The most influential women in every country
To celebrate inspirational women around the world, we recently set out to discover the most influential and admired ladies from across the globe.
Using a variety of ranking factors, like social media following, Google searches and media mentions, we identified the most influential woman in the world’s 100 biggest countries.
These women come from all kinds of industries, from music and TV, to beauty and business.
In the UK, Adele was revealed as the most influential woman, with almost 12 million searches for her name and impressively high social media engagement among her fans.
Across the pond in the United States, Ariana Grande took top spot, largely thanks to having the largest social media following of all the women included in the study. The pop princess has more than 429 million social media followers across her various accounts, with incredible reach – each of her tweets receives around 14 million1 impressions.
Despite not being the most influential woman in her country, Kim Kardashian was mentioned the most in the media out of anyone, with over 29 million news stories written about her in the past year alone!
Musician, IU, from South Korea, ranked first in both social media engagement and Google searches, with her name being typed into the search engine more than four billion times!
See below for a snapshot of the world’s most influential women and then a detailed report on each continent and industry.
Europe
In Europe, Spanish model, Georgina Rodriguez, has the highest number of combined followers (242 million), but UK singer, Dua Lipa, was mentioned the most in the news (two million articles), despite not being the most influential in the UK overall.
Romanian singer, Inna, was Googled the most, with over 22 million searches, while Adele has around 25 million impressions for each of her tweets - more than anyone on the continent.
North America
Though supermodel, Kendall Jenner, has the most TikTok followers in North America, with over 28 million users subscribed to her account, Ariana Grande has more on every other platform.
That being said, Canadian beauty influencer, Farah Dhukai, has the best engagement rating on the continent at 5.15%, with Mexican actress, Danna Paola, coming second at 4.75%.
South America
Brazilian singer, Anitta, boasts the highest social media following in South America, with an incredible 108 million followers across her different channels.
Despite this, Ecuadorian TV star, Alejandra Jaramillo, had the highest engagement rate of anyone in the study at 20.65%!
Asia
Though IU has the most media mentions of any woman in Asia, fashion model, Ngọc Trinh, came a close second with almost five million news stories on Google.
While Indian singer, Neha Kakkar, has the most TikTok and YouTube followers, actress, Deepika Padukone, also from India, has the highest combined social following – a staggering 139 million!
Africa
Actress and model, Minnie Dlamini from South Africa, has the most social media followers in the continent, but Nigerian singer, Tiwa Savage, has the most engagement on her tweets.
Senegal music superstar, Queen Biz, has the most media mentions in Africa, but singer, Almok, from Togo, was the most searched for on Google.
Australasia
Australian actress and singer, Anne Curtis, has a massive 49 million social media followers, however personal trainer, Kayla Itsines, also from Australia, has the highest Facebook following.
The Vampire Diaries star, Phoebe Tonkin, has both the best social engagement rate and the most Google searches on the continent, while Papua New Guinea’s Megan Washington has the most media mentions.
Among the 100 most influential women, the most common industries were film, TV, fashion and beauty. Within each of the categories, we then ranked these influential women against each other.
Music
As well as having the most Google searches and the best social media engagement, South Korean singer-songwriter, IU, was among the most influential women in music, with a huge 12 million media mentions – at least three times more than any other woman in the category.
Ariana Grande came out on top in this category, with her impressive social media statistics securing her first place. The UK’s most influential woman, Adele, also ranked highly, helped by her social following of over 155 million.
TV & Film
Indian actress and producer, Deepika Padukone, came out on top amongst women from the film and TV industry, with a whopping 139 million social media followers and over three million Google searches for her name.
Star of the Netflix show Elite, Danna Paola, came a close second with almost 1.5 million Google searches.
Fashion & Beauty
Amongst the most influential women in fashion is Victoria’s Secret Angel, Barbara Palvin, from Hungary, who has an outstanding Instagram engagement of 9.35%.
Host of 2021 Eurovision and Dutch Youtuber, Nikkie de Jager, and model, Georgina Rodriguez, lead with strong influence in the fashion world, as they have the highest social following in the category.
These are the world’s most popular women – if you want to view Gala’s most popular bingo games, click here.
Methodology
*We used Worldometer to identify the world’s 100 biggest countries and then HypeAuditor to discover the five women from each nation with the most Instagram followers. We only included women aged 25 or over.
For each of the 500 women, we noted down their follower numbers on Instagram, Twitter, Facebook, TikTok and YouTube and calculated their total social following.
HypeAuditor also provided the Instagram engagement rate for each person.
We then used Social Bearing to source the number of Twitter impressions, dividing ‘total impressions’ by the number of tweets to get an average impressions-per-tweet figure.
Keyword Tool provided the number of Google searches for each woman’s name and Google News gave us the amount of media mentions from the last year.
We ranked each country’s five women against each other for each category, then took an average ranking from these scores to reveal the most influential individual.
All data collected in May 2021.