Table of contents for TIME Inspiring Women in TIME Magazine

“You live through my mistakes. You live through my ups, you live through my downs.… And it’s also a tale of never letting anyone write your story. A lot of people can relate to that. Always be authentically you. Own who you are. And love you. It’s a big tale of self-love.”SERENA WILLIAMS In 2019, the number of college-educated women in the U.S. workforce surpassed that of men for the first time. In spring 2023, an analysis of U.S. Census Bureau data by the Pew Research Center showed that in opposite-sex marriages, the percentage of women who earn as much or more than their husbands has tripled in the past 50 years—both partners are equal contributors in roughly 29% of marriages today, up from 11% in 1972. But in…

Taraji P. Henson often plays towering characters who catapult off the screen with charisma, defiance, and tenacity. She ruled network television for six years as Cookie Lyon in Empire and stole scenes from Brad Pitt in The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. She lights up her latest film, a musical adaptation of The Color Purple, as the swaggering singer Shug Avery, belting blues anthems in a swampside juke joint as she holds men and women alike in the palm of her hand. But Henson brings a lot more than sheer bluster to these roles. “The way I see it, people who have these big personas, that’s a defense mechanism covering their most prized possession: their heart,” she says. “They’re like, ‘See this hand, so you don’t see what’s really…

When Adriana Barbosa was a child and her family was struggling to pay rent, she would sell food that her grandmother cooked to raise money. They were some of the few Afro-Brazilians in a middle-class neighborhood in São Paulo, Brazil, and she quickly learned that, although more than half of Brazilians have African ancestry, many of the Brazilians profiting off Black ideas do not. This is significant considering how stark Brazil’s racial wealth gap is, even as officials have downplayed the existence of racism in their society. The average income for white workers was 74% higher than that of Black and brown workers in 2019, according to a study by the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics. Afro-Brazilian men with the same level of education as their white male…

For civil rights activists like Amanda Nguyen and Kelley Robinson, the road to a more equal future can be long and difficult. Two things crucial for getting there, they said in conversation with CNN anchor Abby Philip at the 2024 TIME100 Summit, are joy and math. “I think joy is the most radical form of rebellion,” said Nguyen, who was a key force behind passing the Sexual Assault Survivors’ Rights Act in 2016 (and is also an astronaut). “I think in a world where so many people are fighting for the mere act of existence—whatever it is that they are trying to be—to have that joy in what you do and in the end state, that to me is my personal type of activism.” Robinson is the president of…

In April 2024, british singer-songwriter FKA twigs, born Tahliah Debrett Barnett, testified before the U.S. Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Intellectual Property about the dangers of artificial intelligence. She relayed that she was especially concerned as an artist whose music and performances are used by third parties to train artificial intelligence models. She said that the power of this technology has become especially apparent to her as she has attempted to build a deepfake version of herself. “In the past year, I have developed my own deepfake version of myself that is not only trained in my personality, but also can use my exact tone of voice to speak many languages,” the singer said in her statement. “I will be engaging my ‘AI twigs’ later this year to extend my…

In 2022, Shonda Rhimes and I were deep into a conversation about what makes a healthy work environment when she has to stop me from saying something ridiculous. I’ve been waxing indignant about the professional world’s unfair assumption that employees with kids are not fully present at work. “But I’m not fully present at work,” Rhimes, who is TV’s highest-paid and, arguably, most successful showrunner, as well as a single mother of three daughters, interjected. We’re in the sitting room of a midtown Manhattan hotel suite that, with its tasteful cream-and-wood decor, feels like the natural habitat of Rhimes’ elegant Scandal heroine, Olivia Pope. I don’t need to have kids myself to sense that she’s onto something, and I can see her mentally racing toward a more incisive read.…

To wear Kim Shui is to celebrate confidence. The fashion designer, who founded her eponymous brand in 2016, makes clothes for women who aren’t afraid to make a statement. Sheer qi paos, daring corset tops, brocade mini dresses with artful cutouts, and curve-hugging trousers with lace-up embellishments have all become staples of her New York City-based brand, which is favored by the likes of Dua Lipa and SZA. Shui’s bold style was shaped by her experiences growing up in Rome, where as the American-born daughter of two Chinese immigrants, she was constantly confronted with her otherness. “I didn’t have a choice, I just naturally stood out,” she told TIME in 2023. “At a certain point, instead of hiding it, I wanted to embrace it and put it at the…

Melanie Perkins, co-founder and CEO of the online graphic-design tool Canva, has a two-pronged plan for success. First, build one of the world’s most valuable companies. Next, do as much good in the world as possible. The two goals “fuel each other,” Perkins told TIME in 2023. The philosophy might seem like an odd North Star for a company offering templates for presentations and save-the-date cards, but it’s just one way Perkins is reimagining the modern tech company. Headquartered in Sydney, thousands of miles away from Silicon Valley, with its reputation as a global arbiter of innovation, Perkins has built a design platform that easily rivals those offered by giants like Adobe and Microsoft, all while keeping accessibility at the heart of its mission. After launching in 2013, Canva…

Nadia Murad dreamed of running her own beauty salon in Kojo, a small farming village in northern Iraq. “In my imagination, the salon was a safe space where women and girls could share ideas, learn things, and have something for themselves,” she told TIME in 2024. That dream was torn away when Islamic State fighters invaded her village in 2014, intent on destroying a Yazidi community they called infidels. Her mother, siblings, relatives, and friends were killed. Murad, then 21, was one of nearly 6,000 Yazidi women and children held captive and subjected to rape for nearly three months. She eventually escaped and resettled in Germany in 2015. Today, the 31-year-old channels that trauma into advocacy for survivors of genocide and sexual violence. “When you survive a war and…

For years, medical schools in the united states barely taught their students about myalgic encephalomyelitis/chronic fatigue syndrome (ME/CFS), a chronic condition that affects up to 2.5 million people in the U.S., which can develop after routine viral illnesses and causes debilitating exhaustion. Jaime Seltzer—a trained scientist who developed ME/CFS in 2014 and now works as the scientific director for the advocacy group #MEAction—is working to change that. Through #MEAction, Seltzer is helping to lead a major campaign to improve ME/CFS education, diagnosis, and treatment. Thanks to Seltzer’s efforts, staff at big-name institutions including Emory, Brown, and Georgetown are working with #MEAction to improve education programs and treatment plans related to ME/CFS. Those efforts build on a partnership Seltzer made in 2023 with the Mayo Clinic, through which she helped…

The current COVID-19 vaccines are incredibly good at keeping people who catch the virus from getting very sick or dying, but they cannot block infections. That’s where Akiko Iwasaki, professor of immunobiology at the Yale School of Medicine, comes in. Building on their years of research on other viruses, Iwasaki and her colleagues are working on a new approach to COVID-19 vaccination: administering booster doses via the nose. The idea, Iwasaki says, is to help the body build up additional protection where it’s needed most, blanketing the nose—through which the virus often gets in—with its own defense system. In 2021, she co-founded a company, Xanadu Bio, that is trying to bring nasal vaccines for COVID-19, the flu, and RSV to market. That work dovetails with Iwasaki’s other focus: postinfectious…

Stella Mccartney doesn’t want you to feel bad. The British fashion designer understands it’s easy to get overwhelmed by all the ways the products we eat, buy, and wear come with unintended consequences—for society, for animals, for the planet. And so even if she’s talking about the harrowing conditions workers suffer in fast-fashion factories or the devastating climate impact of animal agriculture, she’s eager to emphasize that the goal isn’t guilt. It’s hard work to be the best you can be, after all, especially when what many of us want is seemingly impossible: to live more sustainably without giving up the luxuries and conveniences of modern life. We want to look good, feel good, and still somehow do good. And so McCartney is trying to make that a little…

Coco Gauff will never forget the utter elation she felt in September 2023 when her backhand winner flew by Aryna Sabalenka at the U.S. Open final to give her, at 19 years old, her first Grand Slam championship. “It was like a drug,” Gauff says. “I’ve never felt anything like that.” And this is coming from a person who has bungee jumped off Sky Tower, New Zealand’s tallest building—twice. Gauff wants to feel that championship high again. “That’s the motivation that drives me,” she says. “I’m sure the ‘Face of Tennis’ and glitz and glam will come along with that. But I don’t really care about any of that. I really just care about how many of those major trophies I can get in my house.” The phenom fell…

When Aurora James founded her nonprofit Fifteen Percent Pledge in 2020, in the wake of the reckoning sparked by the murder of George Floyd, she knew that the push for racial justice needed to include addressing the Black-white wealth gap. As black squares flooded social media feeds and corporations vowed to do better when it came to diversity, James saw an opportunity for companies to take real action to back up their pledges. On her Instagram account, she issued a challenge to major retailers, asking them to commit to buying 15% of their products from Black-owned businesses. “We represent 15% of the [U.S.] population and we need to represent 15% of your shelf space,” she wrote in her post, which went viral, leading to the formal creation of the…

Issa Rae’s office in South Los Angeles overflows with trinkets from her many successes. Awards perch on virtually every surface. Three boxes of President Barbie dolls, her character from 2023’s biggest blockbuster, sit high on a shelf. There are purple roses, bottles of LeBron James’ Lobos 1707 tequila—a company Rae invests in—and custom pillows from Insecure, her hit HBO series that ran for five zeitgeist-capturing seasons. But in February 2024, the item that Rae was most excited about was her brand-new Moleskine notebook. Rae buys a new notebook every year and fills it with personal reflections, creative ideas, and tasks to complete for her many businesses. The previous fall, her 2023 journal started getting so full, she wrote in smaller and smaller fonts to preserve space. “I love Mondays,…

When Rebecca Ajulu-Bushell was a fine-arts student at Oxford University, she landed an internship at a prestigious gallery. There, she learned about the art world, but not in the way she expected. The organization, which seemed to exclusively employ blond, white women, paid a stipend that didn’t even cover her London Tube fare. To get a full-time job there, a colleague warned, “You either have to know someone who knows [the gallery owner]. Or you have to wait until someone dies,” Ajulu-Bushell recalls. The experience was disheartening, but it didn’t curb the drive of the first Black woman to swim for Great Britain’s national team and former world No. 1 swimmer in the 50-meter breaststroke. Ajulu-Bushell is now CEO of the 10,000 Interns Foundation, which, in three years, has…

After South Carolina had the game in hand on April 7, 2024, and was about to win its second national championship in three seasons and finish off the 10th undefeated season in the history of women’s college basketball, the ESPN on ABC cameras panned to Iowa’s Caitlin Clark, who was leaving the court for the last time as an NCAA player. She had just been subbed out, and the Hawkeye-heavy crowd in Cleveland offered her a proper round of applause. The TV screen pointed out the multiple records she set as a collegian: all-time leading scorer in NCAA D1 history, regardless of gender, most points in the NCAA women’s basketball tournament, a few others. South Carolina, which beat Iowa 87-75, had plenty to crow about. The Gamecocks’ record over…

The song “I’m Here” from The Color Purple musical is not meant to be sung, but roared. It’s not meant to be heard but felt. “I’m Here” is the climax of the musical. It reframes the protagonist Celie’s narrative from victim to a triumphant woman who has overcome adversity. Up to this moment, Celie has been told that no one loves her. But she begins life on her own in a shop that she owns and realizes that she’s been loved all along; now, she chooses to find that love in herself after going through hell and back searching for it elsewhere. The song marks a new beginning—Celie declares that she’s here, and boy, are you gonna hear her. Alice Walker’s 1982 novel breathed life into the characters of…

When Florence Pugh was a child, she hated to cry in public. If she had an argument with her parents, she would run to the bathroom, lock the door, and sit under the sink. Only then would she weep. “When I started acting I remember thinking, ‘Ooh, this isn’t good news’ because we all know how amazing it feels when you see the character you’ve been following finally crumble,” she says. “And I just couldn’t do it.” Now she cries so often in movies that it’s become something of a meme—her guttural wails in Midsommar, her blubbering in Little Women, and her screams in Don’t Worry Darling have all gone viral. Because a childhood illness affected her breathing, Pugh still has a gravelly voice that lends itself to anguish.…

Since 1927, TIME has chosen a person of the Year, the editors’ assessment of the individual who most shaped the headlines over the previous 12 months, for better or for worse. As a tradition, Person of the Year springs from the Great Man Theory of history, a belief that individuals have the power to transform society. The selections over the years have tended to follow certain patterns. The person chosen has typically been a ruler over traditional domains of power. He—and yes, usually it has been a “he”—is very often a politician or a titan of industry. Fourteen U.S. Presidents, five leaders of Russia or the Soviet Union, and three Popes have all been recognized. And yet the person whose singular influence was revealed throughout 2023 has held none…

On October 4, 2023, some 1,500 Israeli and Palestinian women descended on Jerusalem and the shores of the Dead Sea. Wielding blue and yellow flags representing two different grassroots peace organizations, they gathered to demand an end to the “cycle of bloodshed” consuming their communities and for their respective leaders to return to the negotiating table to secure a nonviolent resolution to their decades-long conflict. “This is a historic partnership of two women’s movements,” said Yael Admi, a co-founder and leader of the Israeli movement Women Wage Peace. She referred to the alliance with the Palestinian organization Women of the Sun, whose founder and director Reem Hajajreh added, “We started out as a movement with a few lone women and now we are thousands. We no longer take the…

Jane Fonda, at 86, is small-boned and elegant, her eyes like soft blue-gray flannel. Yet it’s startling how much energy shoots through her via a simple handshake: If a woodland creature could shake your hand, it might feel like this, the will of an entire forest ecosystem pouring through one being. She’s physically strong, sitting up straight and tall for more than an hour on a backless ottoman, perched before a cozy sitting-room fireplace in her Los Angeles town house. But the message telegraphed by her handshake is less a matter of muscle tone than of pure urgency. If you could put it into words, it would be this: There’s not much time left. Fonda has already lived many lives. The daughter of a much loved actor and a…

When 2024 TIME earth awards honoree Gabriela Hearst launched her namesake brand in 2015, one of the pillars of her design was a resolute commitment to sustainability. It was a decision that came in the wake of a clarion call from her past. Following the death of her father in 2011, the fashion designer inherited Santa Isabel, her family’s 17,000-acre ranch, where she grew up in Paysandú, Uruguay. Revisiting her remote childhood home reminded Hearst how they made their own blankets and furniture, drawing on precious resources from the ranch to construct pieces that would last—a stark contrast to the waste-filled practices of the fashion industry where she had been working for more than a decade. “I started to see the discrepancy between what I was doing in New…

Two iconic female athletes—Ibtihaj Muhammad and A’ja Wilson—called for more U.S. investment in women’s sports at the 2024 TIME100 Summit. “I would love to see these big companies…invest in women and invest in the game,” Muhammad said. Muhammad is an Olympic medalist in fencing, activist, and author and Wilson is an Olympic gold medalist in basketball and WNBA Champion. The pair spoke with Pablo Torre, host of the sports podcast, Pablo Torre Finds Out, just days after the lower pay of female athletes was thrust into the spotlight when basketball phenom Caitlin Clark was selected first in the WNBA draft with a salary of $338,056 over the next four years. Yet some female college athletes are doing significantly better financially than their predecessors after the NCAA lifted its ban…

Billie Eilish became the youngest two-time Oscar winner at the age of 22 at the 2024 Academy Awards. Eilish, along with her brother Finneas O’Connell, won the Academy Award for Best Original Song for the power ballad, “What Was I Made For?” from the blockbuster Barbie. “I feel so incredibly lucky and honored,” Eilish said, before thanking Barbie director Greta Gerwig. “This goes out to everyone that was affected by the movie and how incredible it is.” “What Was I Made For?” sets the mood for the identity crisis Barbie (Margot Robbie) is having throughout the movie. The song also dominated the 2024 Grammys, receiving five nominations and winning Song of the Year and Best Song Written for Visual Media. The brother-sister team also won the Oscar for Best…

Jailed human rights activist Narges Mohammadi, then 51, was awarded the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her fight against the oppression of Iran’s women and her fight to promote human rights and freedom for all. Berit Reiss-Andersen, head of the Norwegian Nobel Committee began the announcement with “Zan. Zendegi. Azadi. Women. Life. Freedom,” drawing on the motto used by Iran’s protesters who took to the streets en masse since the September 2022 death of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini while in police custody after she was arrested for allegedly wearing her headscarf too loosely. Announcing Mohammadi’s selection, Reiss-Andersen said: “Her brave struggle has come with tremendous personal cost. All together, the regime has arrested her 13 times, convicted her 5 times, and sentenced her to a total of 31…

The greatest female athlete of all TIME—check that: perhaps the greatest athlete of all time—told TIME in 2022 that she had been thinking a lot about the reason she’s vowed to hang up her racket for good. “Olympia doesn’t like when I play tennis,” Serena Williams said plainly about her daughter, Alexis Olympia Ohanian Jr. When Williams told Olympia, who turned 5 shortly after the TIME interview, that she was soon to be done with the life that made her an inspiration to millions, Olympia’s reply was as joyful as her mother’s celebrations after so many Grand Slam wins: a fist-pumping “Yes!” “That kind of makes me sad,” said Williams, leaning forward in her chair in the library of a New York City hotel. “And brings anxiety to my…

In Russian custom, the soul of the dead is believed to remain on earth for 40 days, finishing its business among the living before it moves on to the afterlife. Surviving friends and relatives often spend this period in mourning and reflection. But the loved ones of Alexei Navalny, Russia’s leading dissident, did not have much freedom to abide by this custom after he died in an Arctic prison camp on February 16, 2024. For them, and especially for his wife, Yulia Navalnaya, the days and weeks that followed his death rushed by in a blur of studio lights, airport terminals, hotel rooms, and video calls. Somewhere in that time, between consoling their two children and being consoled by them, she met with President Joe Biden in San Francisco…

The night before she revealed on social media that she had breast cancer, actor Olivia Munn had a “full-blown panic attack,” she told TIME in May 2024. She wrestled with wanting to be strong and hopeful, yet realistic about the challenges of having cancer: the difficult treatments and the sobering realities of how it would impact her future. So she decided to give some actionable advice. She wrote an Instagram post urging women to use the Breast Cancer Risk Assessment Tool, a free online test that women can take in about five minutes to determine if they are at higher risk of developing breast cancer. “It was my No. 1 goal to tell other women that this tool exists,” said Munn. Her doctor had used it to learn that…

The world knows Halle Berry as a director and an Oscar-winning actor. But these days, she’s equally likely to be on a movie set or on Capitol Hill, lobbying lawmakers for better menopause research and treatment. When Berry entered menopause, she, like many women, realized she knew almost nothing about the life stage. Her doctors hadn’t prepared her for life-disrupting symptoms including hot flashes, night sweats, and brain fog, which made her feel like her only option was to grit her teeth and suffer through. “Internally and socially, I had never felt better, more ready for the world, more empowered, more confident,” Berry says. “I thought, ‘This isn’t the time to not have all the information about how to take care of myself.’” She decided to do something about…

Nemonte Nenquimo believes that mother Nature is sending us a message—we just need to listen. “She’s crying. She’s shouting. She’s screaming. She’s saying that…when the tides are rising, the rivers are rising. There are droughts. And this is my language. This is my alarm to you.” Nenquimo, an Indigenous leader of the Waorani peoples in Ecuador and founder of the nonprofits Ceibo Alliance and Amazon Frontlines, has focused much of her activism on preserving the Amazon from deforestation and oil extraction. The warning signs of the climate crisis are a reminder of our collective responsibility to the Earth, she said in her TIME Earth Awards acceptance speech in April 2024, after the honor was presented to her by Peter Seligmann, CEO of nonprofit Nia Tero and chairman of Conservation…

Inspiring Women Editor-in-Chief Sam Jacobs Managing Editor Lily Rothman Creative Director D.W. Pine Senior Design Coordinator Skye Quinn Director of Photography Katherine Pomerantz Project Editor Julie Blume Benedict Project Art Director Courtney Lentz CEO Jessica Sibley COO Mark Howard Chief Revenue Officer Eric Kelliher Retail Sales & Business Development Lisa MacDonald Consumer Marketing Maya Draisin ON THE COVER Top row: Taylor Swift, Caitlin Clark. 2nd row: Serena Williams, Selena Gomez, Halle Berry. 3rd row: Billie Eilish, Megan Rapinoe, Issa Rae. Bottom row: Florence Pugh, Olivia Munn, Jane Fonda. CREDITS Cover Jason Armond/Getty Images; Denise Truscello/Getty Images; Emma McIntyre/Getty Images; Samir Hussein/Getty Images; Marc Piasecki/Getty Images; Rodin Eckenroth/Getty Images; Matt Kryger/Getty Images; Michael Kovac/Getty Images; Dominique Charriau/Getty Images; Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images; Gareth Cattermole/FIFA/Getty Images Inside Front Cover Cameron Spencer/Getty Images…