African-American woman gets top job at Xerox

Ursula Burns will become the first African American woman to lead a top US company when she becomes CEO of Xerox on 1 July. She is a native New Yorker who grew up in poverty on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

In many ways, her story is typically modern American. Burns's mother had three children by two different fathers who played no part in the family's life. But Olga Burns took in ironing and ran a day-care center so she could send her children to Catholic schools. Her daughter, Ursula, turned out to be a mathematics wizard and got a master's degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University in 1981.

In a 2003 interview with The New York Times, Ursula Burns said she grew up poor with "lots of Jewish immigrants, Hispanics and African-Americans, but the common denominator was poverty." She began to climb the corporate ladder at Xerox from the moment she was a summer intern in 1980. Burns rose to president in 2002 and since then has helped build Xerox into the world's largest maker of high-speed colour printers. This is also the first time that the top job at such a large US company has passed from one woman to another, as Ursula Burns replaces Anne Mulcahy as CEO.