In 2023, the Formula One Group created the “F1 Academy,” a female junior category aimed at including and giving visibility to women within the motorsport universe. However, how can we truly grant space to women while simultaneously excluding them from the main championships?

The female audience is represented by major names such as Hannah Schmitz, the British engineer who serves as the Head of Race Strategy at Red Bull Racing, alongside female category champions like Alisha Palmowski and Doriane Pin. Furthermore, women now make up approximately 40% of Formula 1’s global audience.

Yet, the media still heavily pushes the “WAG culture,” where women in motorsport are reduced to being drivers’ partners, treated as mere accessories who exist to watch male triumph and genius from the sidelines. Meanwhile, the industry ignores the true representatives who have worked tirelessly to establish themselves in a heavily male-dominated world.

Despite initially appearing to be a functional and intelligent plan, the F1 Academy has evolved into a form of misogyny disguised as inclusion. More often than not, once drivers reach the age or time limit within the category, they lose visibility and are discarded by investors, making it virtually impossible for them to advance into higher tiers like Formula 3 or Formula 2. Moreover, the F1 Academy operates on a completely different race weekend schedule and structure compared to other categories, which severely hinders the drivers’ adaptation.

Teams still hesitate to invest in women in motorsport, regardless of their talent and sheer determination. This will not change until there is fair, genuine, and equal investment between men and women. They do not need a separate category; they need to be viewed simply as racing drivers, not as marketing tokens covered up by disguised exclusion.

When Do Female Categories in Motorsport Stop Being About Inclusion and Secretly Become Exclusion? was originally published in Dear Feminist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

All three were, of course, incredibly famous in their time, rising above the male contemporaries who gave them access to the world stage in a way that has since rendered them immortal. Each of these women ignited such a fascination in the public that they were relentlessly scrutinised, details of their private lives drawing attention for decades, or, in Anne’s case, centuries, after their deaths. So what is it about these women that continues to inspire such enduring interest and devotion?

There is, of course, the obvious and desperately sad similarity that ties them together: their early deaths. Diana Spencer and Marilyn Monroe were both 36 when they passed away, whereas Anne was thought to be 35. Struck down in their prime, the sense of tragedy is only exacerbated by the knowledge of what they could have done if only they had been granted a full life. Who would they have been if they had had more time? All three women were known for their philanthropy and support of charitable causes. Who knows how much more good they would have done if given the chance?

Indeed, all of these women seem to represent something untouchable, almost otherworldly. There is something unattainable about all of them; a void that cannot be filled no matter how much we read, watch or discuss. Despite this, each of them remained relatable through their well-documented struggles, proving that no amount of wealth, beauty, or status can insulate us from pain.It is this fundamental conflict that makes them so compelling.

They are the evidence that chafes against the societal messaging fed to us as young girls: be beautiful and demure and charming and you will find your prince. They were each the very epitome of what a patriarchal world says a woman should be, so perfect in their femininity that they attracted attention from royalty and movie stars. Despite this, each of them suffered in their love lives, disproving the harmful rhetoric that a man’s treatment of a woman is conditional on her perceived value. In fact, in the cases of Diana, Marilyn, and Anne, the more they embodied this feminine ideal, the more miserable they seemed to become. They reached the highest realms of desirability and were eaten alive as a result.

But the ideal woman is not simply expected to be beautiful and desirable. She must also be agreeable, accommodating and endlessly resilient, navigating a set of expectations that are as contradictory as they are relentless. These women found themselves caught between the woman they actually were and the woman the world expected them to be, punished whenever their humanity slipped through.

Such a high level of scrutiny and expectation surely left Diana, Marilyn, and Anne living in dual realities; the saint, the goddess, and the queen, a real human being hiding beneath each legend. None of them were able to tell their own stories in a substantial way (Diana’s secretly authorised 1992 biography and Panorama interview aside). What we are left with are fragments of a story, a tale we must weave together with our own imaginations, fiction and reality entwining the way they so often do when it comes to the lives of public figures. They become characters; superhuman beings we imagine are impervious to criticism and pain. We imagine that such things don’t reach them, that their wealth, status, and beauty must insulate them from any harm that may come their way. Though time and time again we are shown definitively that this isn’t true, it is so difficult to decouple an icon from a human being that I fear we will see Diana, Marilyn, and even Anne’s story play out again and again.

The pressures of fame and the expectations placed upon these women were not simply abstract concepts; they had very real consequences for their lives. In Anne’s case, her ambition to become Queen of England ultimately placed her in a position of extraordinary vulnerability when her marriage to Henry VIII broke down and she failed to provide him with a male heir.

For Diana and Marilyn, the connection comes in the form of mental health problems exacerbated by the pressures and scrutiny they faced. As celebrities in a more modern era, Diana and Marilyn were both subject to terrible press intrusion, reporters and photographers swarming Marilyn Monroe as she left Doctors Hospital in New York after suffering a miscarriage. During the tragic events of August 31st 1997, Diana was also swarmed by paparazzi as she lay in the wreckage of her car in the Pont de l’Alma tunnel, critically injured.

No doubt Anne would have been subject to similar treatment by the press if such a thing had existed in her day. A commoner marrying into the royal family is timeless in its ability to draw attention and fervour; a modern-day fairy tale that the public are equally happy to see fail as they are to watch thrive.

But the pressures of being a woman in the public eye are not limited to the scrutiny of strangers. They extend into the most intimate parts of life, shaping our interpersonal relationships and influencing how women are allowed to behave within them.

Anne was known for her sharp tongue. She didn’t hold back, even when facing off against the King of England. She objected to his affairs and made no attempts to suppress her emotions, including anger, when she felt it was justified. She refused to sit quietly in the corner, seen but not heard, a vessel for Henry to produce sons. She was intelligent, opinionated, and vibrant. These qualities attracted Henry to her, but soon became an inconvenience when she did not magically morph into what Henry wanted in a wife.

Similarly, Diana garnered an overwhelming amount of attention for her refusal to fit into the box of ‘Princess of Wales’. She too showed her emotions, connecting with people from all walks of life, particularly those who were rejected by polite society, including sufferers of leprosy and HIV/AIDS. When her marriage to Prince Charles became untenable, she spoke out, first through Andrew Morton, and then in her infamous Panorama interview.

Just like Anne, she did not look the other way and endure her husband’s infidelity. Both Anne and Diana had been sold the idea of a love match, and both of them seemed to deeply believe in it. Thus, the furore around Diana’s decision to let the public see the human side of her, something which at the time went firmly against expectations of the royal family, fed the never-ending press interest in her life, encouraging paparazzi to pursue her dangerously in their hopes of making a fortune through her image.

In the case of Marilyn, her love life and celebrity status interacted differently. Marilyn was thrice divorced, her first husband, James Dougherty, whom she married when she was just 16, reportedly ending their marriage as her career took direction and Hollywood gained greater influence over her life. Her second marriage to baseball player Joe DiMaggio ended for similar reasons. DiMaggio’s objections to her sexualised image are well documented, as are rumours he wanted Marilyn to become a housewife and give up her career. In their divorce proceedings, which took place just nine months after they married, Marilyn stated that DiMaggio was controlling and emotionally cruel.

Marilyn’s third and final marriage, to Arthur Miller, reportedly ended due to his frustrations over the ‘instability’ of their relationship, caused by Marilyn’s struggles with mental health, substance abuse, and the pressures of her career. It’s reasonable to conclude, then, that Marilyn’s celebrity and the scrutiny that came with it played a role in the deterioration of all three of her marriages, the endings of which only invited further media analysis and public interest. Marilyn was reduced to who she married, why those marriages failed, and what that supposedly revealed about her. The pressures of her personal life and public image formed part of the wider circumstances surrounding her struggles with insomnia and reliance on prescription sleeping tablets.

Perhaps, then, the tragedy of these women lies not in any single decision, relationship or circumstance, but in the impossible expectations placed upon them. They were expected to embody an ideal, while being punished whenever their humanity slipped through.

This may be the most enduring parallel between Anne, Marilyn and Diana: all three were women who became symbols before they were allowed to remain people. Their deaths were the result of a range of individual circumstances, and it would be far too simplistic to reduce any of them to a single cause. But if there is one thread running through all three stories, it is the unique pressure placed upon women who occupy the public gaze in a world that struggles to tolerate them as complex human beings. Whether this took Anne to the scaffold, Marilyn to a fatal overdose of barbiturates, or Diana to the fatal car crash in Paris, each story raises the same uncomfortable question: what are the consequences when a woman is expected to embody a fantasy, but inevitably turns out to be human?

By the time these women died, they had ceased to belong entirely to themselves. Anne became a queen, a traitor and eventually a feminist icon; Marilyn became a symbol of Hollywood glamour and its darker underside; Diana became the eternal princess, a saint-like figure whose memory embodies the idea of perfection. Perhaps that is why, centuries later, we are still trying to find the women beneath the legends, trying to reconcile the human beings with the larger-than-life idols they became.

The parallels that connect them are not mere coincidence. They reveal a repeating story: the futile and exhausting quest to become the ideal woman, in the hope that compliance will be rewarded with happiness and protection. Diana, Marilyn, and Anne offer us a way to challenge these impossible expectations, demonstrating that only acceptance, compassion, and love towards ourselves can liberate us from the exhausting belief that we must become something other than who we are to deserve happiness.

Princess Diana, Marilyn Monroe, Anne Boleyn was originally published in Dear Feminist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.