Short, honest profiles of people whose courage, curiosity and persistence changed the world around them. Read one when you need a reminder of what’s possible.
The daughter of a washerwoman who became the first Black woman to found a bank in America
In segregated Richmond, Virginia, she took a struggling mutual-aid society and built from it a bank, a newspaper and a department store, so that…
Led India to independence with marches, fasts and a refusal to hit back
A shy lawyer thrown off a South African train for the colour of his skin, he developed nonviolent resistance into a weapon that helped end British…
His village was erased when he was seven, and he spent his life writing it back into existence
A refugee at seven who crept back into Israel as an illegal resident in his own land, he was jailed for his poems, spent decades in exile and became…
Shot for going to school, she became the youngest Nobel laureate in history
As a schoolgirl she spoke out against the Taliban’s ban on girls’ education. Shot in the head at 15, she recovered and turned her voice into a global…
Saudi activist jailed for filming herself driving, a founder of the campaign that ended the ban
A single mother working in cybersecurity, she filmed herself driving in Saudi Arabia, where women were forbidden to, and was jailed for it, turning a…
Brought the first computer to Latin America and built Argentina's computer science from nothing
A mathematician exiled twice by Argentina's political upheavals, he imported the country's first digital computer, founded its earliest computer…
Wrote the software that landed Apollo 11 and kept its head when the alarms went off
Leading the Apollo flight software team while raising a young daughter, she insisted on error handling that NASA thought unnecessary. Minutes before…
An illiterate Irish orphan who became the bread woman of New Orleans
Orphaned as a child and widowed young, she could not read or write, yet built a dairy and then one of the largest bakeries in the American South, and…
Forced to watch a massacre in Burundi, she hid 25 children and built them a town called Peace
A Tutsi schoolteacher who survived the killing of 72 people at a bishop's residence in 1993 and saved the Hutu and Tutsi children in her care. Maison…
Grew up without running water in a Rio favela and rose to run one of the world's biggest oil companies
Raised in poverty in Rio de Janeiro's Gramacho favela, she worked her way through a chemical engineering degree and thirty years at Petrobras to…
Worked unpaid for nearly thirty years, then won the Nobel Prize for explaining how the nucleus is built
Because her husband was on the faculty, universities would not employ her, so she did physics as a volunteer. The newspaper headline when she won the…
Built a newsroom to hold the Philippine government to account and was arrested for it
A former CNN bureau chief who co-founded the news site Rappler, she documented the killings of the drug war and the troll networks behind the…
At 52 she sailed to South America to paint insects nobody in Europe had seen
When people still believed insects sprang from mud, she raised caterpillars and drew each stage of their lives. She left her husband, sold her…
Holds over 200 patents built on the technology that let phone calls travel over the internet
One of very few Black women in engineering at AT&T Bell Labs in the 1980s, she became a driving force behind voice-over-internet-protocol technology…
Pioneer of radioactivity and the first person to win two Nobel Prizes
Barred from university in her home country, she studied in secret, moved to Paris with almost nothing and went on to discover two elements and win…
Banned from the research ships, she mapped the ocean floor from their soundings and found it splitting apart
Told her discovery of a rift running down the Atlantic was girl talk, she kept plotting until the evidence was undeniable. Her map changed what…
Rio city councillor from a favela who was assassinated for challenging police violence
Raised in one of Rio de Janeiro's poorest favelas, she became a Black, bisexual city councillor who investigated police killings and militia…
Locked in her room until 29 by a strict mother, she turned her own body into her art
Raised under near-military discipline by a mother who kept a curfew on her into adulthood, she left Belgrade to make performance art that tests pain…
Warned that spray cans were destroying the ozone layer, and was told he was being hysterical
A chemist who turned a childhood bathroom into a laboratory, and as a young postdoc did the calculation that showed a harmless-seeming industrial gas…
A homeless drag queen of the Stonewall era who housed the kids the movement forgot
She arrived in New York in 1963 with fifteen dollars and a bag of clothes, was a fixture of the Stonewall era, and with Sylvia Rivera set up a…
Six times the best woman footballer in the world, from a town where girls were told not to play
Raised by her mother in a poor town in north-east Brazil, she played with boys who did not want her there, left home at 14 and became the most…
Led the movement that ended legal segregation in America and was killed at 39
A young Baptist minister thrust into leading a bus boycott at 26, he was arrested 29 times, stabbed, bombed, wiretapped and finally shot, in thirteen…
A self-taught fossil hunter who changed how the world understood prehistoric life
Poor, female and working-class in Georgian England, she found the first complete ichthyosaur and plesiosaur skeletons and was quietly relied upon by…
Mobilised the housewives of Govan against wartime rent rises and forced a change in the law within weeks
A carpet printer's daughter who organised the Glasgow rent strikes of 1915, sending women with flour bombs to see off the bailiffs. The Rent…
