Maria das Graças Foster

Maria das Graças Silva Foster was born in 1953 in Ipanema-adjacent poverty that had nothing to do with the beach of the same name: her early childhood was spent in Gramacho, a favela built on and around a landfill outside Rio de Janeiro, without running water. Her mother took the children to São Paulo state seeking better prospects, and Foster later said she decided at a young age, after seeing a magazine photograph of an oil refinery, that she wanted to become an engineer.

She studied chemical engineering, one of very few women in her cohort, and joined the state oil company Petrobras in 1981 as a trainee, working her way up through refining and gas operations over three decades. In 2012 she was appointed chief executive, the first woman to lead Petrobras and, at the time, one of relatively few women running a company of comparable size anywhere in the world, overseeing vast pre-salt deepwater oil projects off the Brazilian coast.

Her tenure ended in 2015 when she resigned along with much of the board amid the Lava Jato corruption scandal, a sprawling bribery scheme involving Petrobras contracts; investigations found the corruption predated her appointment and she was not personally implicated, but she took responsibility for the company's governance failures and stepped down.

She later served as an independent director and adviser to energy companies, and has spoken about being one of the few working-class, Black Brazilian women to reach the top of a major global corporation, a path she attributes to education rather than connections.