You Can Be Anything

The educational app Women Who Changed the World tells the sweetly illustrated stories of female heroes who—through their hard work, talents, smarts, and bravery—changed humanity for the better.

We learn about the hurdles that Pakistani activist Malala Yousafzai had to overcome just for the right to go to school. We're reminded of the important work done by French-Polish physicist Marie Curie, American civil rights hero Rosa Parks, and several glass-ceiling-shattering astronauts. The pilot Amelia Earhart winks at us from the top of the page, perhaps a nod to the app’s origins.

Gemma Malet, cofounder and co-CEO of Catalonia-based app publisher Learny Land, hit upon the idea through a surprise conversation.

“My daughter asked me one day, ‘Can girls be pilots?’ I was surprised,” Malet says. “I said, ‘Of course! Why are you asking me that?’” Malet had always taught her children that girls could do anything.

Still, she says, it's no wonder the message wasn’t getting through: “The main characters that we hear about every day, that we learn about in school, they’re all men.”

So the team at Learny Land looked for new characters. They bought history books, borrowed from the library, combed the internet. “It was easy to find women who have done incredible things,” Malet says. “The difficult part was how to rewrite the stories and adapt them to children.”

And they had another problem: How could they possibly choose which women to feature?

They developed a set of criteria: The women must represent global, racial, ethnic, and religious diversity; they must still be living or have lived recently (“It’s difficult for girls to find inspiration from a woman that lived 2,000 years ago,” Malet says), they had to have inspiring jobs and interesting lives, and, finally, each woman had to be making the world a better place through her work.

While many of Learny Land’s apps are designed for children to enjoy on their own, Women Who Changed the World was conceived for parents and children to use together. With each chapter devoted to one woman, Malet envisioned parent and child sitting side by side, going through the app like a storybook to learn about a history-maker each night.

“I hope this is a family activity,” she says, “because I think kids have a lot of questions about these topics.”

Although Malet won’t pick favorites, there is one person featured in the app she’d most like to meet for dinner: Nobel Peace Prize winner Wangari Maathai. “She had some visionary views about the environment,” Malet says. “She was the one who surprised me the most.” Further proof that all of us—young, old, male female—could stand to learn a thing or two.

“It’s good for everyone to rebalance a bit,” Malet says.

Women Who Changed the World

Great stories to inspire you

View