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Malala Yousafzai by Southbank Centre –

15 Famous Asian Women Who Made History: A Look at Their Contributions and Impact

Women have made significant progress in this day and age and have broken glass ceilings in various fields and industries. From creating multimillion business ventures to being movers and shakers in the political fields to shaping opinions on the religious and societal front, women are the centerpiece of the society. 

In Asia, we have women who have paved way for many girls and generations behind them. In this article, we highlight 15 famous Asian women, including their contributions and the impact they have made in society.

1. Aung San Suu Kyi

Aung San Suu Kyi is a Burmese politician, diplomat, author, and a 1991 Nobel Peace Prize laureate who served as State Counsellor of Myanmar, which is equivalent to a prime minister and Minister of Foreign Affairs from 2016 to 2021. 

She has served as the chairperson of the National League for Democracy (NLD) since 2011, having been the general secretary from 1988 to 2011. She played a vital role in Myanmar’s transition from a military junta to partial democracy in the 2010s.

Contributions and Impact

Aung San Suu Kyi won the 1991 Nobel Peace Prize winner for her non-violent struggle for democracy and human rights.

Her political activism has seen her being detained severally making her an international symbol of peaceful resistance in the face of oppression.

2. Indira Gandhi

Official portrait of Smt. Indira Priyadarshini Gandhi, 3rd prime minister of India by Prime Minister’s Office –

Indira Gandhi was an Indian politician and stateswoman who served as the third prime minister of India from 1966 to 1977 and from 1980 until her assassination in 1984. She was India’s first, and to date only, female prime minister and a central figure of the Indian National Congress.

Gandhi was the daughter of Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, and the mother of Rajiv Gandhi, who succeeded her in office as the sixth Indian prime minister. Furthermore, Gandhi’s cumulative tenure of 15 years and 350 days makes her the country’s second-longest-serving prime minister after her father.

Contributions and Impact

Indira Gandhi is famously known as the iron lady of India because of her strong standing in decisions that would affect India’s politics. Her no-nonsense attitude gave her that title. Additionally, she was termed a goddess by several political leaders. BJP veteran and former Prime Minister of India, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, once described her as the all-powerful “Goddess Durga” in one of his interviews.

Indira went to war with Pakistan in support of the independence movement and war of independence in East Pakistan, which ultimately resulted in an Indian victory and the creation of Bangladesh.

3. Yoko Ono

Yoko Ono is a Japanese multimedia artist, singer, songwriter, and peace activist. Her work also encompasses performance art and filmmaking. Ono began a career in popular music in 1969, forming the Plastic Ono Band with Lennon and producing a number of avant-garde music albums in the 1970s. 

Yoko achieved commercial and critical success in 1980 with the chart-topping album Double Fantasy, a collaboration with John Lennon of the Beatles that was released three weeks before his murder, winning the Grammy Award for Album of the Year.

Contributions and Impact

Many musicians have paid tribute to Ono as an artist in her own right and as a muse and icon in this generation. To date, she has had twelve number-one singles on the US Dance charts, and in 2016 was named the 11th most successful dance club artist of all time by Billboard magazine.

She has made significant philanthropic contributions to the arts, peace, disaster relief in Japan and the Philippines, and other such causes. In 2002, she inaugurated a biennial $50,000 LennonOno Grant for Peace. In 2012, she received the Dr. Rainer Hildebrandt Human Rights Award and co-founded the group Artists Against Fracking.

4. Mother Teresa

Mother Teresa by Kingkongphoto –

Mother Teresa was an Albanian-Indian Catholic nun who, in 1950, founded the Missionaries of Charity. Mother Teresa is known for her missionary work in helping the poor. She was an empathetic devout catholic nun whose mission was to lessen the mystery that the sick and poor went through. 

Mother Teresa is considered to be the greatest humanitarian to have ever lived in the 20th century.  Read more interesting Facts about Mother Teresa. 

Contributions and Impact

After Mother Teresa founded her religious congregation, it grew to have over 4,500 nuns and was active in 133 countries as of 2012. The congregation manages homes for people who are dying of HIV/AIDS, leprosy, and tuberculosis. 

The congregation also runs soup kitchens, dispensaries, mobile clinics, children’s and family counselling programmes, as well as orphanages and schools.

Mother Teresa was admired by many for her charitable work. She would always open her doors to the poor and share a meal with them. Mother Teresa was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979 for her work undertaken in the struggle to overcome poverty and distress, which also constitutes a threat to peace.

5. Malala Yousafzai

Malala Yousafzai is a Pakistani female education activist and the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize laureate. Awarded when she was 17, she is the world’s youngest Nobel Prize laureate, the second Pakistani and the first Pashtun to receive a Nobel Prize.

She is known for human rights advocacy, especially the education of women and children in her native homeland, Swat, where the Pakistani Taliban have at times banned girls from attending school. Her advocacy has grown into an international movement, and according to former Prime Minister Shahid Khaqan Abbasi, she has become Pakistan’s most prominent citizen.

Contributions and Impact

Malala is a Pakistani activist for female education. Yousafzai is well-established for human rights advocacy. Her main concern is the education of women and children in her native Swat. This is after the Pakistani Taliban has at times banned girls from attending school.

She celebrated her 16th birthday by giving a speech at the United Nations headquarters. Malala’s speech was about Women’s basic human rights, such as the right to education. This is after the Pakistani Taliban tried to end education. She requested the government to introduce free and compulsory education. To ensure a brighter future for children worldwide.

6. Wu Zetian

Empress Wu Zetian –

Wu Zetian was the de facto ruler of the Tang dynasty from 665 to 705, ruling first through others and then from 690 in her own right. From 665 to 690, she was the first empress consort of the Tang dynasty as the wife of Emperor Gaozong and then, after his death, empress dowager ruled through her sons Emperors Zhongzong and Ruizong. 

Unprecedented in Chinese history, she subsequently founded and ruled as empress regnant of the Wu Zhou dynasty of China from 690 to 705. She was the only female sovereign in the history of China widely regarded as legitimate.

Contributions and Impact

Under her 40-year reign, China grew larger, becoming one of the great powers of the world, its culture and economy were revitalized, and corruption in the court was reduced.

She was more decisive and proactive than her husband, and historians consider her to have been the real power behind the throne during Emperor Gaozong’s reign for more than 20 years until his death.

7. Benazir Bhutto

Benazir Bhutto was a Pakistani politician who served as the 11th and 13th prime minister of Pakistan from 1988 to 1990 and again from 1993 to 1996. 

She was the first woman elected to head a democratic government in a Muslim-majority country. Ideologically a liberal and a secularist, she chaired or co-chaired the Pakistan Peoples Party from the early 1980s until her assassination in 2007. 

Contributions and Impact

In the early stages of her career, she had popularity both at home and abroad since she was a champion of democracy for Western countries.

She achieved political success in a society that was controlled by men, which led to her becoming hailed as a symbol of women’s rights after her death.

8. Sunita Williams

NASA Astronaut Suni Williams by NASA/Robert Markowitz –

Sunita Williams is an astronaut and United States Navy officer who formerly held the records for most spacewalks by a woman and most spacewalk time for a woman (50 hours, 40 minutes). Sunita Williams, a native of Needham, Massachusetts, was born in Euclid, Ohio, to Mumbai Indian American neuroanatomist Deepak Pandya and Slovene American Ursuline.

Williams was assigned to the International Space Station as a member of Expedition 14 and Expedition 15. In 2012, she served as a flight engineer on Expedition 32 and then as commander of Expedition 33.

Contributions and Impact

As of August 2012, Sunita Williams has made seven spacewalks totaling 50 hours and 40 minutes, at the time putting Williams fifth on the list of most experienced spacewalkers.

In July 2015, NASA announced Williams as one of the first astronauts for U.S. Commercial spaceflights. Subsequently, she has started working with Boeing and SpaceX to train in their commercial crew vehicles, along with other chosen astronauts.

9. Chihiro Iwasaki

Chihiro Iwasaki was a Japanese artist and illustrator best known for her water-coloured illustrations of flowers and children, the theme of which was peace and happiness for children.

Chihiro drew numerous illustrations for commercial posters, magazines and school textbooks as much as she could. In 1949, an editor of Doshinsha, a children’s book publishing company, requested her to create Okaasan no Hanashi (The Story of a Mother), a kind of educational Kamishibai which became her first children’s work. It was published in 1950 and was awarded the Minister of Education Prize.

Contributions and Impact

Iwasaki received the Juvenile Culture Award of the Shogakukan Publishing Co. for her illustration works for children’s books and magazines. The majority of her illustrations were water colors, but some of her work contained Japanese calligraphy, and she also produced some oil paintings.

There are two memorial museums dedicated to Chihiro Iwasaki: The Chihiro Art Museum Tokyo and Chihiro Art Museum Azumino. Both museums collect and exhibit original illustrations of children’s books by Chihiro and other artists.

10. Chien-Shiung Wu

Chien-shiung Wu by Smithsonian Institution –

Chien-Shiung Wu was a Chinese-American particle and experimental physicist who made significant contributions to the fields of nuclear and particle physics. Wu worked on the Manhattan Project, where she helped develop the process for separating uranium into uranium-235 and uranium-238 isotopes by gaseous diffusion.

She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. The Wu experiment was a particle and nuclear physics experiment conducted in 1956 by the Chinese American physicist Chien-Shiung Wu in collaboration with the Low-Temperature Group of the US National Bureau of Standards. The experiment established that the conservation of parity was violated by the weak interaction, providing a way to operationally define left and right without reference to the human body.

Contributions and Impact

She is best known for conducting the Wu experiment, which proved that parity is not conserved. This discovery resulted in her colleagues Tsung-Dao Lee and Chen-Ning Yang winning the 1957 Nobel Prize in Physics, while Wu herself was awarded the inaugural Wolf Prize in Physics in 1978. 

Her expertise in experimental physics evoked comparisons to Marie Curie. Her nicknames include the First Lady of Physics, the Chinese Madame Curie and the Queen of Nuclear Research.

Read more on the 110 Most Influential Women of All Time.  

11. Rukhmabai 

Rukhmabai was an Indian physician and feminist. She is best known for being one of the first practicing women doctors in colonial India as well as being involved in a landmark legal case involving her marriage as a child bride between 1884 and 1888. 

The case raised significant public debate across several topics, which most prominently included law vs tradition, social reform vs conservatism and feminism in both British-ruled India and England. This ultimately contributed to the Age of Consent Act in 1891.

Contributions and Impact

The case generated a great deal of debate both within India and England. It drew written commentaries from reformers like Behramji Malabari (1853-1912), and Balgangadhar Tilak, journalistic opinion pieces from prominent names like Rudyard Kipling and broader feminist discussions in British women’s magazines.

Ultimately, the publicity and debate generated by this case helped influence the enactment of the Age of Consent Act in 1891, which changed the age of consent from 10 to 12 years across British India.

12. Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw

Photograph of chemist Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw by Sofia Negron –

Kiran Mazumdar-Shaw is an Indian billionaire entrepreneur. She is the executive chairperson and founder of Biocon Limited and Biocon Biologics Limited, a biotechnology company based in Bangalore, India and the former chairperson of the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore.

Contributions and Impact

In 2014, she was awarded the Othmer Gold Medal for outstanding contributions to the progress of science and chemistry. She was on the Financial Times 2011 top 50 women in business list.

In 2019, she was listed as the 68th most powerful woman in the world by Forbes. She was named EY World Entrepreneur Of The Year in 2020. Read more on the Most Influential Women Entrepreneurs. 

13. Maria Ressa

Maria Ressa is a Filipino and American journalist. She is the co-founder and CEO of Rappler. She previously spent nearly two decades working as a lead investigative reporter in Southeast Asia for CNN.

As she is a prominent critic of the then Philippine President Rodrigo Duterte, her arrest and conviction was seen by many in the opposition and the international community as a politically motivated act by Duterte’s government.

Contributions and Impact

She was included in Time’s Person of the Year 2018 issue featuring a collection of journalists from around the world actively combating fake news.

Ressa is one of the 25 leading figures on the Information and Democracy Commission launched by Reporters Without Borders. She was awarded the 2021 Nobel Peace Prize jointly with Dmitry Muratov for their efforts to safeguard freedom of expression, which is a precondition for democracy and lasting peace.

14. Qiu Jin

Qiu Jin秋瑾, Chinese revolutionary matyr –

Qiu Jin was a Chinese revolutionary, feminist, and writer. Her courtesy names are Xuanqing and Jingxiong. Qiu was executed after a failed uprising against the Qing dynasty and is considered a national heroine in China and a martyr of republicanism and feminism.

Contributions and Impact

Qiu Jin was known as an eloquent orator who spoke out for women’s rights, such as the freedom to marry, freedom of education, and abolishment of the practice of foot binding. 

In 1906 she founded China Women’s News, a radical women’s journal with another female poet, Xu Zihua in Shanghai. They published only two issues before it was closed by the authorities.

Qiu was posthumously immortalized in the Republic of China’s popular consciousness and literature. The People’s Republic of China established a museum for her in Shaoxing, Qiu Jin’s Former Residence.

15. Junko Tabei

Junko Tabei was a Japanese mountaineer, author and teacher. She was the first woman to reach the summit of Mount Everest and the first woman to ascend the Seven Summits, climbing the highest peak on every continent 

Contributions and Impact

Tabei wrote seven books, organized environmental projects to clean up rubbish left behind by climbers on Everest, and led annual climbs up Mount Fuji for youth affected by the Great East Japan Earthquake.

An astronomer named asteroid 6897 Tabei after her and in 2019, a mountain range on Pluto was named Tabei Montes in her honor.  Read more on the most famous Japanese Women.