10 Most Amazing Women In The World
Ten women whose names alone rewrote what was possible for girls and women everywhere.
TheThings Celebrity’s rundown of the “10 Most Amazing Women In The World” pulls from very different centuries and very different fields — a 19th-century mathematician, a teenage sailor, a Pakistani schoolgirl shot for wanting an education — and lines them up as proof that barrier-breaking doesn’t follow one script. The video moves fast, but the stories behind each name run deep, from a Taliban bullet survived in the Swat Valley to a solo sail around the globe finished before the sailor could legally drive in most countries.
- Malala Yousafzai survived a 2012 Taliban assassination attempt in Pakistan’s Swat Valley and became the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate in 2014, at age 17.
- Ada Lovelace is credited as the world’s first computer programmer for her 19th-century work on Charles Babbage’s Analytical Engine.
- Laura Dekker completed a solo circumnavigation of the globe aboard her boat, Guppy, in January 2012 at age 16.
Malala Yousafzai’s Fight for Girls’ Education
Malala Yousafzai was 15 years old when Taliban gunmen boarded her school bus in the Swat Valley and shot her in the head for speaking publicly about girls’ right to go to school. She survived, relocated to Birmingham, England, for treatment and recovery, and turned the attack into a platform rather than a retreat. In 2013 she co-founded the Malala Fund, which has since pushed for girls’ education access in Pakistan, Nigeria and among Syrian refugee populations.
In 2014, at 17 years old, she became the youngest person ever awarded the Nobel Peace Prize, sharing the honor with Indian activist Kailash Satyarthi. Her Nobel lecture leaned on the same argument she’d been making since childhood — that a classroom seat for a girl is worth fighting for.
“Let us pick up our books and our pens. They are the most powerful weapons.”
Ada Lovelace’s Blueprint for Modern Computing
Long before “coder” was a job title, Ada Lovelace was writing what historians now call the first computer program. Working alongside Charles Babbage on his never-fully-built Analytical Engine in the 1840s, Lovelace produced notes that included an algorithm designed to be processed by the machine — the reason computer scientists still cite her as the field’s first programmer, more than a century before the machines she imagined actually existed.
The video’s inclusion of Lovelace next to living record-breakers is the point: her ideas about a machine that could manipulate symbols, not just numbers, anticipated software itself. That kind of forward-thinking has kept her name attached to everything from a U.S. Department of Defense programming language to Ada Lovelace Day, an annual celebration of women in STEM.
Laura Dekker’s Record-Setting Voyage
Dutch teenager Laura Dekker fought a Dutch court just to make her trip happen — child-welfare authorities initially tried to block a minor from sailing solo across open ocean. She won the legal battle, set off in 2010, and finished in January 2012 at age 16, completing a solo circumnavigation of the globe aboard her two-masted sailboat, Guppy. The feat made her the youngest person on record to sail around the world alone.
Dekker’s route took her through some of the most notoriously rough sailing water on the planet, and she did it without a support crew trailing behind her. Her story sits in the video as a reminder that “amazing” doesn’t require decades of buildup — sometimes it’s a teenager, a boat, and a refusal to be told no.
The Rest of the Roster
The list rounds out with names spanning entertainment, law and politics. Oprah Winfrey built her syndicated talk show into a media company spanning television, magazines and philanthropy centered on education and poverty relief. Emma Watson, known for her acting career, was appointed a UN Women Goodwill Ambassador in 2014 and has used the role to campaign on gender pay gaps and girls’ education access worldwide.
Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s inclusion nods to her tenure as an Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court, where she built a record on gender-equality law dating back to her years litigating sex-discrimination cases before ever putting on a robe — the kind of quiet, decades-long grind that predates the flashier record chases people cheer for today, the same instinct that made Amy Schneider’s Jeopardy! run feel like history in real time. And Margaret Thatcher, who became the United Kingdom’s first female prime minister in 1979, closes out the roster as proof the barrier-breaking goes back generations — the kind of complicated, headline-defying legacy that echoes in pieces about royal family members who are nothing like they seem.
Back in Birmingham, where her family resettled after the shooting, Malala was 19 in December 2016, still finishing her schooling while the Malala Fund kept pushing its campaigns for Syrian refugee girls and displaced students in Nigeria — the same fight the video freezes her mid-stride in, book and pen still the weapons of choice.
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