News Journal:Women of the Year: A force for good

We all have our own ideas every December about who should be Time Magazine’s Person of the Year (Man of the Year until 1998).
As I looked back at 2014 to compare Time’s choice with my own, I was struck by the especially large number of newsmakers who would be great candidates for Woman of the Year.
Here’s my top ten list:
1. Hanna Hopko is a newly elected member of the Ukraine Parliament and Chair of its Foreign Affairs Committee. She was one of the leaders of the Maidan movement that overthrew President Yanukovych in February. “Decades of unprecedented corruption are like a cancer in Ukraine,” she said. “They weakened our position in the world and destroyed our army, billions of U.S. dollars were stolen, and therefore they couldn’t be invested in the military or the economy.”
2. Sister Gabriella Bottani is the leader of Talitha Kum, the international network of sisters working to end human trafficking. She was featured earlier this month in Pope Francis’s World Day of Peace call for ending modern-day slavery. “Try putting a hand over the mouth and scream,” she said. “The cry is stifled, dumb, no one listens to it. The hand represents a socioeconomic system that tries to hide the suffering it causes, making silent the cry of the victims.”
3. Paulette Brown became the first black woman to lead the American Bar Association, running for the office on a platform to eliminate bias in our legal system. In a profession where only seven percent of law firm partners are members or minorities and only two percent are minority women, she has her work cut out for her. “But once you recognize it’s a possibility that you could have some unconscious bias,” she said, “then it hopefully will adjust your behavior.”
4. Angela Merkel has been Chancellor of Germany since 2006. Polls put her popularity in Germany at something around 75 percent, unique among leaders of democracies in recent history. Since the onset of the Ukraine crisis this year, she has been instrumental in Europe’s agreement to sanction Russia. The only world leader who talks regularly with Putin, she has been able to keep the crisis from escalating.
5. Alayne Fleischman is the courageous whistleblower who was fired from her job as a lawyer and diligence manager at JP Morgan Chase in 2008, after warning her superiors of the bank’s involvement in “massive criminal securities fraud.” The evidence she gave the Justice Department was crucial in the Department of Justice’s $13 billion civil settlement with JPM. She went public only when it became clear that DOJ was not moving forward with criminal prosecution of the bank or its managers.
6. Mary T. Barra became the first female CEO of General Motors just as the ignition-failure cover-up scandal made headlines. As disastrous as the cover-up that resulted in at least 19 deaths was, she didn’t try to defend the inbred GM culture that led up to it. Instead, she fired those responsible and told everyone else at the company, “I never want to put this behind us. I want to put this painful experience permanently in our collective memories.” Changing GM will be a tough job, but Mary Barra has made a promising start.
7. Mo’ne Davis became the first Little League baseball player to appear on the cover of Sports Illustrated. “When thirteen-year-old Mo’ne Davis led her Philadelphia Taney Dragons to the Little League World Series,” ESPN News said, “she did more than play jaw-dropping ball; she took the snow globe of the world and shook it up, changing the whole picture for the better…She intoxicated a nation and restored our hope in what sports can offer not just girls but everyone.”
8. Janet Yellin became the first female Chair of the Federal Reserve. One of her major objectives is to keep the “American Dream” alive. She said, “The extent of and continuing increase in inequality in the United States greatly concern me… I think it is appropriate to ask whether this trend is compatible with values rooted in our nation’s history, among them the high value Americans have traditionally placed on equality of opportunity.”
9. Saadia Zahidi won the 2014 Financial Times McKinsey Award for the best proposal for a business book. In it she wrote, “The first convert to Islam was a businesswoman. She was a wealthy trader who inherited her father’s business and later expanded it into an even more impressive enterprise. At one point, she offered a job to a man. He accepted and conducted a trading mission from Mecca to Syria under the tutelage of his female boss.
10.“Her name was Khadija. He was the Prophet Muhammad, and the two later married. Khadija’s personal loyalty to the Prophet and her financial independence were essential pillars of support in the early days spreading the message of Islam. This history is often missing from the narrative within and about Islam.”
10. Malala Yousafzai is, at 17, the 2014 Nobel Peace Prize winner. After being shot in the head by members of the Pakistani Taliban for promoting girls’ education, she recovered and continued her work. She said in her acceptance speech for the prize, “This award is not just for me. It is for those forgotten children who want education. It is for those frightened children who want peace. It is for those voiceless children who want change … I am here to stand up for their rights to raise their voice.”

Read all of former U.S. Senator Ted Kaufman’s columns at tedkaufman.com.