Time March 16–23, 20202002 PERSON OF THE YEAR
The Whistleblowers
Standing for what’s right
Against the big personalities of politics
and business, workaday people can
seem inconsequential. But by 2002,
three women made it clear that when
dedicated to doing the right thing,
anyone can make a difference. Cynthia
Cooper alerted the audit committee of
telecom giant WorldCom to one of the
largest accounting frauds in history;
Sherron Watkins warned then Enron
CEO Kenneth Lay of an accounting
hoax that concealed hundreds of
millions of dollars in debt; Coleen
Rowley detailed the FBI’s failure to
respond to warnings from her field
office about a conspirator in the
Sept. 11 attacks.
For their actions, the three whistle-
blowers were named TIME’s Persons
of the Year in 2002. “We don’t feel
like we are heroes,” Cooper said then.
Though the women told TIME that
they were just doing their jobs, their
actions had huge repercussions.
Congress passed the Sarbanes-
Oxley Act in 2002 to establish more
robust financial regulations for
public companies as a reaction to the
accounting scandals at Enron and
WorldCom. The FBI embarked on a
yearslong reorganization. And at places
like Cambridge Analytica and Uber,
employees knew that speaking out
against wrongs at giant organizations
could have enormous impact.
—Alana Semuels2001
Wangari Maathai
Seeding a movement
Wangari Maathai was the first woman
in Central and East Africa to earn a
Ph.D., but she learned the ways of the
world by planting trees. In 1977, she
founded the Green Belt Movement to
teach peasant women livelihoods while
reforesting urban areas. That whole-
some pursuit was seen as a threat by
Kenya’s land-grabbing politicians, and
in 2001, Maathai spent International
Women’s Day in jail,
where she often found
herself. But having
found organic links be-
tween environmental-
ism, poverty reduction
and democratic rights, she a year later
won a Parliament seat with 98% of the
vote. The Nobel Peace Prize followed in
- By the time of her death in 2011,
Maathai had taken on palm-oil planta-
tions in Southeast Asia, and her move-
ment, with branches in 30 countries,
had planted 50 million trees. —Karl Vick
2000
Sandra Day O’Connor
Deciding vote
The first woman to sit on the U.S.
Supreme Court, Sandra Day O’Connor
was known for a centrist pragmatism
even as she often voted with the conser-
vative bloc and waded into some of the
most contentious issues during 25 years
on the bench. The most politically pro-
vocative case of her ten-
ure came in 2000, when
the Supreme Court de-
termined the presiden-
tial election. In a 5-4 split
along ideological lines,
with O’Connor joining the conserva-
tive majority, the court ruling resulted
in George W. Bush’s victory over Al
Gore. The divisive decision tainted the
Justices with accusations of partisan-
ship and tested Americans’ faith in their
electoral system. —Tessa Berenson
2000 s84