12. The Marissa Mayer factor — Only 3% of Fortune 500 CEOs are women, and Marissa Mayer represents not only the latest woman to fatten that number up a bit, but also the youngest one in the mix. Her story is incredibly inspiring — she went from kicking ass at Youth Science Camp in West Virginia to kicking ass at Stanford University in her work with artificial intelligence to kicking more ass at Google as its first female engineer (and then quickly moving up the ranks to eventually be a vice president — and we predict she'll continue that ass kicking at Yahoo!. And though she takes offense with the word "feminism" for being too militant, she does uphold all the values of it: Actions do speak louder than words, and Marissa's feminism shouts her support.

Photo: Martin Klimek/ZUMA Press/Corbis