The world has never made it easy for women to lead – but that has never stopped them. Across boardrooms, studios, courtrooms, and mountain peaks, a generation of women is dismantling structures that were never designed to include them, redefining what leadership, creativity, and justice can look like when women are finally at the centre of the story.
They are filmmakers and lawmakers, advocates and athletes, scholars and activists – united not by a single cause but by a refusal to settle for less than the space they have earned. This International Women’s Day, we celebrate the visionaries, rebels, and forces of nature who are cracking the status quo wide open – and making room for everyone who comes after them.
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Georgina Wilson
Georgina Wilson may have made her name on runways and television screens, but her most consequential work has taken shape in boardrooms and brand strategy sessions. As co-founder and marketing director of Sunnies, the lifestyle company behind Sunnies Studios, Sunnies Face, Sunnies Café, Sunnies Coffee, and the most recent addition Sunnies Flask, Wilson and her partners have grown what began as a fashion-forward eyewear label in 2013 into one of Southeast Asia’s most recognised homegrown brands – one that has fundamentally shifted what accessible luxury can look like for a generation of Filipino consumers. The Sunnies universe is impressively coherent: wearable frames, a cruelty-free beauty line, café spaces, and a highly customisable flask that has taken on a life of its own – each extension carrying the brand’s clean, aspirational aesthetic into a new corner of daily life. A commerce graduate with a double major in finance and accounting from the University of Sydney, Wilson brings a rigorous commercial intelligence to a brand that always manages to look like it came together without trying.
Alysa Liu
At 20, Alysa Liu arrived at the 2026 Milano Cortina Olympics and did what no American woman had managed in over two decades – took singles gold, and made it look almost certain. The Chinese-American Californian had already left her mark on the record books at 12, becoming the youngest female skater to land a triple axel in international competition. Then, at 16, she did something even more unexpected: she walked away. Not because she couldn’t compete, but because joy had started to matter more than trophies – a distinction few athletes at that level are brave enough to make.
The comeback, when it came, was entirely on her terms. Enrolled at UCLA and skating with a new approach centred on autonomy rather than control, she returned to competition after negotiating a say in her music, choreography, training intensity, and nutrition. The sceptics were vocal. The answer was two golds in Italy.
Trisha Shetty
At 25, Trisha Shetty founded SheSays – a Mumbai-based NGO dedicated to gender equality, consent education, and survivor support – after breaking her own silence on childhood abuse in a 2019 TED Talk that sparked a nationwide conversation on sexual violence in India. A lawyer trained in law, psychology, and political science, Shetty has since built one of the country’s most impactful advocacy platforms: running workshops that equip young people to recognise red flags and report safely, while lobbying for marital rape criminalisation, mandatory school gender education, and the removal of sanitary napkin tax. The accolades have followed – UN Youth Leader, Obama Foundation Scholar, Queen’s Young Leader Award inductee, Paris Peace Forum Steering Committee President – but the mission has never shifted. Shetty continues to use her own scars to dismantle shame, challenge broken systems, and fight for the women and girls that those systems have long failed.
Jang Hye-young
Jang Hye-young entered South Korea’s National Assembly as one of its youngest lawmakers ever – carrying with her a personal history that made her purpose impossible to overlook. After leaving Yonsei University to bring her autistic sister out of an abusive institution where she had spent 18 years, Jang supported them both while turning that experience into her award-winning 2020 documentary ‘Grown Up,’ a film that gave human shape to a system long overdue for scrutiny. Named to TIME100 Next in 2021, the Justice Party legislator has since advanced disability welfare reform and LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination bills, taking on religious conservatives and corporate resistance in a country where neither battle comes easily. In 2020, she also publicly accused her own party chair of sexual harassment – unflinchingly and by name – a move that led directly to his confession and resignation, and sent a powerful signal to women across the country that accountability was possible.
Lhakpa Sherpa
No mountain has defeated Lhakpa Sherpa yet – and she has climbed Everest ten times to prove it. The first Nepali woman to summit and descend alive in 2000, she holds the women’s world record for Everest ascents, each one earned through a life marked by hardship and a refusal to stop. She has carried oxygen for clients, crowdfunded expeditions after earthquakes and setbacks derailed earlier attempts, and raised three children alone after leaving an abusive marriage in 2015. Through it all, she kept climbing – not for prize money or sponsorships, but for the summit itself. Her story, documented in the Peabody Award-winning Netflix film ‘Mountain Queen,’ reveals a truth that reaches far beyond mountaineering: the most extraordinary ascents are rarely the ones measured in metres.
Vicky Lau
Vicky Lau began her career not in a kitchen but at a design studio – and that instinct for composition and detail has never left her plates. Trading graphic design for Le Cordon Bleu Bangkok, she trained at one Michelin-starred Cepage before launching Tate Dining Room in 2012, earning her first star just a year later. By 2021, a second star had arrived, making her Asia’s first female Michelin two-star chef. Since then, Lau has been steadily building one of Hong Kong’s most thoughtfully developed gastronomic ecosystems: Mora, her Green Michelin-starred tofu-focused restaurant in Sheung Wan; Date by Tate, a pastry shop celebrating the sweeter side of her craft; Ān, an in-house soy production venture underpinning her sustainable philosophy; and JIJA by Vicky Lau at Kimpton Tsim Sha Tsui, where Yunnan-Guizhou flavours meet fine-dining discipline. Add a board seat at Feeding Hong Kong since 2021, and Lau’s influence extends well beyond the dining room. She doesn’t just feed tables – she designs, stars, and sustains them.
Dr. Carmen Yau
Born with Spinal Muscular Atrophy, Dr. Carmen Yau never accepted the limits the world tried to place around her – and the world is better for it. A social worker, academic, and globally recognised disability rights expert, she has brought Hong Kong’s voice to the UN Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, delivered influential reports on women with disabilities in Chinese communities, and lectured at Goldsmiths, University of London – all while producing publications and her provocative erotica narrative practice, ‘Sugar XXX’s Stories,’ that centre the sexual autonomy and lived experiences of disabled women. Holding a master’s in social work and a PhD from HK PolyU, Yau tackles everything from forced marriages and political health inequalities to workplace inclusion and violence against women with disabilities with the same direct clarity.
Chloé Zhao
From Beijing to the global stage, Chloé Zhao has rewritten what it means to be a filmmaker in Hollywood – and she’s not done yet. In 2020, she became the first woman of colour to win the Best Director Oscar for ‘Nomadland,’ a film that also swept Venice’s Golden Lion and took home four Academy Awards in total. She then stepped into the MCU with ‘Eternals’ before returning to the intimate, landscape-driven storytelling that made her name – this time with ‘Hamnet,’ an achingly devastating drama that has already claimed a Golden Globe and a BAFTA, and earned her a second Best Director Oscar nomination, making her only the second female filmmaker in history to achieve that.
An NYU Tisch graduate who developed her voice through odd jobs and indie hustle, Zhao brings a raw, borderless quality to everything she touches – at home in both the sprawl of a Marvel epic and the intimacy of a chamber drama, This International Women’s Day, there’s no better time to step inside the worlds she builds, one extraordinary frame at a time.
Born in Korea and raised in Hong Kong, Min Ji has combined her degree in anthropology and creative writing with her passion for going on unsolicited tangents as an editor at Friday Club. In between watching an endless amount of movies, she enjoys trying new cocktails and pastas while occasionally snapping a few pictures.
