6 Extraordinary Women Who Rose to the Pinnacle of Their Professions


The daughter of Panamanian immigrants, Burns was raised in a New York City housing project. Her hard work earned her a spot at NYU’s engineering school, and she would go on to graduate from Columbia with a Master’s in Engineering. After working at Xerox for nearly twenty years, Burns would go on to become the company’s CEO in 2007. She was the first Black woman to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company.