The TIME 100 and Some People TIME Forgot

Yesterday TIME published its famed “100 Most Influential People.” I love browsing this list, reading profiles of fascinating people written by other fascinating people, and every year look forward to it. I was thrilled to see some of my favorite feminist icons featured on this year’s list: Beyonce, Hillary Clinton, Malala Yousafzai. However, this year as I was reading some entries from the “Icons” section I got a sinking feeling that the list would not achieve gender parity this year. After finishing my perusal of the list, I went back and counted and my gut was right. This year only 41 of the world’s most influential people were women.

I can’t say I was shocked, but I’ll admit I was disappointed. The “100 Most Influential People” list is inherently subjective which gives the editors some leeway in who ends up on the list. If the editors wanted to achieve gender parity on the list, they would be absolutely within their rights to do so. I have to wonder why it isn’t a priority especially in 2014.

However, rather than wallow in my own disappointment I set out to fill in the gaps. I decided to pick out nine women to complete the list. I thought, at first, that this might be difficult given that TIME couldn’t come up with nine more women to add to the list and I found very quickly that I was right. It was difficult, but not for a lack of influential women, rather for a preponderance of them.

So many women seemed to deserve a place on this list. A few names immediately jumped to mind: Wendy Davis, Dilma Rousseff, Sheryl Sandberg, Elizabeth Warren. But even then I couldn’t stop naming amazing, fascinating, diverse, influential women. In fact, the longer I went on naming women, the easier it got to list off accomplished ladies. I ended up with a list of 19 individual women, one two-woman team, and one three-woman team, and I could have gone on if I let myself.

I stopped myself at a list that included these 24 women: Mindy Kaling, Wendy Davis, Shonda Rhimes, Elizabeth Warren, Tina Fey, Dilma Rousseff, Drew Gilpin Faust, Nadezhda Tolokonnikova and Maria Alyokhina, Sheryl Sandberg, Amy Purdy, Michelle Obama, Laverne Cox, Jennifer Lawrence, Lupita N’yongo, Piper Kerman, Amy Poehler, Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Robin Roberts, Lorde, Katy Perry, and Geena Davis.

Each of these women is, in her own way, redefining something about the world we live in. They are leaving indelible marks on our culture and our world and it’s a little bit ludicrous that none of them was recognized on TIME’s list, if you ask me. I hope in future years that TIME’s editors will consider making gender parity a must for the “100 Most Influential People.” I believe almost any relatively informed person could list 50 incredibly influential women so it shouldn’t be that much of a challenge to TIME’s editors.

Here’s to this year’s “100 Most Influential People” and to the many women on the list, the many women who should be on that list, and the many women who will one day be on that list.