It is a list that tells a lively, determined, courageous Italy. The list of 100 successful women selected by Forbes Italia for 2025 Includes well -known and lesser -known names, women who guide companies, write, innovate, treat, teach, govern. And they protect. As Martina Pludadirector for Italy of Humane World For Animals Europe (formerly Humane Society International), the first woman driving an animal rights organization in Italy to be included in this prestigious ranking.
It is not a cover ranking: it is a cross -section of our time. A reflector lit on a different way of exerting power: that of treatmentof thesocial commitmentfrom the responsibility.
Martina Pluda is among the few to have brought an uncomfortable theme to the list, often ignored in the institutional tables: the Animal protection. With his daily work, and with the strength of a lucid and without rhetoric activism, he has contributed to the defense of animals a political, cultural, civil question.
His entry into the “100 successful women” is a clear signal: talking about animal rights today is a leadership theme. But not of muscle, performative, patinated storytelling. It is a leadership that has to do with taking charge, with the ability to give voice to those who do not have it.
2025 was a turning point also for the organization that Martina Pluda Guida. In February, in fact, the new name was announced: Humane World For Animals. A change that is not only aesthetic or marketing: it is a way to explicitly declare a global and inclusive goal, where “World” and “Animals” are finally in the center.
Rebranding obtained important awards: the campaign that accompanied him was appointed five categories to Cannes Lions 2025, the most prestigious prizes in the field of communication. A sign that talking about animals is no longer a niche theme or “goodists”, but a cultural frontier involving the whole society.
A face between one hundred
In the same list of Forbes, scientists are like Fabiola Gianottidirector of CERN, athletes like Jasmine Paoliniactresses like Greta Scaranomanager, entrepreneurs, diplomats. Each name tells a piece of country that changes, but few put on the table, as Pluda did, an idea of progress that also includes the invisibles of our production and cultural system: animals.
It is not the first, of course: in the list of past years there were already women like Donatella Bianchiformer president of WWF Italia, or the journalist Giulia Innocenzifor years committed to documenting the conditions in intensive farms. But the presence of pluda, today, has a particular value, because it tells the normalization of animalism as an all -round civil commitment.
A success that speaks to us too
Forbes defined the 100 women of 2025 as “women who are favoring the progress – economic and non -economic and our country”. And that “non” is important. Because it reminds us that not everything is measured in the turnover, in company metrics, expanding the market.
Martina Pluda represents that part of the change that does not make noise but changes the world starting from the smallest: a dog saved from a laboratory, a campaign against fur, a law proposed to limit the use of animals in circles. Every gesture, every battle won, is a small crack in indifference.
