If you had to name five women who changed something in your life this year — not necessarily in a grand, sweeping way, just a small shift, a line you read, a moment that stuck — you could. Maybe it's Beyoncé releasing a country album. Maybe it's a prime minister you hadn't heard of two years ago. Maybe it's a 22-year-old on TikTok who explained intersectional feminism better in 60 seconds than three years of gender studies lectures.
In 2024-2025, a handful of women reshaped culture in ways that will outlast the news cycle. Some did it loudly. Some did it quietly, methodically, in rooms most people will never enter. What they have in common is that the world looks slightly different because they were in it.
Music: three women, three different kinds of power
Beyoncé — Country music's reckoning
Nobody expected it. In March 2024, Beyoncé released Cowboy Carter — a country album that triggered precisely the reaction she'd probably anticipated: sections of America rejected it outright, the rest gave her the Grammy she'd been denied for years. The real move wasn't the music itself. It was the argument embedded in it: country is Black music. Its roots run through the blues and folk traditions of the American South, and Beyoncé chose to reclaim that lineage with 27 tracks, a roster of living legends, and marketing precision that left the genre's gatekeepers with nowhere to go.
In 2025, her Cowboy Carter Tour broke records across the American South — states where she's simultaneously celebrated and contested. That contradiction is what makes her interesting. She doesn't perform provocation. She performs history.
Taylor Swift — the empire that built itself
In 2024, Forbes declared her a billionaire for the first time — not through investments, but through music and touring. The Eras Tour became the highest-grossing concert tour in history, clearing over a billion dollars in direct revenue. What's remarkable isn't the money. It's how she made it: by reclaiming ownership of her catalogue, re-recording her old albums, and turning a dispute with Scooter Braun into a masterclass in intellectual property rights for an entire generation of artists.
Swifties became an economic force in their own right. Cities restructured public transport for her shows. Economists coined the "Taylor Swift Effect" on local hotel and restaurant revenues. There aren't many artists whose influence extends this far beyond the music itself — and she built all of it without a major label deal she didn't choose.
Dua Lipa — the British pop standard
She was born in London to Albanian parents, grew up between Kosovo and the UK, and has become one of the clearest examples of what British pop can look like in 2025. Radical Optimism, her third album released in May 2024, landed her at number one across 15 markets. The album cycle — interviews in Vogue, the Met Gala, a Saturday Night Live hosting slot — showed a strategic intelligence that matches her songwriting.
What Dua Lipa represents beyond the charts is a certain vision of Britishness: outward-looking, cosmopolitan, uninterested in nostalgia for its own sake. British Vogue has put her on three covers in four years. That's not an accident.
Film & TV: the women rewriting the scripts
Margot Robbie — producing as power
The Barbie film made over $1.4 billion at the global box office in 2023 — a number that kept reverberating through 2024 as the industry tried to work out what it meant. Margot Robbie's LuckyChap production company was behind it, and the cultural conversation it sparked (about gender, about nostalgia, about what mainstream cinema can still do) positioned her as one of the most influential figures working in Hollywood — not just as an actress, but as a creative force behind the camera.
She was notably absent from the Oscars nominations. The response to that absence — widespread, loud, genuinely surprised — said something about where audience expectations now sit. People expected her to be recognised. The fact that she wasn't felt like a statement in itself.
Emma Watson — the feminist brand evolves
Emma Watson's HeForShe campaign launched at the UN in 2014. In 2024, a decade on, she took stock of what it had and hadn't achieved — publicly, in a way that was more honest than most celebrity activism allows itself to be. She acknowledged the limits of individual allyship frameworks, the ways in which "lean in" feminism had been used to paper over structural problems, the gap between awareness campaigns and material change.
It was a more complicated message than her original speech. It was also more useful. The willingness to revisit and revise, rather than just celebrate a decade of impact, made her one of the more credible voices in the ongoing conversation about what mainstream feminism should actually be doing.
Michaela Coel — the writer who doesn't compromise
I May Destroy You won the BAFTA for Best Mini-Series in 2021. In 2024-2025, the ripple effects of that show — on how sexual assault is depicted on screen, on what survivor narratives can look like — are still being felt. Coel turned down a Netflix deal worth millions because it didn't include creative ownership. She went to HBO instead, on terms she controlled. The resulting work is hers. So is the template she's given other writers about how to negotiate in an industry that routinely strips creators of their rights.
Politics: cracks in the ceiling
Kamala Harris — the campaign that didn't win but changed things
In August 2024, Joe Biden stepped aside. Within hours, the Democratic machine reorganised around Kamala Harris. The campaign that followed generated a level of grassroots enthusiasm the party hadn't seen since Obama's 2008 run — and lost anyway, in November 2024, to Donald Trump's second campaign. The outcome doesn't erase the significance of the moment.
Harris received over 75 million votes — more than Obama in 2008. Her loss was shaped by the Electoral College system, post-Covid economic anxiety, and a media environment that treated her campaign coverage quite differently from her opponent's. Whether or not the glass ceiling broke, it cracked visibly enough that the crack is now part of the permanent record.
Bridget Phillipson — education as the long game
When Keir Starmer won the 2024 UK general election, Bridget Phillipson became Secretary of State for Education — one of the most consequential government briefs, and one that rarely gets the media attention it deserves. Her agenda for 2025 includes expanding free childcare provision, reviewing GCSE and A-level structures, and addressing the teacher recruitment crisis. These are not photogenic policies. They are, arguably, more important than most things that get covered in the political press.
Phillipson is 40. She went to a comprehensive school in the northeast of England. She is, in the context of a Cabinet that has historically skewed heavily towards certain kinds of education and background, something different.
Sport: talent under pressure
Emma Raducanu — the long return
The US Open 2021 win was one of sport's great fairytale moments. What came after — injuries, coaching changes, tabloid scrutiny of a young woman's body and relationships, public debate about her mental health — was a long way from a fairytale. By 2024, Raducanu had gone through five coaches in three years and was working her way back through the rankings after surgery on both wrists and an ankle.
What makes her relevant here isn't her ranking. It's what her experience has done to the conversation about how young female athletes are treated — by the media, by sponsors, by the sport itself. The Guardian's coverage of her 2024 season was notably different from 2021: less about the fairytale, more about the actual complexity of being 21 and navigating elite sport under international scrutiny.
Sifan Hassan — the range
At the 2024 Paris Olympics, Sifan Hassan competed in both the 10,000m and the marathon — on the same day, in different venues. She won bronze in the 10,000m and then, three hours later, ran a marathon and won silver. This is not something that happens. The physiological demands are incompatible, in theory. She did it anyway. It's the kind of performance that doesn't fit the neat narrative structures sports journalism prefers, which is probably why it didn't get the coverage it deserved outside specialist athletics media.
Tech & AI: the women building the infrastructure
Fei-Fei Li — the person who made AI vision possible
If you use any AI tool that involves images — photo filters, facial recognition, AI image generation — you are using infrastructure that traces back to Fei-Fei Li's work. She launched ImageNet in 2009: a database of over 14 million annotated images that enabled the training of the first large convolutional neural networks. Without ImageNet, there is no modern computer vision. Without computer vision, there is no GPT-4 Vision, no Midjourney, no half the "AI innovations" everyone talks about.
In 2024, she published The Worlds I See — a memoir that tells the parallel stories of her experience as a Chinese immigrant in the United States and the development of modern AI. She is also co-founder of AI4ALL, an organisation working to diversify the pipeline of people entering the AI sector. The reasoning is not sentimental: systems built by demographically narrow teams produce systems with the biases of their creators.
Joy Buolamwini — the algorithmic justice project
In 2018, MIT researcher Joy Buolamwini published research showing that facial recognition systems from IBM, Microsoft and Face++ had error rates for dark-skinned women up to 34 percentage points higher than for light-skinned men. The technology was already being used by law enforcement. Her work, and the subsequent campaign she built around it, forced IBM to halt sales of its general-purpose facial recognition technology and contributed to multiple city-level bans on police use of the technology in the US.
In 2024, her book Unmasking AI brought this work to a general audience. She is one of the clearest examples of how a single researcher — with data, persistence, and the ability to communicate — can materially change how a technology is regulated.
Literature & Style
Raven Leilani — what fiction is for
Luster, published in 2020, was one of those novels that arrived and immediately changed what was possible in American literary fiction about race, desire, ambition and the specific anxieties of being young, broke and Black in New York. In 2024-2025, Raven Leilani's second novel confirmed that Luster wasn't a fluke. She writes with a precision about emotional experience — particularly the experience of being perpetually misread — that is genuinely difficult to achieve and rarely attempted in mainstream literary fiction.
Sarah Burton — independence as a creative statement
When Sarah Burton left Alexander McQueen in 2023, she closed a 13-year chapter during which she maintained the coherence and quality of one of fashion's most demanding houses after its founder's death. In an industry where creative directors now average fewer than three years in a role, that tenure was remarkable. In 2024, she launched her own label — a significant financial risk, given that the luxury market is dominated by a handful of conglomerates. The first collection was watched closely. What it demonstrated, more than anything else, was that she had a clear point of view that wasn't dependent on a brand's existing language.
Why it matters
This list could easily be twice as long. I've kept it at fifteen not because others don't count, but because the point isn't completeness — it's range. Music, politics, tech, sport, literature, film: in each domain, women are doing work that is shaping how culture develops, how technology is built, how politics is conducted.
What is consistent across all of them is the effort required to be visible. Taylor Swift had to legally re-record her own albums to own them. Kamala Harris ran a campaign that outperformed any metric you'd apply to a male candidate and lost anyway. Fei-Fei Li built the technical foundation of an industry that remains 78% male. Joy Buolamwini had to prove with data what should have been obvious. None of this is accidental — it reflects structural conditions that haven't changed as much as we sometimes pretend.
What has changed, perhaps, is that more people are paying attention to the gap between the work these women do and the recognition they receive. That attention is not a solution. But it's a starting point.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Beyoncé release a country album in 2024?
Cowboy Carter is part of a deliberate reclamation project: Beyoncé is asserting that country music has deep roots in Black American culture — roots that have been systematically obscured. The album is also a direct response to the cold reception she received when she appeared at the CMA Awards in 2016. Musically, it blends traditional country, folk, gospel and R&B, and earned Beyoncé her first country Grammy nominations.
What is ImageNet and why does it matter for AI?
ImageNet is a database of over 14 million annotated images created by Fei-Fei Li and her team at Stanford from 2009. It provided the training data that enabled the development of convolutional neural networks capable of recognising objects in images with near-human accuracy. It is the technical foundation of virtually all modern computer vision systems, from smartphone cameras to self-driving vehicles to AI image generators.
What happened with Joy Buolamwini's facial recognition research?
Her 2018 MIT study (Gender Shades) demonstrated that facial recognition systems from major technology companies had significantly higher error rates for dark-skinned women than for light-skinned men. This work contributed to IBM halting sales of its general-purpose facial recognition technology, Microsoft announcing restrictions on its facial recognition API, and multiple US cities passing legislation restricting or banning police use of facial recognition. Her 2024 book Unmasking AI details the full story.
How did Taylor Swift become a billionaire from music alone?
The combination of The Eras Tour (which exceeded $1 billion in revenue — the first tour ever to do so) and ownership of her masters (achieved through the re-recording project known as "Taylor's Version") gave her a catalogue with genuine long-term value. Unlike most pop artists who sign deals that transfer ownership of their recordings to the label, Swift now owns the new recordings of her first six albums. The Forbes billionaire calculation combines touring revenue, streaming income, and the estimated value of these owned masters.
Why did Margot Robbie not receive an Oscar nomination for Barbie?
The Academy's voting process is opaque, but the broad consensus was that the film's box office success — over $1.4 billion — worked against it in a body that historically has been sceptical of mainstream commercial cinema. There was also a perceived tension between the film's feminist messaging and its status as a major corporate marketing exercise for Mattel. Greta Gerwig (director) also received no directing nomination. The omissions generated significant press coverage and were widely interpreted as reflecting a bias in the awards system against commercially successful work by women.