The Story Behind TIME’s 2026 Women of the Year

The last photograph I can find on my phone of the TIME newsroom before we were dispersed by the COVID pandemic is of a giant wall of magazine covers. For months, we’d been working on our inaugural Women of the Year project. The picture shows the scale of that work: 100 TIME covers, marking the centennial anniversary of women’s suffrage in the U.S. by representing the most influential woman of each year dating back to 1920. That project, led by Kelly Conniff and Emma Barker Bonomo, interrogated...