Yesterday, carmaker General Motors announced that they have appointed Mary Barra as their CEO.
A woman running a car company. All I can say is Wow. To me, this is almost as big as hearing we landed a man on the moon, ended apartheid, or solved world peace.
A woman running a car company. All I can say is Wow. To me, this is almost as big as hearing we landed a man on the moon, ended apartheid, or solved world peace.
Okay, I am joking just a bit. But this is huge. My personal dream of gender parity in upper management may be coming true.
Think about it. Cars have been a boy’s domain, largely. They spend all their time as children playing with them. Then when they are old enough to drive and get one, hopefully they wrench on them, or at least they used to when you could still get to the engine and all its amazing parts. They soup them up, polish them, worship them, and sometimes are buried in them.
I bought a high performance car about a year ago – a Porsche 911. I LOVE that car. I was considering myself what it would be like to being buried in it as I was zipping down to Santa Barbara last weekend in it. It fits like a glove, performs like the well-oiled machine that it is. Though I know enough to respect the 365 horsepower that is under the rear hood, it does what every car on the road should do: it gets up and goes when I need it to, and purrs in between.
Still, when I am driving it around, I feel a certain amount of embarrassment at being a woman and owning it. I wonder what other drivers must think. Can I really appreciate it? And because I do, does that make me weird, like Bernadette or Amy on Big Bang Theory? By the way, I think that show has done wonders in improving the image of cerebrally-endowed women.
So now we have a woman heading up an entire car company. A company that has been the domain of men for more than 100 years as they design, build and sell their buddies the next dream machine all shiny and smelling of fine Corinthian leather, or the SUV or truck that will safely carry their family around, but provide enough chrome and rumble to impress their buddies when they pull into the parking lot at work or the gas station.
GM is a car company that has suffered massively and just yesterday also was in the news as costing the American taxpayers more than $10 billion in bailouts. Yes, GM was saved, but Detroit was not. These boys in charge ran their company into the ground, and the US government threw them a few life lines to keep that part of the American dream alive and well.
Along with failing Yahoo, GM has decided hiring a woman to lead the charge is a good thing. I hope for Mary Barra’s sake she has true power to lead GM to greater success. Women do like their cars too. Even performance cars, some of us. Maybe Mary Barra will find a way to build GM so that they can do the right thing and pay back that $10 billion and build stylish and affordable eco-efficient cars. Now that would be miracle leadership.