Celebrate the ladies on March 8, 2026, on International Women’s Day! The holiday was first observed on March 19,1911, by a German activist named Clara Zetkin at the 1910 International Conference of Working Women in Copenhagen, where a million people in Europe had fought for women’s rights to work, vote, and hold public office. Since then, we’ve come a long way, and it’s important to appreciate the achievements of women in history who pushed for gender equality. Here are three of the many strong examples of women who changed the world.
“We realize the importance of our voices only when we are silenced,” is the famous line said by well-known education advocate Malala Yousafzai on July 12, 2013, in a speech to the United Nations. Yousafzai, ever since she was young, advocates for girls’ education, pushing through even despite an assassination attempt against her once. She is the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize laureate, when she received one at age 17 in 2004, and thanks to her as well as many others, many more women have secured their right to learn.
Another laureate of a Nobel Peace Prize, in 2025, is María Corina Machado, a politician, activist, and strong leader who promotes democracy in Venezuela and support women’s political rights and suffrage. She successfully unified opposition parties in Venezuela and is an inspiration to young women to dream big and speak up. At her 2025 Nobel Lecture, she had powerfully proclaimed, “When a woman decides to fight for her family and her country, there is no force on earth that can stop her.”
Last for today, but certainly not least, a pillar of women in STEM, is Marie Curie. Her story as one of the few major women scientists of her time, and the first woman to win a Nobel Prize and the only to have won two for her research on radioactivity and discovering elements radium and polonium. She is a strong inspiration to girls to keep doing what they love to do and it is proof that anything is possible. Curie once said, “Nothing in life is to be feared; it is only to be understood. Now is the time to understand more, so that we may fear less.”
Yousafzai, Machado, and Curie are just three of the many women in history that we celebrate during International Women’s Day. They continue to serve as an inspiration for the future generations of females to come. As Zetkin once said, “The woman of the future will be a person who develops her own nature to the fullest.”
