2026 Laureates - Les Engagées: the determination to change the models

The history of his family is intrinsically linked to that of Iran, the country that his parents fled during the Khomeini era to take refuge in France. Chirinne Ardakani takes the path of law, becoming a lawyer in international criminal law and foreigners' law. The assassination of Jina Mahsa Amini pushed her to create Iran Justice, a collective whose mission was to document Iranian state crimes in order to bring their perpetrators to justice, advocating the criminalization of gender apartheid. Chirinne Ardakani is the lawyer in France of the 2023 Nobel Peace Prize winner, Narges Mohammadi.

Profoundly deaf since birth, Virginie Delalande will pursue her dream to the end: that of being a lawyer. She learned to read lips, obtained a scientific baccalaureate, went on to study law at Panthéon-Assas without her teachers allowing her to have the lessons in paper version. From this adversity, she draws her determination. Virginie Delalande is the first profoundly deaf lawyer in France. She created HandicaPower, which gives more than 90 conferences throughout France with, as highlights, themes on how to overcome one's limits or focus on diversity.

She saw herself as a juvenile judge. She embraced the environmental cause from a very young age. Daughter of the mountains, Camille Étienne is not thirty years old, but her face and her name have established themselves in the media and associative landscape. His struggles are numerous: mining of the seabed, mega-basins… After a first work in 2023, his latest book, entitled “Factor X: how the chemical industry hides the truth from us”, tackles the subject of PFAS pollution.

His life is telecoms. She was notably the special advisor to Xavier Niel, also managing subscriber relations for Free. But Angélique Gérard is above all the co-founder of Women in STEM Europe, an organization whose main focus is the inclusion of women and their leadership in subjects where they are sorely lacking, such as mathematics, engineering, science or technology. Especially in an environment where AI constitutes a new revolution.

They have formed an entrepreneurial duo since 2023 and the birth of Good Morning Impact, an initiative which takes the form of a monthly meeting around women from all backgrounds and all sectors: researchers, artists, activists, managers and entrepreneurs. The objective: to give voice and address all sensitive subjects - democracy, mental health, women's rights, digital technology -, thus circulating ideas and connecting women who share the same vision of a more inclusive society.

Expert in economic and strategic intelligence, Jessica Matoua-David started in large companies such as Microsoft and Pernod Ricard. Now at the head of Fargo Int, she is also the founder of the think tank Nemow Lab, dedicated to women's entrepreneurship. Its goal is to question, make people think, unite the ecosystem and translate data into concrete actions. Jessica Matoua-David emphasizes the recurring negative representations that turn young girls away from engineering and tech careers. She also reminds us that we must stop approaching women solely from the angle of their gender and consider them above all as entrepreneurs.

Machine-translated from French