Luisa Clasen AKA Lully is a video blogger, or "vlogger" from Brazil. Her vlogs about art and culture, shot from her apartment in Rio de Janeiro, have attracted nearly 180,000 YouTube subscribers. Lully launched her channel giving fashion tips, but then refocused it on her first passion, filmmaking. Advertisers love her, so Lully's able to make a living from her online posts. She says she's nicer than the average vlogger and gives a balanced opinion, which "scares trolls". Lully doesn't use bad language, avoids politics and admits when she's wrong. It's hard for her to disconnect from her online life though, especially as her boyfriend is also a well-known vlogger in Brazil "it's a struggle for both of us to let go of our phones and just talk to each other", but they keep each other up to date with what's going on. Ugaaso Abukar Boocow lives in the Somali capital Mogadishu and has become a hit on social media with her pictures and videos documenting everyday life in the city. Ugaaso left Somalia during its civil war and grew up in Canada, she recently went back to live in Mogadishu and says she wants to show a side of the city that's often overlooked - the humour, beauty and beaches. Ugaaso has nearly 70,000 followers on Instagram, from inside Somalia and outside the country. Like Lully she tries to avoid politics, so she doesn't get "stuck in the middle". Ugaaso says she is "cautious" about what she posts to social media because it has a "life of its own and once it escapes your hand it can end up in anyone else's hand". Image: Ugaaso, credit: Ugaaso A. Boocow; Lully, credit, Lais Moss

Nneka Egbuna is a Nigerian German songwriter and performer. She grew up in Warri in the Delta region of Nigeria and travels the world performing and writing, but still it is her home country and its problems which move her to make music. She says, "It's pain, mainly pain, that does inspire me". Nneka writes her songs on her own and plays guitar and drums as well using various computer applications to create loops and beats. Her influences range from Fela Kuti and Bob Marley to Dolly Parton. She talks about the pressure to look conventionally sexy and sound 'fragile' as a female singer and shares what she has learned about controlling who you want to be as an artist. Swedish pop music composer Maria Marcus has made her name writing catchy melodies for other artists to perform - responding to briefs given to her by record companies. She is currently creating hit songs for the South Korean group Girls Generation among others, and likens the ability to write in different genres to having a split personality. Maria's inspiration for music tends to come from "some kind of problem in your life that you have a need to express". She attended a songwriting academy in Sweden which taught her that she works best by collaborating with others in the studio, especially when it comes to song lyrics.(Photo: (Left) Nneka, credit Patrice Bart-Williams, (Right) Maria, credit Jana Damrōse)

Chika Anadu is a self-taught film-maker who wrote, produced and directed her first feature film, the acclaimed B for Boy, in 2013. After studying law in the UK she went back to her home country Nigeria to shoot her film - a contemporary drama which reflects the tension between modern and traditional values in middle-class family life in Lagos. Its central character is a female TV producer who is under pressure to have a baby boy. Chika says, "you tell the stories that you know... I'm Nigerian, I'm Igbo...but I feel that what affects me most is the fact that I'm a woman." Chika also talks about her choice not to go to film school and how she dealt with major financial and technical problems on her set. Shonali Bose is an independent film-maker from India who sees her art as a form of social activism. She has most recently directed Margarita, With a Straw - a coming-of-age movie about a young woman with cerebral palsy. Shonali says finding funding is always a challenge, "the discrimination is such that if it is a woman-led film, it is very hard to find money and I think that is not just the case in India". Her advice to aspiring directors is to get experience on film-sets and to work extremely hard. She talks about combining motherhood with movie-making and sees her two feature films as her 'non-human' children! (Photo: Chika Anadu (left), Credit: Restless Talent ; Shonali Bose (right), Credit: Shonali Bose)

Irish striker Stephanie Roche fell in love with football from an early age. She went to matches with her dad and brothers and played on boys' teams before joining girls' sides from the age of 13. Her opponents were surprised to see a girl on the pitch and says she would sometimes get a bit of abuse from players and parents "but nothing too bad". The insults didn't bother her though, she just focussed on her game. Stephanie went on to represent her country, as well as playing for local teams. It was at a minor league match where she scored the goal that would change her life. By chance the spectacular volley was filmed and uploaded to the internet; it was picked up by FIFA and took second place in their best goal of the year competition, beating stars like Manchester United's Robin van Persie and Chelsea's Diego Costa. Sahar El Hawary was also inspired by her father. She used to sit on the sidelines and watch him referee matches in her native Egypt. It was unusual to see a girl watching from the benches, but Sahar loved the atmosphere and wanted to be as close as she could to the action. At the time Egypt didn't have a women's football team and Sahar thought this was wrong, so she travelled around the country talent-spotting young players and training them in secret in her family's compound. People said she was, "crazy ... and how can women play football? It's a man's game." Sahar wouldn't accept 'no' for an answer and now she takes the national team to tournaments across the region. Today women and girls can be seen playing football across Egypt.Image: Stephanie Roche (credit FAI/Sportsfile) and Sahar El Hawary

Aowen Jin is from China but has lived and worked in the UK for 18 years. Originally trained as a lawyer, she swapped a life at the bar for a life at the easel and now her work is in the Queen's private collection. Before the civil war Sara Shamma was a star of the blossoming Syrian art scene. She carried on painting in Damascus for as long as she could - starting on a series called Diaspora. By the time she finished it, she was herself part of the Syrian diaspora, having fled to neighbouring Lebanon where she has made her home. Aowen and Sara joined Kim Chakanetsa in the studio to talk about leaving home, taking inspiration from conflict, family ties and how to spend a day off relaxing to music and eating cheese!(Photo: Sara Shamma and Aowen Jin outside the BBC offices in London. Credit: Tim Allen)

Salima Ikram was born in Pakistan and got hooked on ancient Egyptian artefacts through the pictures in a childhood book. Her fate as an Egyptologist was sealed when she came face-to-face, aged nine, with mesmerising statues in the Cairo museum; she decided then that finding out more about them would be her life's work. "Archaeologists are people who never grew up" she says. When not lecturing at the American University in Cairo, Salima will be somewhere dry, dusty, and dirty, recording ancient inscriptions or X-raying mummies - human and animal. Her role models in archaeology were women who had been working since the 1940s, but, she says sexism is still a problem and more so in the west than the east. The important thing, she says, "is to do what you want to do and do it very well." Justine Benanty is a qualified pilot but as a maritime archaeologist her time is spent underwater rather than in the sky. At her first dig in Israel she realised that she hated wheelbarrows and got sunburnt too easily to work in the desert, so investigating shipwrecks became her focus. Her project for the last five years has been to tell the stories of the slaves, who were shipped across the Atlantic Ocean, through archaeology. It is a science which needs an image overhaul because, she says "there's nothing cooler than finding [...] a shipwreck at the bottom of the sea that no-one has seen for hundreds of years". She is a co-founder of the ArchaeoVenturers project, a collection of videos and blogs about issues in history and science, which also celebrates women's work in these fields. (Photo: Salima Ikram and Justine Benanty. Credit: Salima Ikram - J. Rowland)

Annise Parker is the mayor of Houston, Texas, the oil and gas capital of America. She once worked in this industry, but says her day job was supporting her "volunteer habit" and eventually gave it up to serve her community full-time. Annise climbed the rungs of local government to become the first openly gay mayor of a major US city in 2010. Her election caused an international media frenzy because of her sexuality. "The perception was Houston was a very conservative, sort of backwards place that wouldn't allow that to happen", but Annise says she used the coverage as an opportunity to talk about her city in a new way. Annise describes being a mayor as the best political job you can have, she was recently voted the seventh best in the world, but is sad about the lack of women wanting to take up this position. Chhavi Rajawat also gave up a high-flying corporate career in India to run for elected office. She has an MBA and worked in the telecoms industry, until she was asked by villagers from her ancestral home, Soda in Rajasthan, to run for the position of sarpanch, or local mayor. Chhavi has used her business savvy to attract funds from the private sector to help provide clean water, electricity and build toilets. She says, "if I were just to depend on government funding I don't think I'd be able to do what I've been able to do in these five years." She's been credited with changing the face of rural India because of her achievements. Chhavi says for her "every day is a Monday", people queue up at her front door early morning and late at night to discuss their issues. (Photo: Mayor Annise Parker and Sarpanch Chhavi Rajawat)

Naamah Kelman was the first woman to be ordained a rabbi in Israel in 1992. She belongs to the liberal Reform movement in Judaism and so her office isn't recognised by Orthodox Jews. She says, "women in our family were supposed to marry rabbis ... and give birth to rabbis" but her father gave her the support she needed to break the mould, study for years, and eventually become a leader. Naamah was influenced by the feminist movement to follow her religious calling despite the fears some in her own community had on her behalf about whether she was "up to it". She is now Dean of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. Former Catholic nun, Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger describes herself as a bishop, but the ordination of women in the Catholic Church is considered a grave crime - the priesthood is a male preserve. Growing up in Austria she was drawn to Biblical stories and loved sharing and explaining them, comparing her feeling of having a religious calling to having a musical gift. She spent years in a convent in the hope that reforms would enable women to become deacons. The "scandal" of her actions and subsequent ex-communication by the Vatican have not deterred her from what she feels is her path in life. (Photo left: Naamah Kelman. Credit: Yitzhak Harari. Photo right: Christine Mayr-Lumetzberger. Credit: C M Lumetzberger)

MC Melodee is a rapper from Amsterdam who grew up listening to cassette tapes of De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest. From a young age Melodee says she loved playing with language and creating rhymes. Melodee says she went to university to please her parents, but when she graduated she chose a career in music, rather than a steady office job. That decision paid off and now MC Melodee has rocked venues around the world and set up her own female collective, Dam Dutchess, to coach, promote and encourage talented young women in the industry.DJ Naida is from Zimbabwe's capital Harare and has also worked in an all-female collective of rappers from different African nations. She describes herself as "a social commentator", with a personal style influenced by "old school" artists such as Lauryn Hill, Tupac and Coolio. When she was starting out in rap Naida was shaken by a music producer's warning that, "you really can't rap, anyway it's not for females, you really shouldn't be doing it - stick to the singing you'll probably make more money with it". She gave up, but eventually came back to it and proved that she could be a successful rapper -- and that same producer is now one of her biggest supporters.(Photo left: DJ Naida. Photo right: MC Melodee. Credit: Dear Productions)

At the age of 28 Ky Furneaux swapped her job as a guide in the Australian outback for stunt work in Hollywood. "I don't think I really realised it was gonna hurt," she says of this sometimes "brutal" industry. Now aged 41 Ky is a veteran of more than 60 films including Catwoman, X-Men: The Last Stand, and Thor. She has a reputation for taking "hard hits" but admits that the first time someone punched her in the face, she cried. She won a Taurus award which is the stunt industry's equivalent of an Oscar for her work in the blockbuster Thor and is trying to retire but the actresses she doubles for are reluctant to let her. Sanober Pardiwalla is one of the relatively few female stunt action performers in India's massive film industry. She says that being sporty and confident from an early age made her stand out among other Indian girls and propelled her to become a black belt in karate and learn to ride a motorbike. Now her skills are called upon by some of Bollywood's top action directors, but she would not recommend her profession to other Indian women. Sanober believes 'visualisation' plays a huge part in successful stunts and describes how she approached performing a fall down a 300-feet cliff face.(Photo left: Sanober Pardiwalla. Credit: Sanober Pardiwalla. Photo right: Ky Furneaux. Credit: Ky Furneaux)