Mary Barra

By Tom Kirvan

The first female CEO of a “Big Three” automaker, Mary Barra rose to the top of General Motors (GM) the hard way, beginning her corporate journey in 1980 as a co-op student, checking fender panels and inspecting hoods as GM cars rolled off the assembly line.

Born on December 24, 1961 in Royal Oak, Mich. to parents of Finnish descent, Barra graduated from the General Motors Institute (now Kettering University) in 1985, obtaining an electrical engineering degree. She quickly moved up the ranks at GM holding a variety of engineering and administrative jobs, including managing the Detroit/Hamtramck Assembly Plant. In 2008, she became vice president of Global Manufacturing Engineering, later heading Global Human Resources and then Global Purchasing and Supply Chain.

In January 2014, Barra began her tenure as CEO of GM in a milestone moment that would have been a point of pride for her father, a die maker for 39 years who instilled in his daughter a love for cars, including the Chevy Chevette, the first car that she owned.

Mary Barra*

Barra, who earned an MBA from Stanford University in 1990, and her husband Tony Barra, whom she met while in college, have two adult children. Inducted into the Automotive Hall of Fame in 2023, Barra was named the most powerful woman in business by Fortune magazine in 2024, proclaiming, “If you do every job like you’re going to do it for the rest of your life, that’s when you get noticed.”

Other notable quotes from Barra:

“I never want to get a job because I’m female. I want to get it because I earned it, and I deserve it . . . people should be judged on how well they do the job and deliver results.”
“My parents were both born and raised in the Depression. They instilled values about integrity and the importance of hard work, and I’ve taken that with me to every job.”
“A car is 30,000 parts that you’re putting together.”
“My senior leadership team is half people who have been at GM for a long period of time like me, and others who have joined the company within the last five years from different industries, experiences, and countries. . . The diversity of thought is where you can make better business decisions.”

*Uploaded by Benjamin Applebaum, 29 October 2022, retrieved from https://www.dhs.gov/medialibrary-assets/assets-temp/mary_barra.jpg