History
Her legacy of charm and charity endures, especially her campaigns for acceptance of AIDS victims and against land mines. We remember most the uniting effect of the world's mourning after her sudden and shocking death. She was a Royal and a Humanitarian.
PRINCESS DIANA
On the throne since 1952, she is the longest-reigning monarch in British history. She has become much loved and respected globally.
The 94-year-old matriarch is still setting the tone at public events and receiving world leaders at Buckingham Palace and Windsor Castle.
QUEEN ELIZABETH II
The first female leader of the Philippine Revolution. The revolt became one the longest sustained battles against the Spanish colonizers, with HER launching guerrilla attacks one after the other, causing the enemies to fear her name. To date, her name continues to stand for women's power, strength, and bravery. Our country's women-led and pro-women alliance is named in her memory. In Ayala Triangle, along the corner of Ayala Avenue and Makati Avenue, stands her monument, which depicts the warrior on horseback, wielding a bolo.
GABRIELA SILANG
This Tennis Champion has been ranked No. 1 in the world on eight separate occasions. She continues to leverage her career for social change and activism through numerous philanthropic and women's rights initiatives, in addition to her personal fund.
SERENA WILLIAMS
She is the author of the Harry Potter Series that got hundreds of millions of kids around the globe to love reading, and supports a number of causes through her charitable trust, Volant. She is also the founder and president of the international children's non-profit organization Lumos, which works to end the institutionalization of children globally and ensure all children grow up in a safe and caring environment.
J.K. ROWLING
She was a missionaries of charity founder, in creating an order whose members tended to the orphaned, sick, and dying among the poorest of the poor in India and, eventually, worldwide, inspired others as a model of service and extreme goodness.
MOTHER TERESA
She is the first African-American First Lady of the United States. Through her four main initiatives, she has become a role model for women and an advocate for healthy families, service members and their families, higher education, and international adolescent girls education.
MICHELLE OBAMA
The founder of the Girl Scouts of the Philippines. A teacher, social worker, and activist, she was also a staunch advocate of women's suffrage, fighting for Filipino women's rights to vote. She was trained in social welfare at the New York School of Social Work and earned a master's degree in Sociology from Columbia University. Today, she is commemorated on the one thousand peso bill and has a monument in Ilocos Norte.
JOSEFA LLANES ESCODA
She was a tennis superstar and has been ranked no.1 in singles on five separate occasions. She is one of ten women to hold the career Grand Slam. Not to mention she is also an Olympic medalist, having earned silver for Russia in the 2012 Summer Olympics in London.
MARIA SHARAPOVA
She is an American talk show host, television producer, actress, author, and philanthropist. Her tv show was the highest-rated television program of its kind in history and ran in national syndication for 25 years. Dubbed as the "Queen of All Media,” and ranked as the most influential woman in the world, she was the richest African American of the 20th century and North America's first black multi-billionaire and she has been ranked the greatest black philanthropist in American history.
OPRAH WINFREY
Rendered blind and deaf by a childhood illness, she was freed from her isolation by the extraordinary efforts of her dedicated teacher, Anne Sullivan (1866-1936), who suffered from impaired vision herself. She was the first deaf-blind person to earn a college degree, changed forever our ideas about what disabled people could accomplish.
HELEN KELLER
She set new norms as a government leader when she gave birth, took six weeks maternity leave and shared that her partner will be a stay-at-home dad. At 38, she is the youngest female leader in the world and New Zealand's youngest PM in 150 years with ambitious plans to tackle climate change and child poverty. In 2020, she received global praise for her capable handling of the Covid-19 pandemic. New Zealand successfully eliminated the virus in both waves.
JACINDA ADERN
Most know her for being the first woman admitted to the prestigious Harvard Medical School in 1936, she pioneered in the formerly male-dominated field of medicine. When she came back to the Philippines in 1941, she invented a makeshift incubator out of bamboo for families in poor communities without electricity, founded the first pediatric hospital in the Philippines—the Children’s Medical Center. She was the first-ever woman to be conferred the rank and title of National Scientist of the Philippines.
FE DEL MUNDO
She is now a retired American professional boxer who competed from 1999 to 2007. She is the daughter of the legendary boxing champion Mohammed Ali. During her career, from which she retired undefeated, she held the WBC, WIBA, IWBF and IBA female Super middleweight titles, and the IWBF light heavyweight title.
LAILA ALI
She was a French fashion designer and businesswoman. She is the only fashion designer listed on Time magazine's list of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. She designed her famed interlocked-CC monogram, which has been in use since the 1920s.
COCO CHANEL
The first woman to win a Nobel Prize in two areas, co-discovered two elements, radium and polonium, and coined the term "radioactivity." She was one of the first to suggest using radiation to treat cancer. She helped usher in the atomic age and revolutionize chemistry, physics, and medicine — while fighting deep prejudice against women in the sciences.
MARIE CURIE
She maintains her position as most powerful woman in philanthropy as co-chair of the world's largest private charitable foundation with a $40 billion trust endowment. She's increasingly visible in shaping foundation strategy, solving tough global challenges from education and poverty to contraception and sanitation. As part of the foundation's mission to help all people lead healthy, productive lives, she has devoted much of her work to women's and girls' rights.
MELINDA GATES
The multi-award-winning singer and actress was the first Asian female to play Éponine and Fantine in the Broadway musical Les Misérables. She is also the first Asian female to win Best Performance by a Leading Actress in a Musical for Miss Saigon and Best Direction of a Musical at the Tony Awards. She was also the first Asian woman to win a Laurence Olivier award.
LEAH SALONGA
She started off her sports career in Judo and became the first American woman to earn an Olympic medal in judo by winning a bronze medal at the 2008 Olympics. She had enormous success in the UFC and is currently signed to WWE as a wrestler. She is the only woman to win a championship in both the UFC and WWE.
RONDA ROUSEY
She is an American business executive, billionaire and philanthropist. She serves as the Chief Operating Officer of Facebook and the founder of LeanIn.Org. In June 2012, she was elected to Facebook's Board of Directors, becoming the first woman to serve on its board.
SHERYL SANDERG
She was a poet, singer and civil rights activist, best known for her influential series of autobiographies. She was also a leading force within the Civil Rights Movement alongside Martin Luther King, Jr. and Malcom X.
MAYA ANGELOU
Though she is only 17 years old, the young Swedish activist has started a worldwide movement for climate change and is undoubtedly one of the most powerful female forces in the world today. Named Time's Person of the Year in 2019, she started out by holding school strikes for climate change outside of the Swedish parliament as a way to call attention to climate change.
GRETA THUNBERG
This weightlifter has proven that no amount of weight can weigh a woman down. She won a silver medal at the 2016 Rio Olympics, ending the Philippines’ two-decade Olympic medal drought and making her the first Filipina to win in the Olympics. Prior to that feat, she has won several international weightlifting competitions such as in the Southeast Asian Games and Asian Games. She also serves as an Airwoman First Class in the Philippine Air Force.
HIDILYN DIAZ
Prevailing in a male-dominated sport is no easy feat, yet she won the 2008 Indy 300 championship in Japan and became the first woman to become an IndyCar Series Champion. Five years later, she was the first woman to win a NASCAR Sprint Pole Series. Her successes as a NASCAR driver has encouraged other women to compete in the male-dominated sport of car racing.
DANICA PATRICK
Nicknamed “Mother of the Internet”, her invention of the algorithm behind the Spanning Tree Protocol (STP), was instrumental in making today's internet possible. Her work made a huge impact on the way networks self-organize and move data, and put the basic rules of internet traffic in place. She has delivered keynote speeches across the world, and is still a computer programmer and engineer for Dell EMC.
RADIA PERLMAN