The news that 51-year-old Mary Barra has been appointed as the first woman in the world to head a car company (General Motors in her case) is a surprise, not so much that it has happened because a woman at the helm of what is still amale-dominated industry has been brewing for a few years now, but that Ford didn't get there first.
Ford is known for promoting women. Indeed, almost 30 years ago they were the first car company to appoint a woman specifically to oversee the wants and needs of women customers in the showroom and had roving executives visiting outlets around the world including New Zealand to train sales men (and they are still invariably men) in the delicate art of persuading women to make the final purchase decision. And yet General Motors, known as a kind of lumbering giant where its own decisions can take aeons because of an all-pervading and archaic bureaucratic approach, has up and gazumpt its longtime Detroit rival. Who would have thought?
Ms Barra certainly has the creds. Her father was a die-maker with Pontiac for nearly 40
years. She studied electrical engineering at the General Motors Institute (now known as
Kettering University) to obtain a Bachelor of Science degree before receiving a GM
fellowship at Stanford Graduate School of Business in 1988 and a Masters degree in Business Administration in 1990. In that she represented the emerging academic trend of women studying both science and/ or engineering while adding business for good measure. So she knows how a car works and understands the industry.
In February 2011 she was appointed
Executive Vice President of Global Product
Development with responsibilities for design
and the global purchasing and design chain
and less than a year later Forbes magazine
listed her as the 41st most powerful woman
in the world. This new appointment, which
starts in January, will no doubt see her
move up that particular pecking order.
She can be found on the company's test
track putting cars through their paces and
she will need to be up to speed to improve
profits which see GM lagging behind Ford
and Toyota and she will need to literally
drive improvements in the company's
product lineup. In fact just hours after her
appointment was announced, GM pulled
the plug on manufacturing in Australia.
Ms Barra would certainly have played an
insider role in that decision.
