For many casual observers, General Motors took an unexpected turn on Tuesday when it announced that Mary Barra will become the company's first female CEO.
Barra, 51, will replace Dan Akerson next month. Akerson, 65, has said that his retirement was hastened by his wife's recent cancer diagnosis. Investors seem to have largely shrugged off the news and on Tuesday afternoon, the company's stock price was flat. Perhaps that's because Barra is a blank slate to many.
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Female CEOs are hardly a rarity these days. In the tech industry, there's Yahoo's Marissa Mayer and IBM's Virginia Rometty and eBay's Meg Whitman and HP's Carly Fiorina before them. In the auto industry, though, Barra is a pioneer in a male-dominated profession. How did she do it? Here are some clues about Barra's personality.
She Has Been at GM Since She Was 19
Barra joined GM in 1980 as a a General Motors Institute (a.k.a. Kettering University) co-op student. Kettering U. was founded in 1919 as an automotive trade school, but has since focused on on science, technology, engineering and math. A co-op program requires applicants to find a GM unit to be their sponsor. For Barra, that was Pontiac.

She Keeps an Albert Einstein Bobblehead on Her Desk
Along with the model cars on her desk, Barra keeps this souvenir. A Bloomberg Businessweek profile revealed that Barra attained the item after winning a war-game competition among execs to determine who could best attack GM.
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She Almost Bought a Chevrolet Camaro, But Decided Against It
A friend told Bloomberg Businessweek that she thought the car would be a dangerous temptation to her teen son.
She Just Joined Twitter in April
Barra has tweeted twice since then. One was a pic of the new Cadillac. The other tweet celebrated a $2.5 million fundraiser by the Karmanos Cancer Center. She had around 1,800 followers at this writing.
She Used to Work in HR
GM's latest CEO spent a year and a half as GM's head of human resources before moving on to be SVP of global product development in 2011.
Her Main Objective: "No More Crappy Cars"
Barra says that's the main directive she gives to engineers and designers at the company. “I think there was sometimes so many boundaries put on them [employees] that we didn’t give them a recipe for success. So now were saying no excuses, if its budget, if its resources, we have to do great cars, trucks and crossovers and it’s our job to enable you to do that,” she said, according to GM Authority. “The simple thing I said was no more crappy cars.”

Her Father Worked at Pontiac
Growing up in the Detroit suburbs, Barra was the son of a 39-year GM man. Her father, Ray Makela, was a die maker at Pontiac.

Her First Car Was a Chevette
That came after Barra impulsively put a deposit on a much racier Firebird, but chickened out of buying it.
Images: Getty/Paul Morigi, Flickr, Trust, Wikimedia Commons, Getty/Junko Kimura