GM’s new CEO Mary Barra
Men don’t understand the world anymore. Scandal! At the helm of General Motors now stands … a woman. Recently, Mary Barra took up her new post as the CEO of GM.
How did it come to this? When our society already begins working in childhood to ensure that just such a thing never comes to pass? After all, boys get the red “Cars” bed sets… “Car girl” Mary Barra was daddy’s little girl, but, in her case, Daddy was an autoworker at GM. Barra cast aside the cultural codes and took the steering wheel. Thus, she has simultaneously broken into two domains where men previously preferred their own company.
Broken barrier number 1: the executive suite. Testosterone long ruled in the corridors of power. Only in 2004 did the estrogen level begin a slow rise in Germany when Karin Dorrepaal became the first woman to break into the executive echelons of a DAX-listed company. In the United States, the brighter sounds of women’s voices began to fill the boardrooms, like those of Meg Whitmann at Hewlett-Packard, Marissa Mayer at Yahoo, and Indra Nooyi at Pepsi.
But now the real catastrophe has arrived: The feminine knows no bounds and has found its way into the driver’s seat.
Broken Barrier Number 2: The automobile. The last, best-guarded bastion of man. A man can always retreat to the car in the garage to escape his wife’s nagging. Who drove the chariots in ancient Rome? Men! Who sits behind the wheel, or on the couch with a beer in hand, during Formula 1 races? Men!
But the writing was on the wall. We have been on this road to ruin for a long time: It was in 1888 in Germany that the first high-heeled shoe broke all the rules by stepping on the gas pedal. That year, Bertha Benz became the first woman to make an inter-city automobile trip, all without a driver’s license or the knowledge of her husband, and in one of the first automobiles ever built!