General Motors' Mary Barra part of new breed of woman tech executives

Mary Barra, who has been named the new CEO of General Motors, is the latest of a new breed of woman executives to reach the top corporate ranks with a background in science, technology, engineering or maths.

Trained as an engineer, Barra, 51, joins about 20 women, a third with science backgrounds, who now run US companies in the Standard & Poor's 500 Index. Among these women are Ursula Burns at Xerox, Virginia Rometty at IBM and Indra Nooyi at PepsiCo.

A decade ago, women of all backgrounds were CEOs of only nine companies in the index.

"It's not too late to buy your daughter a truck for the holidays," said Rosabeth Moss Kanter, a Harvard Business School professor who has studied chief executive officers. "It's going to inspire and motivate women and girls. Many of them have been steered away from engineering and science."

Such woman have an advantage at a time when technology is driving so many companies, says Xerox CEO Burns, who studied mechanical engineering as an undergraduate.

"Problem solving, discipline, turning complexity into simplicity, managing by fact, valuing contributions from others - all these are attributes of successful engineers and, I believe, successful leaders," Burns says.