Set to kick off on Oct. 25, the BBC World News TV channel, World Service and bbc.com are teaming up to launch the 100 Women campaign. Miss World 2013 Megan Young is one of the women to take part in BBC's 100 Women Conference in London after winning her crown in Indonesia amid criticism toward the pageant from Islamist hard-liners.

In a recent interview on BBC World News TV, Megan Young talked about what she thinks about the pageant before she joined the competition.

"It's funny because I've always told people that I did think of pageants as very superficial. That's one of the reasons why I didn't join before even though people have constantly been telling me to join. I didn't see any essence, what would I get out of it? What would be my purpose?" Young said.

But the 23-year-old beauty queen changed her mind when she came across Miss World's "Beauty with a Purpose" and the fact that the main focus of the cause is charity.

"It wasn't about the glitz and the glamour at all. It was more of how you were as a person," she said.

BBC's 100 Women campaign will have a series of special reports that will feature Rupa Jha in investigating sexual violence in India and Mishal Husain interviewing Pakistani schoolgirl Malala Yusufzai, who was shot by the Taliban last year.

Other contents of the campaign includes a report on Esther Madudu, a Ugandan midwife nominated for the Nobel Peace Price and an interview with four 70-year-old expert women as they talked about lives and career in the program segment, Age of Reason.

100 Women will be broadcast across the BBC's global news services including Radio 4 as it showcase 100 leading women as they gather and discuss issues they are facing. The conference will be streamed online and broadcast live globally.

"This is by no means a one-off," says BBC's controller of language services Liliane Landor. "The conference will give us a database of women we can use in our programmes. We intent to change the way we report women and women's issues."