Women Making Waves: Women's Leadership Stories
Honoring Women Who Shaped Justice, Leadership, and Equality
Women Making Waves is a year-long advocacy and storytelling initiative highlighting women’s leadership stories that have shaped justice, equality, and opportunity for women and girls around the world.
Each week throughout 2026, we spotlight a woman whose courage, persistence, and principled action — whether bold or behind the scenes — moved movements forward, challenged systems of inequality, and opened doors for future generations.
This page serves as the living archive of those stories – complementing initiatives like the Advocate of the Year Award and Stephenie’s global advocacy events that continue advancing progress for women and girls.
Why Women's Leadership Stories Matter?
- Honor the women who paved the way
- Connect past advocacy to today’s movements
- Inspire continued action for women and girls
Why Women's Leadership Stories Matter?
- Honor the women who paved the way
- Connect past advocacy to today’s movements
- Inspire continued action for women and girls
Library of Women Making Waves
Courage, Education & the Foundations of Justice
January’s Women Making Waves highlights focus on the foundations of justice, education, and courageous leadership. The women featured this month demonstrate how individual bravery and collective action can transform societies and expand opportunities for future generations.
From civil rights pioneers and movement organizers to global advocates for girls’ education and reproductive justice, these leaders show how persistence, vision, and courage create lasting change. Their work reminds us that progress begins with individuals who are willing to challenge injustice and build pathways toward equality.
Aligned with moments such as MLK Day, the International Day of Education, and the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, January’s stories reflect how advocacy, education, and grassroots organizing have shaped the ongoing fight for rights and opportunity.
Leadership, Democracy & Expanding Access to Power
February’s Women Making Waves highlights explore the many ways women have expanded access to leadership, democracy, and justice. From historic legal breakthroughs to modern movements for political representation and technology accountability, the advocates featured this month demonstrate how women continue to reshape systems of power.
In recognition of Black History Month, we honor leaders who strengthened democratic participation and amplified the voices of communities too often excluded from decision-making. This month also highlights advocates confronting modern challenges — including algorithmic bias, information equity, and digital accountability — reminding us that justice must evolve alongside technology.
Aligned with moments such as National Freedom Day, the International Day of Zero Tolerance for FGM, Safer Internet Day, and Presidents Day, February’s stories illustrate how courageous leadership, civic engagement, and persistent advocacy continue to open doors for future generations.
Women’s Leadership, Youth Voices & Economic Equity
March’s Women Making Waves highlights celebrate women’s leadership, economic empowerment, and the rising influence of youth advocates shaping the future. In recognition of Women’s History Month and International Women’s Day, this month’s stories spotlight leaders who challenged barriers in politics, policy, and the fight for gender equality.
The advocates featured this month also explore how education, economic opportunity, and care-centered policies strengthen communities and expand pathways to leadership. From pioneers in feminist political power to champions of workforce equity and the care economy, these women demonstrate how bold leadership can transform systems.
March also elevates the voices of young advocates leading environmental and water justice movements, reminding us that leadership is not defined by age but by courage and commitment. As the month culminates with World Water Day and Equal Pay Day, these stories highlight the ongoing work required to ensure fairness, opportunity, and equity for women and girls everywhere.
January Highlights
Miriam "Mims" Payne & Jess Rowe
Modern Courage & Women Taking up Space
Miriam “Mims” Payne and Jess Rowe are advocates whose work highlights the power of storytelling, community care, and lived experience in driving cultural change. Through their voices and leadership, they create space for honest conversations about mental health, identity, and the importance of collective support. Their work challenges stigma and elevates stories often left unheard, reminding us that advocacy is not only about policy change, but also about building connection, empathy, and understanding within communities.
Ruby Bridges
Education, Courage, and Civil Rights
Ruby Bridges is a civil rights icon whose courage helped transform education and advance racial equality in the United States. At just six years old, she became the first Black child to integrate an all-white elementary school in the South, walking past hostile crowds each day to attend class. Her quiet bravery became a powerful symbol of the fight for equal access to education and the resilience of children in the face of injustice.
Today, Ruby Bridges continues her advocacy through public speaking and education-focused work, reminding us that progress often begins with extraordinary courage at a very young age.
Marian Wright Edelman
Justice for Children & Families
Marian Wright Edelman is a lifelong civil rights advocate and the founder of the Children’s Defense Fund. Her work has shaped national conversations on child welfare, education, poverty, and equity, grounded in the belief that every child deserves dignity, opportunity, and protection. Edelman’s leadership reflects a moral vision of justice rooted in care, responsibility, and collective action.
Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya
Education as Protection & Empowerment
Dr. Kakenya Ntaiya is an education activist and global advocate for girls’ rights whose work demonstrates how education can protect, empower, and transform lives. After resisting early marriage and female genital mutilation in her community, she earned advanced degrees and returned to Kenya to found schools that provide girls with safe, high-quality education and leadership development. Her work emphasizes education as a powerful tool for ending harmful practices, expanding opportunity, and creating lasting social change. Through her leadership, Dr. Ntaiya continues to show how investing in girls strengthens entire communities.
Ella Baker & Diane Nash
Movement Builders & Collective Courage
Ella Baker was a foundational leader of the U.S. civil rights movement whose work reshaped how social change is built. Known for her belief in collective leadership rather than charismatic figureheads, she played a critical role in organizations such as the NAACP, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). Baker championed grassroots organizing and youth leadership, insisting that ordinary people held extraordinary power to transform their communities. Her philosophy of participatory democracy continues to influence movements for justice today.
Diane Nash is a civil rights leader whose courage and strategic leadership helped shape the nonviolent movement of the 1960s. As a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), she played a central role in the Nashville sit-ins and later became a key organizer of the Freedom Rides. Nash’s leadership demonstrated the power of disciplined nonviolent action and youth-led organizing in dismantling segregation. Her work remains a lasting example of how moral clarity and persistence can drive systemic change.
Monica Simpson
Grassroots Reproductive Justice
Monica Simpson is a nationally recognized advocate for reproductive justice whose work centers the voices and leadership of Black women, LGBTQ+ people, and communities most impacted by reproductive oppression. As a movement leader and organizer, she focuses on building power at the grassroots level — where lived experience, community trust, and collective action drive meaningful change. Simpson’s advocacy expands the understanding of reproductive justice beyond policy alone, emphasizing dignity, bodily autonomy, and the right for all people to make decisions about their lives and families.
Malala Yousafzai
Girls Education & Global Advocacy - International Day of Education
Malala Yousafzai is a global advocate for girls’ education and one of the youngest recipients of the Nobel Peace Prize. After surviving an attack for speaking out against the Taliban’s restrictions on girls’ schooling in Pakistan, she transformed personal courage into global action. Through advocacy, public speaking, and the Malala Fund, she continues to work toward a world where every girl has access to 12 years of free, safe, quality education. Malala’s leadership highlights education as both a human right and a foundation for equality.
Loretta J. Ross
Reproductive Justice Framework
February Highlights
Belva Lockwood
Legal Firsts & Women in Power
Belva Lockwood was a pioneering lawyer, women’s rights advocate, and political trailblazer who refused to accept the legal and political exclusion of women in the 19th century. After being denied entry to the legal profession because of her gender, she successfully fought for the right of women to practice law, becoming the first woman admitted to practice before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Lockwood’s advocacy extended beyond the courtroom. She ran for President of the United States twice, challenged discriminatory laws, and argued that women’s full participation in democracy was essential to justice. Her courage and persistence expanded women’s access to law, leadership, and political power, leaving a lasting legacy in American democracy.
Fannie Lou Hamer
Black Women, Democracy & the Right to Be Heard
Fannie Lou Hamer was a civil rights leader, voting rights activist, and one of the most powerful voices for democracy in 20th-century America. Born into poverty in Mississippi, she experienced firsthand the violence and intimidation used to suppress Black political participation. Rather than being silenced, she became a fearless advocate for voting rights, co-founding the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party and challenging exclusion at the national level.
Patsy Takemoto Mink
Freedom Through Education & Law
Patsy Takemoto Mink was a trailblazing legislator and civil rights leader whose work transformed access to education and opportunity for women and girls. As a U.S. Congresswoman, she devoted her career to dismantling barriers rooted in gender, race, and class, consistently advocating for equality under the law.
Mink is best known as the primary author of Title IX, landmark legislation that prohibits sex-based discrimination in federally funded education. Her vision of freedom was grounded in access — to education, to public service, and to full participation in civic life. Through her leadership, generations of women and girls gained pathways to opportunity previously denied to them.
Joy Buolamwini
AI Bias & Technology Accountability
Joy Buolamwini is a computer scientist and digital justice advocate whose research exposed racial and gender bias in artificial intelligence systems. Through her work, she revealed how widely used technologies can reinforce inequality when ethical considerations and diverse perspectives are absent from their design.
Buolamwini’s advocacy has prompted global conversations about accountability in technology, influencing policymakers, corporations, and the public to demand more equitable and transparent systems. Her leadership highlights the importance of embedding justice and human rights into innovation, ensuring technology serves people rather than marginalizing them.
Safiya Umoja Noble
Information Equity & Algorithmic Justice
Safiya Umoja Noble is a scholar, author, and advocate whose work examines how digital platforms and search technologies shape knowledge, bias, and power. Her research demonstrates how algorithms can reproduce systemic inequities, influencing what information people see — and whose voices are amplified or silenced.
Through her scholarship and public engagement, Noble calls for greater accountability, ethics, and equity in information systems. Her work challenges institutions to recognize technology as a social force and to build digital environments that reflect democratic values, fairness, and inclusion.
Leymah Gbowee
Women, Peace & Human Rights
Leymah Gbowee is a peace activist and Nobel Peace Prize laureate whose leadership helped bring an end to Liberia’s civil war. Mobilizing women across religious, ethnic, and political divides, she demonstrated the transformative power of collective, women-led action in the face of violence and instability.
Gbowee’s work reshaped global understanding of peacebuilding by centering women as essential agents of change. Her leadership continues to influence international efforts focused on women, peace, and security, reinforcing the principle that sustainable peace and human rights are inseparable from women’s participation and leadership.
Barbara A. Mikulski
Breaking Political Barriers
Barbara A. Mikulski is a former U.S. Senator whose career expanded women’s political representation at the highest levels of government. As the longest-serving woman in U.S. Senate history, she normalized women’s leadership in spaces where they had long been excluded.
Throughout her tenure, Mikulski championed policies that supported working families, healthcare access, and gender equity. Her leadership demonstrated that women belong in decision-making roles and that political institutions are strengthened when they reflect the diversity of the people they serve.
Alicia Johnson
Redefining Civic Power Through Public Service
Alicia Johnson is a public servant and advocate who made history as the first Black woman sworn in to serve on the Georgia Public Service Commission. The Commission plays a critical role in regulating utilities and energy services, shaping decisions that directly affect affordability, access, and quality of life for millions of Georgians.
Johnson’s leadership brings greater accountability, representation, and transparency to a powerful but often overlooked area of government. By stepping into this role, she expands who is seen — and heard — in decision-making spaces that shape essential public infrastructure, reinforcing the importance of inclusive leadership in democratic governance.
Mary Sheffield, Sharon Owens, and Dr. Dorcey Applyrs
Firsts in Local Leadership: Redefining Civic Power
Mary Sheffield, Sharon Owens, and Dr. Dorcey Applyrs represent a powerful shift in local leadership as the first Black women mayors of Detroit, Syracuse, and Albany. Their 2026 elections marked historic milestones in cities where Black women had long been underrepresented in executive leadership roles.
By leading at the local level, these women are redefining what civic power looks like in practice — shaping policy closest to the people it impacts. Their leadership underscores the importance of representation, accountability, and community-rooted governance, demonstrating how local office can be a critical site for advancing equity and inclusive democracy.
Gloria Steinem
Movement Building & Feminist Voice
Gloria Steinem is a writer, organizer, and feminist leader whose work transformed public conversations about gender, power, and equality. Through her writing and activism, she helped elevate women’s lived experiences as political issues, connecting personal stories to systemic change.
Steinem’s influence extends beyond any single movement or generation. By building platforms for feminist voices and supporting grassroots organizing, she helped shape modern feminism as an inclusive, evolving movement. Her work continues to inspire dialogue, activism, and leadership rooted in equity and shared humanity.
March Highlights
Ginny Carroll
Education as Empowerment
Ginny Carroll has dedicated her leadership to expanding educational access and opportunity for women and girls around the world. Through her work in global philanthropy and collaborative partnerships, she has supported initiatives that remove barriers to schooling, strengthen leadership development, and elevate the role of women in community transformation.
Her advocacy recognizes that education is not merely a pathway to employment — it is a foundation for confidence, agency, and long-term systemic change. By investing in women’s education and supporting cross-sector collaboration, Carroll’s work contributes to ripple effects that extend far beyond individual classrooms, strengthening families and communities across generations.
She demonstrates that sustainable progress requires both resources and relationships — and that education equity is central to global gender justice.
Kate Lord
Girls’ Education & Global Gender Equity
Kate Lord is a global advocate for girls’ education and gender equity, widely recognized for her leadership at She’s the First — an international organization dedicated to ensuring girls everywhere can be educated, respected, and heard. During her tenure, she strengthened partnerships with community-based organizations across the Global South, prioritizing locally led solutions that address the structural barriers girls face.
Her work centers a critical truth: sustainable change begins within communities. By elevating the voices of girls and investing in grassroots leadership, she helped reshape how philanthropy supports education reform. Rather than imposing external models, her approach emphasized accountability, cultural relevance, and long-term collaboration.
Lord’s leadership underscores that advancing girls’ education requires more than access — it requires equity, partnership, and systemic commitment to opportunity.
Bella Abzug
Bold Women in Public Power
Bella Abzug was a lawyer, organizer, and trailblazing U.S. Congresswoman elected in 1970 during a time when few women held national office. A fierce advocate for women’s rights, civil liberties, and social justice, she brought unapologetic feminist leadership into the halls of federal power and challenged the political establishment to confront gender inequality directly.
Throughout her career, Abzug championed policies advancing reproductive rights, equal opportunity, and government accountability. She also co-founded the National Women’s Political Caucus, helping create a pipeline for women to enter public service and reshape institutions from within.
Her legacy demonstrates that representation is structural — when women lead, policy priorities shift. Abzug’s bold presence continues to inspire generations of women committed to public power and democratic change.