GM is rare in that it can boast of a chief executive officer, chief financial officer, chief human resources officer and the head of global manufacturing all being women, Fortune reports.
Most recently, a woman who once served as a deputy director of intelligence for the Central Intelligence Agency was appointed to GM's board of directors. This means that women now represent half of the 12 member board.
When GM filed for bankruptcy in 2009, it gave its CEO Mary Barra the opening she needed to start transforming the company's culture at the very top in terms of gender equality in the auto industry.
"With GM emerging from bankruptcy, Barra created an egalitarian shift across the company in terms of any employee being able to point out, or admit, problems," says Tom Kolditz, a leadership professor at Rice University. "When employees share an equal responsibility for transparency and quality, a company can improve and do so with a focus on customers."
Equileap, an non-profit focused on advancing gender equality in the workplace, finds that GM "is currently the only company in the largest 20 in the United States" with a woman CEO and an equal number of women and men sitting on the board.
Equileap reviewed more than 3,000 companies globally on factors including leadership, equal compensation and work flexibility, and determined that GM was the best for gender equality.
While GM's size and reputation could influence other corporate giants in and outside its industry to follow its lead, the reality overall is still bleak for women in corporate America.
Women made up about 10% of the highest leadership, which includes CEOs, CFOs and the next three highest paid C-suite roles for U.S. firms in 2016-17, a Pew Research Center analysis of federal securities filings of S&P 1500 companies found. Women make up just 5.1% of chief executives in those firms.
Making matters more disheartening, there aren't many women executives well positioned to advance to the highest leadership positions, says Drew DeSilver, a senior writer at Pew Research Center and an author of the report.
"Only 651 (11.5%) of the nearly 5,700 executives in this category, which includes such positions as chief operating officer (COO) and chief financial officer (CFO), were women," DeSilver writes. "Although this group in general constitutes a significant pool of potential future CEO candidates, the women officers we identified tended to be in positions such as finance or legal that, previous research suggests, are less likely to lead to the CEO's chair than other, more operations-focused roles."
Another recent report, by LeanIn.Org and McKinsey & Company, found that despite all women have done, including fighting for promotions and higher pay, to earning more bachelor's degrees than men for decades, progress is not happening. The report found that only 20% of women hold any C-Suite role and, for women of color, it is 1 in 25.
The report included data from 279 companies with 13 million employees as well as a survey of their human resources practices. More than 64,000 employees were also polled about their workplace experiences.
"Only 38% of companies set targets for gender representation, even though setting goals is the first step toward achieving any business priority," the report found. "Only 12% share a majority of gender diversity metrics with their employees, even though transparency is a helpful way to signal a company's commitment to change. Only 42% hold senior leaders accountable for making progress toward gender parity, and even fewer hold managers and directors accountable."