The path to the C-suite is rarely linear—more often a winding road marked by setbacks as much as opportunity. For women in particular, the climb across industries from Wall Street to Silicon Valley has often meant breaking through glass ceilings to enter rooms where they were once told they did not belong.
But long before boardrooms, earnings calls, and billion-dollar decisions, the 100 leaders on Fortune’s 2026 Most Powerful Women list were learning the fundamentals of work in far humbler settings. Some stood on factory floors or stocked shelves at Target; others worked the airplane cabin aisle or settled into Wall Street cubicles. Few began with a clear roadmap to the top.
What united them isn’t having a perfect plan, but a willingness to adapt, outwork expectations, and seize opportunities when they appeared. While landing the corner office may not have been the goal from the outset, the earliest signs of their ambition can often be found in the first lines of their résumés.
After graduating from the University of Cambridge with a degree in economics in 1988, Jane Fraser began her career as a mergers and acquisitions analyst at Goldman Sachs. While the job taught her some of the foundations of finance, and how to navigate a major firm, she admitted she wasn’t satisfied with where she was in life.
“I was young when I started, and I was the boring girl from Scotland,” Fraser said at the Economic Club of Washington, D.C. in 2023. “Everyone else was European, spoke multiple languages, was a lot more exotic and interesting than me.”
So, once her new-graduate analyst program was over, she moved to Spain—despite knowing little Spanish—and later pursued her MBA at Harvard Business School. She spent 10 years at McKinsey in financial services and strategy before landing at Citi in 2004. By 2021 she was named CEO, becoming the first woman to helm a major Wall Street bank.
Like many young people, Mary Barra’s first-ever job was working at her local grocery store, an experience she’s said taught her “commitment to work.” But her next company would be the one she’d stick with for life.
While a student at General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) she began co-op work on the assembly line as a quality inspector at the Pontiac Motor Division.
“It was terrific because I learned how cars were built and how important every step of the assembly process was to make a great car,” Barra wrote on LinkedIn in 2016.
Her first full-time job was as an electrical engineer, and a few years later, she became the plant manager at GM’s Detroit Hamtramck assembly plant.
With the exception of a brief break in the late 1980s to get her MBA from Stanford University, she then concurrently climbed the ladder all the way to the corner office. By 2014, she was named chief executive officer and has led the company to its nearly $70 billion market cap today.
After immigrating from Taiwan to the U.S. with her family at a young age, Lisa Su spent her early years fascinated by technology. She studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, obtaining her bachelor’s and PhD focused on semiconductors.
Her first job was as a technical staff member at Texas Instruments before jumping to IBM in 1995. She spent four years working at Freescale Semiconductor, and then joined AMD in 2012. By 2014, she was named president and CEO and has since led the company to the forefront of computing and the AI revolution.
Julie Sweet began working at age 14 as a reservationist at the Elizabeth Howard dinner theater in California.
“They had never hired someone in high school, let alone a 14-year-old. But Elizabeth was so impressed that I was this young woman coming in looking for a job, she hired me and gave me a chance,” she told The New York Times in 2019.
“My parents were struggling financially, and when I was in seventh grade I was growing so fast they could only buy one pair of pants at a time, because they kept having to replace them. By the time I got to high school, if I could work, then I could buy my own clothes.”
Sweet went on to attend Claremont McKenna College and obtained her law degree from Columbia in 1992. She worked at a corporate law firm for 17 years before becoming Accenture’s general counsel in 2010. By 2019, she was named CEO of the company.
A native of Spain, Ana Botín studied economics at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and started her career at J.P. Morgan in 1981.
In 1988, she returned to Spain to work for Santander Group, the financial services giant that’s been led by her family for over 120 years. When her father died of a heart attack in 2014, she took the reins of one of Europe’s largest banks by total assets as its executive chairman.
Grace Wang, head of Chinese electronics manufacturer Luxshare, didn’t take a traditional route to the corner office. She never graduated from college and instead began working in manufacturing as a teenager, joining one of the first cohorts of employees hired when Foxconn opened a factory in Shenzhen in 1988. In 2004, she and her brother cofounded Luxshare, which has become a leading maker of Apple products, including AirPods, Apple Watches, and iPhones.
When Mitsuko Tottori joined Japan Airlines in 1985, she wasn’t entering the corporate ranks—she was working the cabin aisle. In her early 20s, Tottori began as a flight attendant and spent decades rising through the airline, later serving in leadership roles including as a senior cabin attendants director in 2015. Nearly 40 years after first putting on the uniform, she was named CEO in 2024.
“I don’t think of myself as the first woman or the first former flight attendant. I want to act as an individual,” she told the BBC in 2024.
For Bela Bajaria, the road to Hollywood power started at a car wash. As a teenager, Bajaria helped her immigrant family’s business, washing cars before winning a string of beauty pageants, including Miss India Worldwide in 1991. After graduating from California State University, Long Beach, she landed an assistant role at CBS in movies and miniseries. By 2002, she was running the division. She joined Netflix in 2016 to oversee global TV and eventually became chief content officer—one of the most influential positions in entertainment.
After graduating from Duke University in 1994, Amy Hood launched her career in investment banking at Goldman Sachs. But after nearly a decade, she realized corporate finance wasn’t how she wanted to spend the rest of her career. She quit without a clear next step, briefly considering a third degree before pursuing what felt like a reset: an internship with the National Park Service. It was short-lived—she quit after her first day at Alcatraz Island. Back on the job market, Hood accepted a role at Microsoft in 2002 without knowing the salary. She climbed steadily through the ranks and has served as CFO since 2013, now making consequential decisions about Microsoft’s AI spending that impact the global economy.
President and CEO of Ulta Beauty Kecia Steelman grew up “poor, hungry and determined” in Mediapolis, Iowa, she told Fortune last year. Her first job was working at Target in the 1990s, making $8 an hour as a floor associate. She slowly worked her way up to district manager in 2001. After leadership stints at the Home Depot and Family Dollar, she joined Ulta Beauty in 2014 and became CEO in 2025.
Explore the full 2026 Most Powerful Women list here.
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