The Auto Industry Finally Appoints a Woman as CEO
Nice job, GM. What’s taking the rest of you slow-pokes so long?
Mary Barra put a Chevrolet-sized crack in the glass ceiling today when General Motors announced she’ll be the company’s new CEO, marking the first time a woman will be in charge of a major automaker.
Barra, 51, joins the ranks of a rare class of women who are CEOs of large U.S. corporations. Less than 5 percent of Fortune 500 companies have women who are top bosses —that’s at just 23 companies total.
GM was ranked No. 7 in Fortune’s most recent revenue-based tally of America’s largest corporations. By selecting Barra, the car manufacturer becomes the largest Fortune 500 company to have a woman CEO.
Only two other Fortune 500 companies in the top 25 have female CEOs: No. 15 Hewlett-Packard (Meg Whitman) and No. 20 IBM (Ginni Rometty). The rest of the top 25 companies in this year’s Fortune 500 have male chief executives. Those corporations include:
No. 1 Wal-Mart
No. 2 Exxon Mobil
No. 3 Chevron
No. 4 Phillips 66
No. 5 Berkshire Hathaway
No. 6 Apple
No. 8 General Electric
No. 9 Valero Energy
No. 10 Ford Motor
No. 11 AT&T
No. 12 Fannie Mae
No. 13 CVS Caremark
No. 14 McKesson
No. 16 Verizon Communications
No. 17 UnitedHealth Group
No. 18 J.P. Morgan Chase & Co.
No. 19 Cardinal Health
No. 21 Bank of America
No. 22 Costco
No. 23 Kroger
No. 24 Express Scripts Holding
No. 25 Wells Fargo
And here are the 23 companies in the Fortune 500 that now have women at the helm, according to Fortune: (This list only includes companies with women who are now serving as chief executive.)
No. 7 General Motors (as of January 2014)
No. 15 Hewlett-Packard
No. 20 IBM
No. 27 agribusiness corporation ADM
No. 43 Pepsi
No. 59 defense contractor Lockheed Martin
No. 72 chemical company DuPont
No. 88 global snacking firm Mondelez International
No. 98 defense contractor General Dynamics
No. 115 apparel and home goods company TJX
No. 131 Xerox
No. 145 Duke Energy
No. 238 Guardian Life Insurance of America
No. 252 beauty manufacturer Avon
No. 281 Sempra Energy
No. 338 Campbell Soup
No. 374 pharmaceutical maker Mylan
No. 386 food processor Ingredion
No. 415 construction company CH2M Hill
No. 465 Graybar Electric
No. 467 newspaper publisher Gannett
No. 492 Frontier Communications
No. 494 Yahoo
So Barra’s promotion is significant.
But it also underscores the slug-like pace of progress among boards appointing female CEOs in corporate America. (Women hold around 16 percent of Fortune 500 board seats, according to this 2012 Harvard Law School blog post.)
It’s been 124 years since the first female CEO in the United States got her job in 1889; Anna Bissell became president of the vacuum cleaner company she and her husband founded when he died.
Unlike her headline-dominating contemporary counterparts, Bissell’s business record was muted in an era unaccustomed to women as leaders. Her 1934 obituary in The New York Times was five sentences long and never mentioned her first name.
Back then, the expectation was that men ran businesses. Women were barely accepted in the corporate workforce at all, let alone at the top. More than a century later, that assumption remains dominant — despite the many studies that indicate more representative companies perform better.
Incidentally, women have a long history with General Motors. They owned nearly a quarter of GM stock in 1921, according to a New York Times article that year. Yet people in those days still questioned whether women could adequately drive cars — let alone run auto companies. (Women in Saudi Arabia are still fighting for the right to drive cars.)
One early auto racer told the Times in 1907 that women were “as a rule exceptionally capable” drivers. The reporter of the story appeared to agree: “Why should not woman drive a fairly high powered automobile? Provided she has confidence in herself, there is nothing about the present day car too arduous for her to operate or understand.”
These days, the same could be said of qualified women as CEOs. Why shouldn’t a woman run a high powered corporation?
