firsts women who are changing the world
MADELEINE ALBRIGHT / MARY BARRA / PATRICIA BATH / ELIZABETH BLACKBURN / URSULA BURNS / CANDIS CAYNE / HILLARY RODHAM CLINTON / EILEEN COLLINS / KELLYANNE CONWAY / MO’NE DAVIS / ELLEN DEGENERES GABBY DOUGLAS / RITA DOVE / ANN DUNWOODY / AVA DUVERNAY / SYLVIA EARLE / ARETHA FRANKLIN / MELINDA GATES / SELENA GOMEZ / NIKKI HALEY / CARLA HAYDEN / MAZIE HIRONO / KATHARINE JEFFERTS SCHORI MAE JEMISON / MAYA LIN / LORETTA LYNCH / RACHEL MADDOW / RITA MORENO / JENNIFER YUH NELSON ILHAN OMAR / DANICA PATRICK / NANCY PELOSI / MICHELLE PHAN / ISSA RAE / SHONDA RHIMES / LORI ROBINSON / SHERYL SANDBERG / CINDY SHERMAN / KATHRYN SMITH / KATHRYN SULLIVAN / BARBARA WALTERS / ALICE WATERS / GEISHA WILLIAMS / SERENA WILLIAMS / OPRAH WINFREY / JANET YELLEN
‘She broke the glass ceiling.’ What a jagged image we use for women who achieve greatly, defining accomplishment in terms of the barrier rather than the triumph.
Talk to women about the forces that drive them and they hit notes of joy and fascination—a passion for music or molecules or finance or food that took them places their sisters and mothers had not gone before. “Sometimes even now when I’m told I was a ‘first,’ it comes as a surprise,” says Patricia Bath, a pioneering physician and inventor. “I wasn’t seeking to be first. I was just doing my thing.”
We wondered if there is a common motive or muscle shared by women who are pioneers. The women profiled here range in age from 16 to 87 and have flourished in public service and private enterprise, explorations to the bottom of the sea and to the outer orbit of Earth. They have been on journeys to places only they could imagine and frequently encountered people who said they would never get there. These stories of success are knitted with stories of setbacks, and these women often credit the people who tried to stop them as a motivating force.
“I recall visiting the home of friends, and a man who was present asked me what I wanted to do one day,” says molecular biologist and Nobel laureate Elizabeth Blackburn. “I said, ‘I’m going to be a scientist.’ And he said, ‘What’s a nice girl like you doing going into science?’ I was shocked and so mad that I didn’t know what to say in response. So I kept my mouth shut, but I was all the more determined. In a way, I’m quite grateful to that man.”
THE FIRST WOMAN to reach a pinnacle may not want anyone to notice her gender; there she is up where the air is thin, where men still outnumber women, but she made it on her own wings. Gender is irrelevant; it’s the altitude that is awesome. But why are there so few women up there with her? Why did it take this long? And if the answer is even partly that there were few role models, that there were no ladies’ rooms in the halls of power, that every step was steeper and harder, then women need to stand up, stand out and be seen at every level, for every talent and discipline. “If the person who gets to tell the story is always
