Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has made Time Magazine's list of the year's 100 most influential people.

Photo: RNZ / Rebekah Parsons-King

She joins others such as the North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, Australian actors Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman, new royal Meghan Markle and Chadwick Boseman from the film Black Panther.

Time describes its list as not a measure of power or past achievements but a gauge of "individuals whose time, in our estimation, is now".

It asked other high-powered people to write brief stories about the top 100.

Facebook's chief operating officer Sheryl Sandberg wrote Jacinda Ardern's profile - saying "in a world that too often tells women to stay small, keep quiet - and that we can't have both motherhood and a career - Jacinda Ardern proves how wrong and outdated those notions of womanhood are".

"She's not just leading a country. She's changing the game. And women and girls around the wold will be the better for it," she wrote.