General Motors Chair and CEO Mary Barra is back on top of Fortune magazine’s 100 Most Powerful Women (MPW) list for 2024. Now in its 27th year, this annual list ranks the 100 most powerful women in the business world “reflecting corporations’ global scope and the nature of executives’ work, which spans the planet.”
The methodology for the Fortune MPW list is based on five criteria: the size and health of an executive’s business, her career trajectory, her influence outside her organization, and how she wields her power. This is the third time Barra is number one on this list, also getting the top spot in 2021 and 2017.
Mary Barra’s return to the top of the MPW list largely has to do with the financial health of GM, a continued transition to EVs (albeit slower than expected), and a successful negotiation with the UAW. “The CEO of General Motors has led the company to its strongest financial position in decades, reforming its culture and reorganizing its product lines to prepare for an electric-vehicle revolution,” Fortune said. “Barra also navigated GM through contentious negotiations with the United Auto Workers, reaching an agreement and ending a costly strike.”
Although Fortune praises Marry Barra for her role in the ongoing process of making electric vehicles mainstream, this mission has hit some bumps in the road in 2024, which Barra called a “year of execution.” As we reported in April, Barra got a 3.9 percent pay cut due to GM missing several electric vehicle and autonomous vehicle goals. In June, she said in an interview that the EV transition is “going to happen over decades,” making it unclear when GM will hit its lofty goal of exclusively offering electric vehicles.
Fortune also praises Mary Barra for her relatively long tenure as CEO of GM. She hit her 10-year mark in the top job this year, while the average tenure for a Fortune 500 CEO is 7.2 years for men and 4.5 years for women. The last GM chief executive to last this long was Roger B. Smith, Chairman and CEO of GM from 1981 to 1990. He was CEO for nine years and Chairman for 10.
Other women toward the top of Fortune’s MPW list for 2024 include CVS Health CEO Karen Lynch, Citigroup CEO Jane Fraser, and Google President/Chief Investment Officer Ruth Porat.
Comments
I know she is tickled to see the longshoreman strike. She is going to have an excuse for fourth quarter results.
Too bad for her, it’s over for now.
ugh. Just what she doesn’t need are more accolades.
WHY there must be someone in the cookie jar that has accomplished more..
She has way over extended her stay. Both her and Reuss need to go. Drain the GM swamp. Bring in the younger blood who have a clue. GM’s market share just continues to fall.
For being GMs most powerful woman exec, she made some bad decisions concerning GM product mix and its future.
Reminds me of long ago days when GM hired anyone with piece of paper showing college graduation, placing them in supervisor positions managing older employees who had 20+ years on shop floor. Eventually upper management realized those grads had no common sense, but by then, it was too late. Feel same about Mary Bara, showing little common sense in keeping GM a profitable enterprise.
A woman empress who single handedly takes down her own empire can also be considered a very powerful woman. She’s powerful for all the wrong reasons but powerful regardless to make the list.
The Kathleen Kennedy of the auto industry.
To be fair, she was the producer for some classics like ET and Jurassic Park.
She rode the coat tails of cinematic and TV geniuses. She took the biggest IP movie franchise in history and turned it into CW Network level streaming shows. The last streaming series cost $300 million and almost nobody watched. The franchise is dead.
She is totally powerful for the wrong reason. She has her head so far up Biden & the LEFTS A – – !
Incompetence and failure are rewarded in today’s America. Look at Kamala Harris.
Affirmative Action at work.
Exactly! She will keep her job as the company goes down the toilet.
She has total control of the Company. Nobody questions her authority and she is the decision maker. This will all pan out when she leaves and the investment in EV’s is so over the top and hurting the bottom line. She may be powerful, but she has not set up the Company for a long future run here in the USA. It is probably time for her to move on and bring some new thinking to the General Motors Company
I thought she was the 2023 and 2024 winner of the Dumbest CEO in America !
AGREE !
and 2022, 2021, 2020……
What was market share & stock price when she took over vs. today?
What’s tough is that I’m not sure stock price means much anymore as a performance benchmark. It’s just the WEF hedge funds moving Boomer retirement money around between every company in the world that they are the largest shareholders of. And it’s all over-inflated thanks to us printing $1 Trillion every 100 days anyway.
I was curious and looked it up anyway. It looks like she took over in Jan 2014, stock price was ~$40.68. Today it’s ~$44.76.
BLS CPI inflation would put $40.68 at $54.75 today. Even though it feels like the price of everything has almost doubled since early 2020.
She needs to be fired from China motors!
For all the hate Mary gets, in my opinion she had been a mixed bag.
People forget how GM was during the financial crisis. The company literally made nothing competitive back then. Nothing was fuel efficient, nothing was reliable (except for a few V8 vehicles), nothing had a nice quality interior. And this was 20 years after the Japanese came into the market. Yet they learned nothing from it. Rick Wagoner was a garbage CEO that did nothing but hold people like Bob Lutz, truly passionate automotive engineers back. The company was undeserving of a bailout but it received a second chance next to Chryslers 3rd chance.
Fast forward to now under Mary, their cars are plenty competitive. I get better gas mileage on my XT5 turbo compared to my Rav4 and its a larger and more powerful vehicle. The newer GM products have nicer interiors, better styling, more refined and smoother powertrains (my Rav4 is raspy sounding and unrefined next to the Malibu I drove) and more comfortable for longer trips. Hard touch plastics? Big deal. My Rav4 is like a Fisher Price toy car in the inside. They all have hard touch plastics now. The problem GM has is once a bad perception is given, it takes years to turn it around. People haven’t moved past the “Buick is a grandpa car” perception while their own grandparents are driving Corollas and Camrys.
On the other hand though, Mary has made many decisions that left me scratching my head. From not selling the 2nd gen XT5 here in favor of slow selling EVs to pulling all of GMs eggs out of the other baskets (markets) and into Chinas basket. But these confusing and lack of common sense decisions is nothing new with GM. Its not a Mary issue. Its become a signature feature of the brand at this point.
She’s a lizard
Powerful doesn’t mean smart
strike just got cancelled. there goes that excuse
tbh she is doing better than dodge and ford
All you complainers still buying GM? Walk the talk !
We buy American 🇺🇸 And sad the Ford family is embedded also with the Left.
I think most of the comments here are Toyota advertising department and Oil Companies. People who are Negative are cowards and not successful people. Marry has lead GM from a very rough time when she took over to the largest American company in terms of selling the most Vehicles in the USA over any car company not a easy job. Complainers and being negative is easy. As a person in power people love to make fun of you but put your self their shoes and you shy away and become a coward.
Especially if that powerful person is a woman or a minority. Double jeopardy if both. I am tired of seeing folks badmouth others while holding outmoded double standards.