GM CEO Mary Barra has another milestone to add to her already rich career: She has been ranked at the top of Fortune magazine’s list of 50 Most Powerful Women in Business.
Barra, who took over from Dan Akerson as chief executive of General Motors on January 15, is the first female CEO in the global automotive industry. The 52-year-old has spent her entire 30-year career at the American automaker, working her way up from factory floor intern to CEO.
“Barra oversees more than 212,000 employees in 396 GM facilities on six continents. An electrical engineer who has spent her entire career at GM, the new CEO faces big challenges in the U.S., where market share is at a historical low and profit margins are below Ford’s, and Europe, where GM’s Opel brand has lost billions,” Fortune wrote. “But company-wide, profits are back, and Barra has the board’s approval to invest to make GM prosper again.”
Barra beat out other women for the top spot including Ginni Rometty of IBM, Indra Nooyi of PepsiCo and Maria de Gracas Silva Foster of Petrobas, which round out the top four.
