Road to Power

Chapter 14 Buick Encore: Finding the Next Mary Barra

When Mary Barra started her career in the early 1980s, women were making inroads in the workplace. A series of laws enshrining civil rights and equal pay had put corporate decision makers on notice that they could no longer ignore women and minorities when it came to hiring and promotions.

Popular culture, starting in the 1970s when Barra was growing up, had made the so-called liberated woman into a new stereotype, repeated in commercials, films, and television shows. “The 1970s were a real tipping point: There were more women in the labor force than out of it, and the birthrate dropped below the replacement rate for the first time,” says Kathleen Gerson, a sociology professor at New York University who studies gender. “There was a mass change of consciousness, and it became increasingly obvious that the doors were starting to open for women.”

Women were still something of a novelty in the workplace. Those who wanted to get ahead aimed to blend in and call as little attention to their gender as possible. They even dressed a bit like men, favoring business suits accessorized with floppy bow ties (for an example, check out Barra's college yearbook photo in the insert).

At about the same time, an important shift took place in the U.S. educational system. Women began to outnumber men when it came to earning college degrees. That change happened starting with women born in 1956¹—five years before Barra. Today, women outnumber ...