When she was named CEO of General Motors in 2014, Mary Barra became the first female CEO of a big American automaker and broke the glass ceiling like no one before her. She started working at GM when she was just 18 and graduated from the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in 1985 with a degree in electrical engineering. In 2021, she was named in Time’s annual list of the 100 most influential people in the world.