The first 30 profiles I wrote about in my Women’s History Month magazine :)
1. Allison Ellsworth She was 9 months pregnant when she pitched on Shark Tank and got a deal. Her prebiotic soda brand Poppi started at a Texas farmers market; a single TikTok video later drove 100,000 sales in 24 hours. She sold to PepsiCo for $1.95B in 2025. All while raising 3 sons.
2. Bridgit Mendler You knew her from Disney Channel. Then she got a master's at MIT, studied at Harvard Law, worked at the FCC… and in 2022, co-founded Northwood Space. She looked at the entire SpaceTech industry and asked who was building the infrastructure to bring satellite data back to Earth. Nobody was. So she did. The U.S. Space Force handed her company a $50M contract.
3. Christina Cacioppo She didn't write a single line of code until customers asked "where do I pay?" Every morning at 5:45am, she manually wrote "daily activity" emails pretending they were automated, just to test if people found them useful. She hit $10M ARR before raising a dime. Vanta is now worth $2.45B.
4. Dame Stephanie Shirley She arrived in Britain at age 5, alone, on a Kindertransport train fleeing the Nazis. In 1962, after years of being ignored and underpaid in tech, she launched her own software company and had to sign her name "Steve" because male executives wouldn't respond to a woman. Of her first 300 hires, 297 were women pushed out of the workforce after becoming mothers. She created 70 millionaires, then gave nearly £70M to autism research after losing her son.
5. Dolly Parton Born in a one-room cabin; her father paid the doctor with a sack of cornmeal. She wrote 3,000 songs, sold 100M records, opened Dollywood and then quietly became one of America's greatest philanthropists. Her Imagination Library has mailed over 270 million free books to children. She partially funded the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine. She could have been a billionaire. She chose something else.
6. Emilia Clarke At 24, fresh off Season 1 of Game of Thrones, her brain hemorrhaged at a London gym. She had emergency surgery, developed aphasia, went back to set, then had open brain surgery a second time, titanium replacing parts of her skull. She earned over $1M per episode as Daenerys. Then she founded SameYou, a nonprofit fixing the near-total absence of neurorehabilitation support for young brain injury survivors.
7. Estée Lauder She grew up in Queens above her father's hardware store, mixing her uncle's face creams and selling them with the conviction of someone who had something to prove. She launched Estée Lauder Inc. in 1946; Saks Fifth Avenue's first $800 order sold out in two days. She famously got into Galeries Lafayette in Paris by "accidentally" spilling her perfume on the floor during a demo. She died in 2004 leaving behind 60,000 employees, products in 140+ countries, and a $50B+ company.
8. Gitanjali Rao At 10, she watched the Flint water crisis unfold and started researching carbon nanotube sensor technology, in elementary school. By 12, she had invented a Bluetooth device to detect lead in drinking water. By 15, she was TIME's first-ever Kid of the Year. She also built an AI app to detect cyberbullying in real time, led innovation workshops in 40+ countries, and got her pilot's license somewhere in between.
9. Indra Nooyi She moved to the US in 1978 with an MBA from IIM Calcutta, juggling Yale studies and a receptionist job to survive. She joined PepsiCo in 1994 and eventually became its first female CEO, growing net revenue by 80% while pushing the company toward healthier products and sustainability. She was the first immigrant to lead a Fortune 50 company. She put the company first at every step and said so publicly, without apology.
10. Jo Malone She was putting food on the table at 11, selling her dad's paintings and replicating her mother's face creams for £4.50 a pot. She built Jo Malone London from her kitchen and sold it to Estée Lauder for millions. Then breast cancer wiped out her sense of smell and a non-compete locked her out of fragrance for five years. On the exact day the clause expired, her sense of smell came back. She started over.
11. Julia Stewart She was hired to fix Applebee's with a clear promise: turn it around, and the CEO job is yours. She doubled the stock, hit $2.35B in sales, and walked into her boss's office to claim the role. He said: "No. Not ever." So she left, became CEO of IHOP instead, delivered 18 consecutive quarters of growth and then had IHOP acquire Applebee's. After the deal closed, she called the man who'd taken her seat and let him go.
12. Kat Cole At 17, she was a Hooters hostess. At 19, she was on a plane to open the company's first international franchise. She dropped out of college, rose to VP at 26, then cold-emailed ten CEOs to get letters of recommendation for an MBA program without a bachelor's degree. She ran Cinnabon to $1B in annual sales by 32. She's now CEO of AG1.
13. Laura Yecies She's a 4x tech CEO who hiked, ate clean, took calcium and still kept losing bone density. So she became CEO of Osteoboost, a company using NASA-derived technology to fight osteopenia with a wearable belt that transmits vibrations to trigger new bone cell activity. In 2024, it became the first FDA-approved prescription drug-free device for osteopenia. TIME named it one of the Best Inventions of 2025.
14. Leena Nair She was the first woman in her family to pursue higher education. She chose the factory floor over the boardroom on purpose, learning how companies actually work from the inside out. After 30 years at Unilever, she was offered the CEO role at Chanel a brand she'd never worked in. She visited 25 offices, 40 factories, and 100 retail locations before changing a single thing. She pushed women into 60% of Chanel's leadership roles and scaled its foundation from $20M to $100M annually.
15. Lori Greiner She started with one idea (a plastic earring organizer), a $300K loan, and no investors. Within a year, she'd paid it off entirely. She became the "Queen of QVC," then joined Shark Tank, where she spotted Scrub Daddy (now over $400M in sales) in seconds. She holds 120 patents, has a 90% investment success rate, and funds college scholarships for women who can't afford to be in the room yet.
16. Madam C.J. Walker Born to formerly enslaved parents on a Southern plantation, she was the first in her family born free. She was widowed by 20, working as a laundress for $1.50 a day, losing her hair to harsh chemicals and poor nutrition. She invested $1.25 in ingredients, developed her own formula, rebranded herself entirely, and built a company employing 40,000 Black women. When she died in 1919, she was America's first self-made female millionaire and she'd already given most of it away.
17. Nadia Murad ISIS massacred 600 people in her village in a single day, including her mother and six brothers. She was abducted, enslaved, and sold between fighters. Her captor forgot to lock the door. She ran. In 2018, she won the Nobel Peace Prize. She used every platform, every dollar, and every ounce of influence to rebuild her community, prosecute war criminals, and ensure survivors had legal rights, reparations, and healthcare.
18. Nina Tandon She studied electrical engineering, built cancer-sniffing devices in Rome, grew beating heart tissue at Columbia, and earned a PhD in cardiac tissue engineering. Then she co-founded EpiBone, the first company to grow living human bones from a patient's own stem cells. In just three weeks, her team can grow a bone that's surgery-ready. In 2023, the FDA approved them to begin testing in humans
19. Oprah Winfrey She wore dresses made from potato sacks. By 14, she'd survived abuse, run away from home, and lost a newborn son. At 19, she became Nashville's first Black female news anchor. By 30, she had taken over a failing Chicago talk show and turned it into a cultural institution. She became the first Black female billionaire in history. Then she built schools in South Africa, championed child protection legislation, and donated millions to education.
20. Peggy Cherng In the '70s, she was writing code for AI systems at 3M and building war simulators for the U.S. Air Force. In 1982, she left to help open a restaurant in a California mall. She brought her engineering precision with her: custom software for inventory, AI-driven scheduling, customer analytics to refine menus. That restaurant is now Panda Express: 2,400+ locations, $5.9B in annual revenue, no franchising, no outside investors. Every location still in-house.
21. Ruth Handler In the 1950s, Mattel's board laughed her out of the room. A doll with adult features? Too racy. She did it anyway, named her Barbie, launched her at the 1959 New York Toy Fair, and sold 300,000 units in the first year. Later, after her own mastectomy, she couldn't find a prosthetic that looked or felt real. So she founded another company and built one.
22. Safra Catz She joined Oracle as an investment banker with no tech background and within two years was on the board. She led more than 130 acquisitions, including a brutal 18-month hostile takeover of PeopleSoft that defined Oracle's future. After Mark Hurd's death, she became sole CEO and pushed Oracle to compete directly with Amazon and Microsoft in cloud. Her 2022 paycheck was $138M. She rarely gives interviews. She doesn't need to.
23. Sandy Lerner She co-founded Cisco Systems from her living room in 1984, not to start a company, but just to connect two university networks that couldn't talk to each other. VCs invested, installed a new CEO without telling her, and fired her six years later. Her husband quit the same day. They sold their shares for $170M. She took the money and co-launched Urban Decay with shades called Roach, Bruise, and Asphyxia. Their first campaign said: "Burn Barbie, burn." It made $9M in year one.
24. Serena Williams 23 Grand Slams. 4 Olympic golds. 319 weeks ranked No. 1 in the world. And in 2014, while still competing, she launched Serena Ventures after discovering that less than 2% of venture funding goes to women-only startups. Today the fund has invested in 85+ companies: 54% founded by women, 47% by Black founders, 14 of which have reached unicorn status. Her entire team is women. All of them diverse.
25. Shelley Zalis She built a market research company from her basement, sold it for $80M, then showed up to CES, one of the world's biggest tech conferences, and didn't want to be one of the only women in a crowd of 150,000 men. So she called some friends. 50 women showed up. By day 3, they were closing deals in the Four Seasons penthouse. That became the Equality Lounge, which became The Female Quotient: now a 7-million-strong global community across 30 industries and 100+ countries.
26. Shonda Rhimes She was broke and unemployed in an LA apartment when she started writing about surgeons… specifically the confused ones, not the confident ones. ABC gave her a slot nobody wanted. Grey's Anatomy became a phenomenon. She went on to become the first woman in TV history to create three shows that each hit 100 episodes. In 2017, Disney refused her sister an extra VIP pass to Disneyland. She called Netflix the same day. Bridgerton became the biggest show they'd ever released.
27. Tracy Chou She was a founding engineer at Pinterest and one of the first people to publicly force tech companies to publish their gender diversity numbers. The backlash was immediate: stalkers, 10,000 password reset requests, real threats. Platforms shrugged. So she built Block Party: an anti-harassment tool now used across 9+ platforms that cleans your social media, locks your privacy settings, and wipes your data trail before someone weaponizes it against you.
28. Vera Wang She spent 17 years at Vogue, becoming its youngest-ever fashion editor, then two more at Ralph Lauren. When she planned her own wedding in 1989, she couldn't find a dress she actually wanted to wear. So she opened a bridal salon at New York's Carlyle Hotel with seed money from her father. Mariah Carey, Victoria Beckham, Ariana Grande, and Chelsea Clinton all walked down the aisle in her gowns.
29. Virginia Apgar In the early 1950s, babies were delivered and if something was wrong, there was no system to catch it fast. Virginia Apgar had attended over 17,000 births and noticed babies were still dying minutes after delivery. Over breakfast with med students, she sketched out five criteria, scored 0 to 2 each, for a total of 10. The Apgar Score. Every baby born in a hospital today is still assessed with her system.
30. Whitney Wolfe Herd She left Tinder in 2014 after her own experience there, and built Bumble: a dating app where women make the first move. By 31, she had taken the company public with a $13B valuation, becoming the youngest woman ever to do so. She banned unsolicited explicit images and built AI safety features years before her competitors thought to.
31. Jean Chatzky Before TikTok "money experts," before financial wellness was a brand category, Jean Chatzky got turned down by Forbes and told to get an MBA. So she went to Wall Street then came back to journalism and became the financial editor for millions of Americans on the Today Show. In 2018, she founded HerMoney Media: a full media company built on one insight: women aren't bad with money, they're just ignored by systems that were never built for them. She also co-created a financial literacy magazine reaching 2M students in 4th through 6th grade.
32. Kiara Nirghin At 13, Kiara was hospitalized with two diseases back to back. At 16, watching her country's farmland die in South Africa's worst drought in 30 years, she spent 45 days in her kitchen turning orange peels and avocado skins into a biodegradable super-absorbent polymer that holds 300 times its weight in water and increases plant survival in drought by 84%. She won the Google Science Fair Grand Prize and was named a UN Young Champion of the Earth.
33. Barbara Belvisi At 26, she became the youngest woman in Europe to launch a VC fund. At 29, she walked away from it. Without an engineering degree, she spent a year cold-emailing NASA engineers, landed a place in NASA's Space Portal program, and in 2018 founded Interstellar Lab, which builds AI-powered, self-contained BioPods that grow over 300 plant species without soil, pesticides, or sunlight, anywhere on Earth or beyond it.
34. Mary Lou Jepsen She holds nearly 300 patents, founded four companies, and led hardware at Facebook, Google, Intel, and Oculus. In 2016, she walked away from all of it to found Openwater, whose wearable infrared holography devices aim to replace MRI machines at a fraction of the cost and treat severe depression through ultrasound, achieving near 50% remission rates in early trials. Then she open-sourced everything: all 68 patents, all hardware schematics, all software.
35. Ada Lovelace In 1842, she translated a paper about Babbage's analytical engine from Italian into English, then added notes three times longer than the original. In those notes, she wrote the world's first computer program, distinguished for the first time between numbers and symbols (realizing a machine could process music and logic, not just math), and posed an early critique of artificial intelligence that philosophers are still debating today.
36. Elsa Schiaparelli She had no design training, no money, and a polio-stricken daughter to raise alone after her husband left. In 1927, she launched a sweater line from Paris; Vogue called it an artistic masterpiece. By the mid-1930s, she was producing 10,000 garments a year from a 98-room mansion, had invented the wrap dress, pioneered the visible zipper, and become the first female designer to appear on the cover of TIME.
37. Joy Mangano She was a divorced waitress and mother of three who hated mopping floors. She scraped together savings, built 1,000 units of her self-wringing Miracle Mop in her dad's auto body shop, took it to QVC, and sold 18,000 in under 30 minutes. Over the next two decades she launched product after product (including Huggable Hangers, now with over 1 billion sold) becoming HSN's #1 seller in history with $150M+ in annual sales and 126 published patents.
38. Clara Barton Clara Barton founded the American Red Cross at 59 from her D.C. apartment. She'd spent the Civil War hauling supply wagons to battlefields before military medics arrived After the war, she answered 63,000 letters from families searching for missing soldiers… then collapsed, went to Europe, and discovered the international Red Cross movement. She ran the American chapter for 23 years, mobilized disaster relief across floods, tornadoes, and epidemics, and lobbied successfully to expand the Geneva Convention to cover natural disasters.
39. Jennifer Holmgren She turned pollution into jet fuel. As CEO of LanzaTech, Dr. Jennifer Holmgren built a bacteria-powered system that captures carbon monoxide from steel plants and landfills and converts it into sustainable aviation fuel, reducing lifecycle emissions by up to 98%. She then spun off LanzaJet to commercialize it, with the first plant in Georgia. Her message: you're not paying a green premium. You're enjoying a fossil discount.
40. Lucy Peng She was teaching finance at a university when her husband joined a small e-commerce startup. She quit her job and joined too. That company was Alibaba. She built its culture from scratch, then took over a broken payments tool called Alipay, brought transaction success rates from 60% to 95% in a year, and spun it into Ant Financial, raising $22B total and making her the most highly funded female founder in history. When the Chinese government halted Ant’s $34.4B IPO days before launch and Jack Ma disappeared from public life, she handled the regulators and guided the company through restructuring.
41. Jane Ní Dhulchaointigh She grew up on a farm in Kilkenny fixing things, studied sculpture, then spent 5 years and 5,000 failed prototypes in a London lab mixing bathroom sealant with wood dust until she created something nobody had seen before: a silicone-based, moldable glue that sets into flexible rubber in 24 hours and sticks to almost anything. She called it Sugru, launched 1,000 packs in December 2009, and sold out in 6 hours. By the time the company sold, users had fixed over 20 million items across 175 countries, including, memorably, a prosthetic leg for a chicken.
42. Kate Ryder She was an English teacher, then a journalist for The Economist and The New Yorker, then helped a former U.S. Treasury Secretary write his memoir, and then, in 2014, founded the world's largest virtual clinic for women and families. Maven Clinic covers fertility, IVF, pregnancy, postpartum, menopause, and pediatrics, available 24/7 in 175 countries. In 2021, Oprah Winfrey joined a $110M Series D that made Maven the first unicorn in women's and family health. It now supports 17 million lives across 2,000+ employers and health plans.
43. Rosalyn Yalow She was the only woman among 400 faculty members at the University of Illinois in 1941. Her first lab at the Bronx VA Hospital was a broom closet. Working there with a single research partner, she developed radioimmunoassay (RIA), a technique for detecting microscopic quantities of substances in blood that made possible everything from hepatitis screening to accurate drug dosing to the GLP-1 research that eventually produced Ozempic. In 1977, she won the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine.
44. Steph Hon She was a dancer and documentary filmmaker who lived out of bags and got tired of watching her skincare explode in hotel bathrooms at midnight. So she built Cadence: modular, magnetic, leakproof, refillable capsules made from 50% recycled materials, including ocean-bound plastic, that click into a honeycomb so you can carry your entire routine in one hand.
45. Judy Love In 1964, she and her husband leased an abandoned gas station in Watonga, Oklahoma with $5,000 borrowed from her parents and four kids at home. She ran the books; he ran the pumps. Today, Love's Travel Stops has 650+ locations across 42 states, 40,000 employees, and has never taken outside investment, still 100% family-owned. While building it, Judy got a master's and launched her own interior design firm. She also gave $10M to build a women's hospital and co-chaired the campaign for the only school in Oklahoma for children experiencing homelessness.
46. Sandra Kurtzig In 1972, she quit her job at GE to start a family and figured she'd write a few software programs from her second bedroom to keep busy. She took a $2,000 commission check, launched ASK, and when her engineers needed a computer they couldn't afford, she talked HP into letting them use one overnight so they showed up at 6PM with sleeping bags and worked till 6AM. In 1981, ASK went public, making her the first woman to take a Silicon Valley tech company public; by the early '90s it was doing $450M in annual sales.
47. Zhang Yin In the early 1990s, she and her husband drove a used Dodge minivan across America, begging landfills to sell them scrap paper. She'd started a paper trading company in Hong Kong with $3,800 and spotted a gap nobody else saw: China's booming economy needed raw materials, and the U.S. had mountains of waste nobody wanted. She founded America Chung Nam in LA, which became the largest U.S. wastepaper exporter, then launched Nine Dragons Paper in China, turning American trash into containerboard used by Nike, Coca-Cola, and Sony to ship goods back to American consumers.
48. Mahnoor Omer At 14, she founded a nonprofit to run gender justice workshops with village girls. At 16, she was making "dignity kits" (pads, underwear, pain medication) and distributing them herself in Islamabad. Then she learned that Pakistan's tax structure adds up to 40% effective burden on menstrual products. So she went to law school, clerked at the Supreme Court, and in 2025 filed a petition in the Lahore High Court challenging the period tax as unconstitutional gender discrimination. She is 20 years old.
49. Melitta Bentz One morning in 1908, a German housewife grabbed a brass tin, punched holes in it, and lined it with blotting paper from her son's school notebook, because she was sick of drinking coffee grounds. She patented it the same year with 72 pfennigs of starting capital, set up shop in her 5-room apartment, and had her husband and sons deliver orders by handcart. When WWI drafted her family, she ran the business alone. Before stepping back in 1932, she introduced a five-day work week, three weeks' vacation, and Christmas bonuses, decades before any of that was standard.
50. Luana Lopes Lara She trained at the Bolshoi Ballet, where teachers held lit cigarettes under her leg to test pain tolerance, then pivoted to MIT for computer science and math. In 2018, walking home from an internship in New York, she and her cofounder had an idea: what if you could trade on events the same way you trade stocks? Forty law firms said it was impossible. She found the one who said yes, fought for federal approval, sued regulators when they blocked election contracts in 2024, and won. In December 2025, Kalshi raised $1B at an $11B valuation. She owns 12%.
51. Trina Spear In 2013, she left Wall Street to start a scrubs company, a product so commoditized that hospitals were buying it by the pound. For months, she and her co-founder parked outside hospitals and talked to nurses, doctors, and EMTs about what they actually needed. Then they built FIGS: better fabric, better fit, sold directly to the people wearing them. In 2021, FIGS made history as the first company co-led by two female founders to IPO on the NYSE, at a $4.57B valuation. She also built a nonprofit, funded operating theaters in Kenya, and donated 500,000 scrubs in 35+ countries.
52. Tan Hooi Ling She co-founded Grab because she was scared to take a taxi home alone in Kuala Lumpur and had spent years texting her mom license plate numbers as a safety protocol. She visited Indonesian wet markets to talk to merchants, sat with drivers to hear their frustrations, and went undercover with her sales team in the Philippines. Grab became a $40B super app serving 33M monthly users across 8 countries.
53. Lillian Vernon In 1951, four months pregnant and newly married, she took $2,000 of wedding gift money and placed a $495 ad in Seventeen magazine for personalized purses and belts. It pulled $32,000 in orders. She mailed her first catalog in 1956 and spent the next decades studying what women wanted by walking Fifth Avenue and watching what stopped them in their tracks. In 1987, she took the company public, becoming the first woman in American history to found a company listed on the American Stock Exchange.
54. Marie Van Brittan Brown She was a nurse in Queens whose neighborhood was dangerous and whose police were slow. So in 1966, she and her husband built their own solution: a closed-circuit home monitoring system with four peepholes, a motorized sliding camera, a two-way intercom, a remote-controlled door lock, and a panic button wired to the police. They were awarded the patent in 1969. No mass production followed… it was too expensive, and she was a Black woman inventor in a white, male tech world.
55. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw Indian breweries wouldn't hire her; it was a man's job. So when an Irish entrepreneur came looking for a biotech partner in India, she took it. She founded Biocon in her garage in 1978 with a retired mechanic as her first employee. Within a year it became the first Indian company to export enzymes to the U.S. and Europe; by 2004, its IPO was oversubscribed 33 times, making it India's first billion-dollar biotech firm. She's now producing life-saving insulin at a fraction of global costs and became the first Indian woman to sign the Giving Pledge.
56. Sara Blakely She cut the feet off her pantyhose, spent $5,000 of savings researching patents at the Georgia Tech library, got turned down by every hosiery mill she pitched, and wrote her own patent. She convinced Neiman Marcus to stock Spanx by demonstrating it in a store bathroom. Then Oprah named it a Favorite Thing in 2000, and it did $10M in its second year. In 2021, when Spanx hit a $1.2B valuation, she gave every employee $10,000 and two first-class plane tickets. She was the first self-made female billionaire to sign the Giving Pledge.
57. Jen Rubio Her suitcase broke at an airport at 24, spilling everything across the floor and she realized there was no perfect luggage on the market. She co-founded Away in 2016, launched a carry-on with a built-in charger, and raised $31M in seed funding, a record for female-led startups at the time. Away became a $1.4B company synonymous with a certain kind of aspirational travel. She and her husband, Slack co-founder Stewart Butterfield, also donated $25M to UNICEF and funded Latinx art initiatives at the Whitney Museum.
58. Tania Boler She had a PhD in reproductive health and was still stunned by how little she knew about her own pelvic floor after pregnancy. In 2013, she founded Elvie to close the gap. Her first product gamified pelvic floor training; her second was the world's first silent, wearable breast pump. She used to be nervous saying "vagina" in investor meetings. Then she made it a test: she says it upfront and watches who flinches. Elvie has raised over $50M and become one of the most funded femtech companies ever.
59. Marissa Mayer She was Google's 20th employee and its first female engineer, helping shape Search, Gmail, Maps, and AdWords. She left to become CEO of Yahoo, tripled its stock price, grew mobile users to 650M, and oversaw a $1.1B Tumblr acquisition, before the company sold to Verizon for $4.48B in 2017. She walked away with $239M. Then co-founded Sunshine, an AI startup, in 2018.
60. Thai Lee In 1989, she bought a failing software reseller for under $1M. No VC money. No investors. She just ran it, grew it, and kept it private. Today, SHI International does $14B in annual revenue, serves 17,000+ customers including Boeing and AT&T, and is the largest woman-owned business in the United States.