Monáe, dressed in a Bella Freud ice-blue velvet suit, matching glitter eyeliner and perfectly matte red lips, walked to the front of the restaurant and picked up a microphone. “This room looks good,” she said. “You inspire me and encourage me to be a better woman and artist.” Earlier in her career, she said, she asked some label reps to recommend other female producers and creators she could work with. The list they provided stunned her. “It was so tiny,” she said. “I was upset.” To channel that anger, she said, she started her initiative to help women “cross-connect and open doors,” as she put it. “It gives everybody a seat at the table.”

Throughout my conversations with Monáe, she talked about her dedication to lifting up women. Some of that didn’t quite square with me — most of the crew that supports her creatively, spiritually, administratively seem to be men. But Monáe’s event felt like a mild insistence that she got it. This brunch seemed like a woman-centric version of a few rounds on the golf course — a space that emphasized the importance of networking, beyond film sets, parties and premieres as a means to lay the groundwork for future collaborations. Seeing her in that capacity reminded me that she’s still evolving into the woman she wants to be in the world and the role she wants to play.

A few years ago, the singer and actor Harry Belafonte was asked by a reporter for The Hollywood Reporter to comment on “members of minorities in Hollywood today.” Belafonte, a prominent civil rights activist who helped organized the 1963 March on Washington where the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. gave his “I Have a Dream” speech, took the opportunity to express frustration about what he perceived as the political malaise of celebrities. “I think one of the great abuses of this modern time is that we should have had such high-profile artists, powerful celebrities,” he said, “but they have turned their back on social responsibility.” Until recently, few publicly stepped in to fill the hole he named. In the past, Monáe shied away from anything that could potentially derail her career. “I used to be a lot more afraid of going off script,” she told me.

She emerged as an activist in August 2015, at a demonstration in Philadelphia she led in support of the local Black Lives Matter movement. There’s a photo of Monáe surrounded by most of the artists in the Wondaland collective: Jidenna, St. Beauty, Roman GianArthur, Chuck Lightning and the producer Nana Kwabena. Their mouths are open, midchant, and the look on their faces is determined. They are holding drums, signs, one another. For Monáe, the times were too urgent to ignore. Freddie Gray and Sandra Bland had recently died following controversial encounters with the police. She realized she had a voice that she could use. That she needed to use. A few days later, Monáe released the anthem “Hell You Talmbout,” which is less a song than a chant. At nearly seven minutes long, it calls out the names of black men and women who were victims of police brutality, followed by the urging to say their names. It was a significant moment in her career: She would no longer be cautious when it came to social responsibility. The song came out almost a year before Beyoncé’s breaking-chains “Freedom” or Solange Knowles’s primal scream on “A Seat at the Table.” A few months later, Ava DuVernay and Ryan Coogler gave a benefit concert in Flint, Mich., to raise money for the clean-water-deprived city that was also a boycott of the Oscars. Monáe performed alongside Stevie Wonder, Vic Mensa and Hannibal Buress. Monaé told me that in the past, she tended to write anthems for other people. “I don’t always live them, I don’t. And I’m learning more and more to live them, to make myself live them.”

Her highest-profile moment came with the 2017 presidential inauguration. Monáe was invited to speak — as well as sing — at the Women’s March by Ginny Suss, a member of the organizing committee in charge of music. Suss wanted artists whose music reflected their personal politic. “When you look at the arc of her career, there has always been a moral core and ethical center to her music, that breaks down constructions of race and gender in our society,” Suss told me. “It’s a tool to imagine the world we want through the accessibility of pop music. Having her stand up and have that voice at the march was amazing.”

Monáe had heard that Lucia McBath, the mother of Jordan Davis; Sybrina Fulton, the mother of Trayvon Martin; and Gwen Carr, the mother of Eric Garner, were going to be there, too, and she wanted to offer support. She herself was still reeling from the election, she added. “I just wanted to come and not only uplift, but I wanted to be uplifted, too.” As she made her way backstage, she got a sense of the crowd for the first time. “I saw, like, tens of thousands — hundreds of thousands of women and men and people from all around the world, babies and Muslims and trans and L.G.B.T. folks,” she recalled. “I was like, Oh, my God.” She hadn’t expected such a tremendous turnout, for so many people to care about what happens to women. The importance of the task hit her. But there was no privacy backstage, no place to prepare or gather her thoughts — just a communal room where the speakers were chatting and taking photographs. Monáe had no choice but to wing it. “That was just one of those moments where I was just, like, It might not come out right, but as long as your intentions are pure, as long as you’re honest,” she told me. She drew from the mixture of emotions stirred up by her recent role in “Hidden Figures,” about female African-American mathematicians suffering from discrimination even as they performed pivotal jobs for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration during the American space race of the 1960s. “Everything that was going on in January felt like that era, when we’re talking about a blatant war on women’s rights.”

She appeared calm as she addressed the enormous crowd. “Women will be hidden no more,” she said. “We have names. We are complete human beings.” For many people, the speech cast Monáe in a new light: she became more than a psychedelic Tim Burton character. The response galvanized her. “I just had to speak from my heart,” she said. “Not a lot of artists do it.”