GM CEO Mary Barra and IBM CEO Ginni Rometty on how to be female leaders

General Motors CEO Mary Barra and former IBM CEO Ginni Rometty have a lot in common, from overcoming early childhood obstacles to rising through the corporate ladder to become CEOs of century-old blue-chip companies. They are professional peers and friends, and at Barra’s recommendation, they came together for the inaugural CNBC CEO Council: Leadership Library Rometty’s book The Power of Good.

In a wide-ranging conversation with CNBC’s Leslie Picker on Monday in New York, Barra and Rometty talked about how power manifests in the workplace. Leading enterprise transformationand Bridging the economic and social divide Additionally, these business moguls discuss how their perspectives on being a “female” leader have shifted over the course of their careers.

In manufacturing and technical engineering roles at large companies, they were often the only women in the room, causing them to sidestep gender issues when it came to promotions. But now, as top women in their respective fields, Barra and Rometty’s thinking about female leadership has changed.

Here are some highlights from the conversation.

Overcoming the hesitation of being a “woman”

Given that so few women hold high-profile CEO positions (even today, only 10% of the Fortune 500 and S&P 500 are women), it seems logical that female CEOs might be inclined to emphasize gender as part of their success, but both Barra and Rometty say they avoided leading with gender early in their careers or even mentioned it. Now they say that was a mistake. They believe leading with “women” is critical to charting the way forward for the next generation of leaders in a world where the gender gap in the C-suite remains wide.

Rometty said she began to accept herself as a working woman and mother when people began to see her as a role model. “People can’t be what they don’t see. I finally realized that it was selfish of me to say, ‘No, no, don’t look at me because I’m a woman, never look at me because of this.’ And then I finally started to accept it. … I talk about our differences, and the memories and the marks we can leave,” Rometty said. “It’s remarkable that you don’t notice them as much.”

Barra eventually had a similar awakening. She started at the bottom of the manufacturing industry, and in her early roles, she says, it was easy to ignore that she was the only woman. But as she moved up the executive ranks, comments about her identity increased, and she became uncomfortable with the situation. Barra recalls asking people, “Can we talk about something else, because I’m like, I’m here because of my skills, my abilities, my contributions, not just because I’m a woman.”

Barra changed her perspective when she saw the impact her identity had on other women in the workplace. “When I got the CEO job, people would come up to me and they’d say, ‘So you’re the first female CEO of an auto company?’ … But then I was in the same situation[as Rometty]where someone came up to me after a meeting and said, ‘You know, my daughter is working hard on math and science in middle school right now because she wants to be like you.’ And I was like, OK, I get it. I get it.”

Embrace your upbringing and motherhood

Barra and Rometty both fought “Mother Punishment” In the workplace. Motherhood can hinder perceptions of competence, leading to lower wages, fewer opportunities for advancement, and less respect in the workplace.

Bara, who now has two grown children, said that when she announced she was having a baby, many people thought she would stop working. That expectation made her realize the importance of being a role model and mentor.

“I’m a mom, I have two kids, I have to juggle both. But I often see women say, ‘I want kids one day, so I can’t do this.’ I’m like, wait a minute, you know, you’re 23. And you’re already saying no? You have to do this, you can do both. … I had such an amazing mother who encouraged me. I didn’t have to deal with ‘I can’t, I can’t do that because I don’t see anyone like me’ … I had an extraordinary mother who made me believe that I could do anything and be anything very early on if I worked hard enough.”

Romandy was raised by three generations of women who had endured great hardships, including a single mom — her father left the family when she was very young — who were all role models for overcoming adversity. “It does give you the courage to endure hardship,” she said.

Especially Luo Ruilan’s mother, Having helped her family escape poverty, Rometty said she had “power even when she had nothing.”

Rometty believes that workforce culture must change to produce more confident, up-and-coming female executives. “I think a lot of the reason there aren’t as many women (in executive positions) has to do with not being able to keep them,” Rometty said. “They reach a certain point, whether it’s kids, family or whatever.”

She added that in addition to the formal programs she’s involved in to encourage more female leaders, she believes an important way for women to enter the workforce if they’ve already left is for them to see “women who are in the same position as us.”

Be confident in your qualifications for the job

When Rometty was offered a better job early in her career, her first reaction was to turn it down “because I was afraid I couldn’t do it.”

She recalled one time she was offered a job, “and I said, ‘Let me go home and ask my husband.’ The man looked at me like, well, that’s a little weird. I went home and my husband said, ‘Do you think a man would answer like that? I’ve seen it over and over again, and every time you take a new job you talk about everything you can’t do… and then six months later, you’re tired of it.’”

“Growth and comfort never go together,” Rometty said, adding that the core idea of ​​her book is to reframe risk as a learning tool. “Every time I feel dangerous and nervous, I’m learning. So that’s good. It’s going to make me take on more and more dangerous things… It’s not a bad ending. I’m going to learn something… It resonated with everyone, but I heard it resonated with a lot of women.”

This pervasive fear of rejection and risk also manifests itself in the hiring process for women. “If a job has 10 requirements, women will look at it and say, ‘Oh, I only meet nine. I can’t even apply for this position,’ whereas a man has five or six and can apply for this position,” Barra said.

In the workplace, Barra said, women “don’t raise their hands because they’re a little unsure. And then someone finally says what they think. And then no one knows.”

Barra advises young women in the workplace to “have your own opinion. Even if it’s not collectively decided, that’s OK. You need to be heard, you need to have your voice heard… I think one of the most important things I encourage women to do is to go for it.”