Road to Power

Preface

Just don't go there.”

That was Mary Barra's advice when, in March 2012, she was asked at a meeting of Michigan's women in business organization, Inforum,¹ about whether she had experienced discrimination as a female manager during her career. Hard as that is to believe—coming from a rare woman engineer, who started on a factory floor at the age of 18 back in the early 1980s—Barra denied ever being held back by being female. “I never said, ‘that happened to me because I’m a woman.'”

Like many women of her generation, Barra played down gender as her career advanced. And she rose through the ranks of General Motors, a company that caught on early to the idea that women make up not only a large portion of the potential workforce, but also a huge share of potential customers. Encouraging women to become leaders made business sense, executives told me over and over again, because women represent a large proportion of car buyers. GM's moves to include women didn't come in a vacuum, though: They followed a string of U.S. government actions that made the company take notice—including a discrimination lawsuit.

Pushed or not, GM has been more successful than most large companies at cultivating high-ranking women, especially starting with Barra's generation. Though the numbers of women on the board and in management still lag behind men, they are at least twice the average of other large publicly traded companies that make up the Standard & Poor's 500 index. Some 26 percent, or ...