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View #Women Of Influence
View an Alphabetical List of Honorees from 2013 to 2017

NEW YORK—2017 marks the 15th year of Vision Monday’s special signature report on Most Influential Women in Optical. Since 2003, we’ve been honoring women in optical, pulling from the worlds of vision care, retailing, manufacturing, distribution, dispensing and designing. This makes for a long and impressive list of honorees. (Go to VisionMonday.com for the complete alphabetical list).

We thought it was time to crunch some numbers so we sifted through our archives and came up with the following fun facts spanning 15 years of profiling, honoring and celebrating #WomenOfInfluence:

Through 2017, Vision Monday has given out 625 honors to 589 women from 9 different countries. Out of the 589 women we have honored, 32 women have been honored twice (and two were honored three times).

Honorees have hailed from the U.S., France, Italy, Mexico Antigua, Australia, Canada, Puerto Rico and Canada.

The VM Staff has poured through the thousands of nominations we’ve received from readers over the past 15 years, winnowing the list down to 30 to 40 honorees each year.

In 2007, we started allowing nominations for women who had already been honored in the past, because some women in optical really knock our socks off.

In 2008, we shook things up a bit and created different categories in order to better honor women. Instead of differentiating women based on their sector of the industry (retail, dispensing, suppliers, media, etc.), we chose groupings that would show how they impress us within their respective fields and came up with the following categories: Executive Suite, Rising Stars, Mentors and Innovators.

As in previous years, VM’s Influential Women for 2017 were chosen from a large pool of nominees named by you, our readers, and in the following pages we profile their accomplishments. We hope you appreciate their stories of success as much as we enjoyed getting to know and write about these #WomenOfInfluence.

—The Editors