Do we like them?

Do we like Mary Barra?

Our score: 6 out of 10. Decent record on women and STEM and no harmful words of her own found, but a deadly recall on her watch and a corporate cosy-up with Trump keep it middling.

Barra was named GM chief in December 2013, the first woman to run a major US carmaker, after decades inside the company. She is a company lifer, which is both her pitch and her problem: she rose through the same outfit whose habits she was then asked to clean up.

Her defining test came almost straight away, with the ignition-switch recalls. In 2015 the US Justice Department agreed to defer and eventually drop two criminal charges against GM in return for a $900 million forfeit, three years of cooperation and an independent monitor, and GM admitted it delayed the recall for ten years. Barra fired 15 people deemed most responsible and said “People were hurt and people died in our cars”. She also called the deal “tough”. That is a better response than most bosses manage, but it was GM's failure, and she was in the building for much of it.

On the harm check, nothing turned up from Barra herself: no campaigning against LGBTQ+ or trans people, no dog-whistles about migrants, no climate denial in her own words. The political mark is business, not belief: in December 2024 GM gave $1 million and a fleet of vehicles to Trump's inauguration, and she said the company and Trump were “goal-aligned” on a strong economy and manufacturing. That reads as a CEO managing tariffs rather than a culture warrior, but it is still a cheque to a man plenty of our readers can't stand. We could not verify any reporting on GM's diversity programs being wound back, so we've left that out.

Nothing scandalous lately, just a big business year. GM booked billions in EV-related charges and slowed EV production in a pivot to hybrids and petrol, which will bother anyone who cares about the planet. In January she also criticised Canada's deal to let in Chinese EVs, and filings reported her 2025 pay at around $29.9 million. Whether the EV retreat is cold-eyed realism or a backflip depends on how much weight you give a company's job to cut emissions.

The good stuff is real, if corporate. Under Barra, GM put grants behind girls' coding programs, including a $250,000 grant to Girls Who Code in 2017, and she has talked up her own engineering background to young women. We found little on LGBTQ+ issues in her own words, so that part of the record is thin.

Put together, she is a decent operator who owned a deadly corporate failure and has not slid into grievance politics. The asterisk is the company's closeness to Trump and a retreat on EVs. We would not cross the road to avoid her, but we wouldn't put her on a pedestal either.