For 2025's International Women's Day, the developers behind the popular first-person shooter franchise Call of Duty are highlighting the real and fictional women who run the game.
The trailer opens with an all-female squad—consisting of Black Ops' Sevati "Sev" Dumas (portrayed by Karen David) and Maya Aguinaldo (Chantelle Barry) with Modern Warfare's Valeria Garza (Maria Elisa Camargo) and Nila "Nova" Brown (Abena, Kandace Caine for voice) —suited up and ready to hit the battlefield in a UTV before switching to rapid fire cuts showcasing female characters from past Call of Duty titles.
The fictional characters are then interlaced with clips from influential women streamers and content creators in the Call of Duty community. The clips include women who participated in 2024's Call of Duty: NEXT live event, a woman live-streaming with a sleeping infant in her arms, and joyful meet-ups of Call of Duty squad mates seeing each other in person.
We’re celebrating the women who run the game—because Call of Duty is for #AllOfUs. #IWD2025
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Those videos are juxtaposed against clips of streamers celebrating victories in Call of Duty: Warzone and cinematic, high-paced action sequences from various Call of Duty titles. The trailer ends with Sev, Nova, Maya, and Valeria walking toward the camera as a group on Warzone's Rebirth Island as a helicopter crashes behind them.
The catchphrase "There's a soldier in all of us" slides —originally popularized with live action Call of Duty: Black Ops 2 advertising spots—onto the screen before fading to "All of us." Call of Duty's social media accounts shared the video with the statement, "We’re celebrating the women who run the game—because Call of Duty is for #AllOfUs. #IWD2025"
A history of women in the Call of Duty franchise
2004's Call of Duty: Finest Hour may not have been the finest hour for the series, but it does hold some cultural significance as the first Call of Duty title to feature a playable female protagonist. Players were able to pick up arms as Tanya Pavelovna, who was penned as a sniper for the Soviet Union during World War 2. However, the player's time with Pavelovna was quite brief.
It would take until Call of Duty: Black Ops in 2010 before we saw another playable female protagonist, and it takes a little stretching to include this one: Sarah Michelle Gellar made an appearance in the paid DLC "Call of the Dead" portraying a fictionalized version of herself that was only available in the game's Zombies mode.
While playable female characters would occasionally crop up in Call of Duty's third modes, it would take until Call of Duty: Black Ops 3 in 2015 before we had a female lead in a mainline Call of Duty game. Again, though, there is some stretching to get to the goal here.
The player can choose between a male or female protagonist, but either way, the player character remains completely silent. There are some gripes to be had about the presentation of Black Ops 3's female protagonist. However, there was still a lot of excitement by many to even see a female lead in the campaign for the series in the first place. Oh, and bonus points for the campaign co-op: players could actually have a squad of four female leads in Black Ops 3, silent though they may be.
It was after Black Ops 3 that Call of Duty fans saw a shift in the availability of playable women characters in the game's campaigns and multiplayer. Modern Call of Duty titles feature characters such as Modern Warfare's Farah Karim, a much loved playable protagonist, and Black Ops 6's ass kicking master of disguises, Sevati Dumas.
Not all female characters have been relegated to the roles of gun-toting goody-two-shoes, either. Modern Warfare's Valeria Garza serves as a chilling, cunning villain. While Call of Duty's representation of women on the battlefield continues to improve, there are still 'firsts' being experienced in the franchise.
The inclusion of Nicki Minaj as a playable operator for multiplayer and Warzone, for example, was the first time in Call of Duty franchise history a woman was added as a playable Operator who was not fictionalized for the game. Similarly, the operator Nova is the first character, female or otherwise, in Call of Duty to have vitiligo—an autoimmune condition that causes patches of skin to lose its pigmentation.
It's suggested that nearly half of people who label themselves as gamers identify as women, and representation for those members of the community can be pivotal to broadening the types of stories that can be told and experiences offered by video games. There is, after all, a soldier in all of us.
