It's time for high fives and reflection among women with careers, who see Mary Barra's ascent to GM's executive peak as a collective gain.
"When I came into the company, the industry, it was male-dominated for sure and all I saw was male leadership" nearly 30 years ago, Sheena Bailey tells columnist Rochelle Riley of the Free Press. Bailey, administrator of corporate governance, heads a 1,400-member GM Women group. "I'm proud of GM," she adds.
Mary Barra "and women of our generation are blessed for . . . battles women fought before us," says Carol Cain of the Free Press, citing her mother. (GM photo/John F. Martin)
The sense of "about time" extends beyond GM and its industry, as Detroit columnists Carol Cain and Laura Berman show with personal context.
On the Free Press business page, Carol Cain writes:
My grandmother — a married woman with three children — wanted to work as a teacher but didn’t, because women with families didn’t.
Or my mother, with seven children, who told a white lie when asked while interviewing for a job at a major corporation if she had children at home in diapers. (They found out later she did, but were happy with her performance as she proved it didn’t matter).
Barra and women of our generation are blessed for those sorts of battles women fought before us.
Detroit News writer Laura Berman shares a "Mad Men"-like anecdote:
At a media Christmas party one year, a GM vice-president threw his arm around my shoulders. It was the early 80s, when women were struggling to be taken professionally, wearing bow-ties and shoulder pads to assert seriousness. “What do you write about?” he asked. “Knitting and sewing?”
As Berman sees it, Barra's success "provides a psychic lift to women that’s comparable to Barack Obama’s election for African Americans.
“This is cracking the steel ceiling for the many, many Mary Barras who are out there,” said Anne Doyle, a former Ford director of communications and expert on corporate treatment of women.
“This is really an example of women bursting out of the pipeline,” she says. GM’s announcement “tells women they are valued and they have a shot.”
A Freep editorial celebrates a promotion it calls "darned remarkable."
There is something especially notable, and pleasantly jarring, about a woman ascending to the top job at a company that has been so consumed with male ego and bravado. . . .
it’s also darned remarkable. The Detroit Three have long been male-dominated institutions, with their executive ranks nearly defining the smoky old boys’ club stereotype through much of the middle of the last century.
Back at GM, here's how Jocelyn K. Allen, a regional communications director, describes her emotions Tuesday to Riley of the Freep:
"Sitting with my team, and you look at them in their 20s and early 30s . . . and then you look at women who have been in the company for 20, 30 years. It’s just such a moment of pride.”
