Mary Barra, the first female CEO of General Motors - one of the world's biggest car manufacturers - was interviewed on The Today Show (NBC's breakfast show in America) and it was a total embarrassment, centred around show anchor Matt Lauer seemingly not being able to grasp that she is a WOMAN and a CEO. It blew his mind. He couldn't deal with it. Pretty much all his questions centred around the fact that she's both female, and a boss, and how could she balance her workload, y'know?
They involved things like 'Were you hired for being a woman?', 'Do your kids prevent you from doing your job?' and 'How do you commute to work if you have a vagina?"'(that last one is an exaggeration).
The most irritating thing about it all, is the fact that Mary probably needed to answer some more pressing questions - for example, the fact that General Motors waited a decade to recall a load of faulty cars linked to the death of 13 people - but Lauer ignored that in favour of a chat about, yawn, the double standards of women in the boardroom. And, in only asking her questions about this, sort of made everything worse.
One of the questions involved asking Mary whether she was hired as a woman to be a softer face for the company, to which she replied: 'It's absolutely not true. I believe I was selected for this job based on my qualification.' Then he asked her if she could both be a mother, and a CEO. Because, as we all know, nobody can do both and considering the renowned terrible salary for being the head of huge corporations, she probably can't afford a nanny or anything.
The backlash against the interview was, thankfully, quite aggressive - with Lauer defending his line of questioning as of interest to parents, not just mothers. That doesn't, however, explain why he kept asking her about being a woman. But sure.
Picture: Getty images
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.