Meet the women who are leading the way toward a better world.
3. BRIGADIER GENERAL JEANNIE LEAVITT: In 1993, after graduating first in her class, she asked to fly a fighter jet, knowing that the U.S. Air Force wouldn’t yet allow it. Months later, when officials changed their minds, she became the Air Force’s first female fighter pilot. Now the brigadier general (and muse for Brie Larson’s Captain Marvel) heads up Air Force recruitment, a role in which she hopes to inspire more women to take the lead. “We all think of movie stars as superheroes, but the Marvel team saw our airmen as the superheroes,” Leavitt says. “That was really neat.”