It’s easy to look at powerhouse women such as Sheryl Sandberg and Marissa Mayer and assume they have it made, but they didn’t reach their top dog professional stances without starting from the bottom. Mayer bagged groceries in high school, Sandberg taught aerobics as a teenager, and 3.1 Phillip Lim co-founder Wen Zhou served cheeseburgers and fries at McDonald’s before turning 16. Lots of top businesswomen today had small beginnings, so here are a couple of successful ladies in the industry who worked the same kind of job as you had in high school.

We always hear about how wealthy and awesome Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg is, but it begs the question: why can’t there be more females in her situation, especially given the company’s mass popularity?

Xerox CEO Ursula Burns echoed this sentiment during a Tuesday appearance on CNBC, where she discussed the social networking site’s IPO and employees. When asked whether Facebook should bring a female onto the board, Burns said, “No question about it.”

Leave it to Ursula Burns, chairman and CEO of Xerox and the first black female CEO of a Fortune 500 company and the first female CEO to succeed a female CEO at a Fortune 500 company, to tell us a little about female trailblazing. “This is a different time. We got here by doing great work while not backing off the things that are important,” she said.

Not enough women serve on corporate boards! So you’ve heard. But did you know how many Fortune 500 board chairs are chicks?

The “Most Powerful Moms of 2011″ list has arrived, courtesy of (who else?) Working Mother magazine. And (hooray!) it’s not all actresses. In fact, most of the 10 honorees are powerful ladies in business.