TIME just released its 2026 Women of the Year list.
Sixteen women. Completely different fields, different countries, different scales of work.
And yet, reading through every profile, one thing keeps coming up: none of them waited!
Not for the right moment. Not for the industry to be ready. Not for someone to hand them the opportunity.
Yes, yes, I know that sounds like a platitude. But I swear it isn't.
Teyana Taylor spent 20 years being told to focus. Pick one thing: acting or music or directing. She refused. In 2020 she walked away from music entirely because she felt undervalued; a move her own team called a mistake. She ignored them. She enrolled in culinary school, took a supporting role in a Paul Thomas Anderson film loaded with A-listers (One Battle After Another), and proceeded to outperform all of them in 20 minutes of screen time. She is now an Oscar front-runner. Her take on it: "I love when it's hard, that means it's of purpose."
Chloé Zhao won the Oscar for Best Director in 2021, then immediately stepped away from Hollywood. Four years later she came back with “Hamnet”, which won the Golden Globe for Best Picture and is now competing for the Oscar. She didn't grind through the burnout. She stopped, rebuilt, and returned stronger.
Mahnoor Omer is 25. At 14, she founded her own NGO because she thought an existing one wasn't doing enough. At 16, she realized sanitary products in Pakistan are taxed at up to 40%, making them unaffordable for millions of women. Last year, she took the Pakistani government to court over it. The case is ongoing.
Safeena Husain spent a decade in San Francisco working in nonprofits, then returned to India and founded Educate Girls, focused specifically on out-of-school girls in the country’s most remote villages. In 2025, the organization hit its goal of reaching 1.5M girls.
Isata Dumbuya spent 25 years as a midwife in the UK, then moved back to Sierra Leone (one of the countries with the highest maternal mortality rates in the world) to run the country's first dedicated maternity center. She arrived to find a staff so worn down by loss they had become desensitized to it. The Paul E. Farmer Maternal Center of Excellence opened on February 14th.
Sister Norma Pimentel has run a humanitarian respite center at the US-Mexico border for over 20 years. Last year, when the number of asylum seekers entering dropped to nearly zero due to federal policy changes, and when the Department of Homeland Security suspended her organization's funding, she didn't close the center. She pivoted it to serve elderly, hungry, and unhoused community members instead, leaning on local donations and faith institutions to keep it running.
Reshma Saujani asked Donald Trump a question about childcare affordability at a public event in 2024. His answer went viral. She used that moment to push forward policy and in January 2026, New York announced a $1.7 billion investment in universal childcare for children under 5.
Kecia Steelman started in retail at 20 as a single mom making $8 an hour. A manager saw something in her and gave her a shot at leadership. Thirty years later, she’s the CEO of Ulta Beauty, running a company where 91% of the workforce is women. Her first year as CEO, she took the company international. Her stated goal: create environments where women don’t have to choose between their careers and their lives.
What connects all of these women isn’t optimism.
It’s not even resilience in the conventional sense.
TIME’s editorial director Lucy Feldman put it plainly when describing this year’s list: “This is a critical moment to ensure that rights are protected and progress gained is not lost.”
And I think that urgency comes through in every single profile.
