Ball was an American actress, comedienne, singer, and producer. She was nominated for 13 Primetime Emmy Awards, winning five times, and was the recipient of several other accolades, such as the Golden Globe Cecil B. DeMille Award and two stars on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

Ball produced and starred in the Broadway musical Wildcat from 1960 to 1961. In 1962, she became the first woman to run a major television studio, Desilu Productions, which produced many popular television series, including Mission: Impossible and Star Trek.

Ella Jane Fitzgerald was an American jazz singer, sometimes referred to as the “First Lady of Song”, “Queen of Jazz”, and “Lady Ella”. She was noted for her purity of tone, impeccable diction, phrasing, timing, intonation, and a “horn-like” improvisational ability, particularly in her scat singing.

During her life, Fitzgerald was awarded the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Equal Justice Award and the American Black Achievement Award, as well as many other honors that celebrated her talents and accomplishments both in the jazz world and in the civil rights movement. Fitzgerald was seen as an inspiration. Her drive pushed her career forward, and by using her talent and help from her friends, colleagues, and manager, she was able to break down seemingly impossible racial barriers.

Betty Friedan was an American feminist writer and activist. A leading figure in the women’s movement in the United States, her 1963 book The Feminine Mystique is often credited with sparking the second wave of American feminism in the 20th century.

Dame Jane Morris Goodall DBE is an English primatologist and anthropologist.[4] Seen as the world’s foremost expert on chimpanzees, Goodall is best known for her 60-year study of social and family interactions of wild chimpanzees since she first went to Gombe Stream National Park in Tanzania in 1960, where she witnessed human-like behaviors amongst chimpanzees, including armed conflict. In April 2002, she was named a UN Messenger of Peace. Goodall is an honorary member of the World Future Council.

Enheduanna was the priestess of the moon god Nanna in the Sumerian city-state of Ur in the reign of her father, Sargon of Akkad. She was likely appointed by her father as the leader of the religious cult at Ur to cement ties between the Akkadian religion of her father and the native Sumerian religion.

Enheduanna has been celebrated as the earliest known named author in world history, as a number of works in Sumerian literature, such as the Exaltation of Inanna feature her as the first person narrator, and other works, such as the Sumerian Temple Hymns may identify her as their author.

Sheila Babs Michaels, also known as Sheila Shiki-y-Michaels, was an American feminist and civil rights activist credited with popularizing Ms. as a default form of address for women regardless of their marital status.

Rosalind Elsie Franklin was a British chemist and X-ray crystallographer whose work was central to the understanding of the molecular structures of DNA, RNA, viruses, coal, and graphite.

Although her works on coal and viruses were appreciated in her lifetime, her contributions to the discovery of the structure of DNA were largely unrecognized during her life, for which she has been variously referred to as the “wronged heroine”, the “dark lady of DNA”, the “forgotten heroine”, a “feminist icon”, and the “Sylvia Plath of molecular biology”.

Fe Villanueva del Mundo, OLD ONS GCGH, was a Filipina pediatrician. She founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines and is known for shaping the modern child healthcare system in the Philippines. Her pioneering work in pediatrics in the Philippines while in active medical practice spanned eight decades.

Tomyris reigned over the Massagetae, an Iranian Saka people of Central Asia. Tomyris led her armies to defend against an attack by Cyrus the Great of the Achaemenid Empire, and, according to Herodotus, defeated and killed him in 530 BC.

Boudicca is known for being a warrior queen of the Iceni people, who lived in what is now East Anglia, England. In 60–61 CE she led the Iceni and other peoples in a revolt against Roman rule. Although her forces massacred some 70,000 Romans and their supporters, they were ultimately defeated.

On April 26, 1777, the 16-year-old Sybil Ludington, daughter of a colonel in the Colonial militia, Henry Ludington, is said to have made an all-night horseback ride 40 miles (64 km) to rally militia forces in neighboring towns after the burning of Danbury, Connecticut by British forces.

Henrietta Lacks was an African-American woman whose cancer cells are the source of the HeLa cell line, the first immortalized human cell line and one of the most important cell lines in medical research.

Today, these incredible cells — nicknamed “HeLa” cells, from the first two letters of her first and last names — are used to study the effects of toxins, drugs, hormones and viruses on the growth of cancer cells without experimenting on humans. They have been used to test the effects of radiation and poisons, to study the human genome, to learn more about how viruses work, and played a crucial role in the development of the polio and COVID-19 vaccines.

Patsy Takemoto Mink, the first woman of color elected to Congress, participated in the passage of much of the 1960s Great Society legislation during the first phase of her congressional career.

As a veteran politician who had a significant impact on the nation during both stints in the U.S. House of Representatives, Mink’s legislative approach was premised on the belief that representation extended beyond the borders of one’s congressional district. “You were not elected to Congress, in my interpretation of things, to represent your district, period,” she once noted. “You are national legislators.”

Sarojini Naidu was an Indian political activist and poet. A proponent of civil rights, women’s emancipation, and anti-imperialistic ideas, she was an important person in India’s struggle for independence from colonial rule.

Mary Anning was an English fossil collector, dealer, and palaeontologist who became known around the world for the discoveries she made in Jurassic marine fossil beds in the cliffs along the English Channel at Lyme Regis in the county of Dorset in Southwest England. Anning’s findings contributed to changes in scientific thinking about prehistoric life and the history of the Earth.

Edmonia Lewis was the first sculptor of African American and Native American (Mississauga) descent to achieve international recognition.

In 1859 she attended Oberlin College in Ohio, one of the first schools to accept female and Black students. She then traveled to Boston and established herself as a professional artist, studying with a local sculptor and creating portraits of famous antislavery heroes.

Moving to Rome in 1865, she became involved with a group of American women sculptors and began to work in marble. Sculptors usually hired local workmen to carve their final pieces, but Lewis did all her own stonework out of fear that if she didn’t, her work would not be accepted as original. In addition to creating portrait heads, Lewis sculpted biblical scenes and figural works dealing with her Native American heritage and the oppression of Black people.

Hypatia was a neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, who lived in Alexandria, Egypt, then part of the Eastern Roman Empire. She was a prominent thinker in Alexandria where she taught philosophy and astronomy.