About six feet tall, she does things best described by superlatives.
Barbara is the first civilian woman to land an F/A Hornet on an aircraft carrier (the Nimitz).
A lawyer, she served as president and CEO of the American Management Association, a worldwide, $300-million management training and publishing organization. She was an executive and officer of two diversified Fortune 500 companies before she was 30. At present, she is chairman of the board of the Valley Bank of Arizona and president and CEO of a Montana luxury resort rated as one of the world’s best.
During her stint as vice chairman of the US Civil Aeronautics Board, Barbara negotiated aviation agreements with the Philippines, Great Britain, China, Poland and Peru. Later, as the first woman deputy administrator of the Federal Aviation Administration, she managed 47,000 employees worldwide with a $6 billion annual budget.
When she was adviser to then Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin Powell during the Gulf War, Barbara constantly championed the cause of women in the military.
But this super woman is, above all this, a devoted wife and mother. Her stilettos have somehow negotiated the tightrope of marriage and career, notwithstanding the added pressure of being wife to one of the world’s top CEOs.
Married to Intel president and CEO Craig Barrett, Barbara is a mother of two and a grandmother of four. She will talk as enthusiastically about a micro-lending program as she will about a safari she took with her grandchildren to Africa last summer.
So who said that the hand that rocks the cradle can’t work the controls of an F/A Hornet?
To an onlooker, it was a whirlwind of a trip for the Barretts, who were whisked from one appointment to the other via helicopter. But to Barbara Barrett, it was just another day.
"I need six times as many hours as there are in a day," she tells us when we caught up with her in her suite at the Peninsula Manila. She had barely an hour before her flight, via private jet, to Kuala Lumpur. "Next time we’re here, I want to be able to go beyond the city."
Although she wears many hats, Barbara says she cannot draw the line between her role as the wife of the Intel CEO and her own private self.
When she accompanies Craig, whom she met on top of a mountain during a hike, to ceremonies dedicating computers for public school children, Barbara relives a childhood wherein she had to struggle for an education.
She was orphaned of her father, a coal miner and a steel plant worker, when she was 13, and she worked hard to put herself and her siblings through school.
"When my father died, my mother fell apart," she recalls. " I had to earn a living. We lived on a farm and we had several horses so I took people horseback riding. That’s how I earned income for six kids and my mother. I charged a dollar and a half per person, and there were times when I took as many as six people riding!
"It took a while to earn much, but it helped. When he was alive, my father made it very clear that we should all go to college. That was something so ingrained in us."
Barbara refused to let her beloved father’s death paralyze her. She applied for and won several scholarships and took as many as five jobs at a time to see her and her siblings through.
"I would take all my classes early in the morning, work in campus in the early afternoon. Then I would go for another job at the State Capitol. From there, I would proceed to a bookstore. Before going home, I would baby sit, and then help out with the professors," says Barbara, looking chic in her Escada navy blue suit.
Of course, she hastens to add, she did not always have to juggle five jobs at a time. But she held on to the bookstore job for as long as she could, even through law school, because she found out it gave her access to law books at special prices.
All this time, she also strove to be both "mother and father" to her brothers and sisters. "Since I was tall for my age, people I thought my younger sisters were my daughters!"
"I’ve been driving since I was 12, so when the time came, flying airplanes seemed really easy. Part of the territory," she quips. One day, she found herself in the inner circle of the powers-that-be, and she took the opportunity to champion the rights of female pilots–especially those who wanted to sign up for combat missions.
"In the early ‘90s, women were not permitted to fly planes. But I firmly believed that women who do sign up to risk their lives for freedom are those who make history. It would be beneficial for them to have a role in the military. All of us are better off when we have the best pilots in the cockpit, with quality as the determining factor–not gender."
"Some people," she protests, "think women cannot fight. So I asked them, ‘Have you ever seen a mother defend her child?’ A woman who believes in her cause is a dedicated fighter."
Biology, she stresses, is no reason to exclude women from activities normally reserved for men.
"There was once a woman who could fly the U-2 bomber, but she was not permitted to fly it because of biological reasons. Then they figured out that all they had to do was be more imaginative. There are a lot of artificial barriers women face, some of them silly. The motivation should really be will and merit," she adds.
More time–with her husband, with her causes–is what she wishes for now.
"I wish I had more time to help other people," says Barbara, who is particularly committed to supporting micro-lending opportunities for women in Third World countries.
She bids us goodbye, and rushes to the elevator. She has not had time to see the beaches of the Philippines, but inaugurating computer clubhouses for children who cannot afford computers gives her a high.
She says a woman is successful when she "spends time doing things she enjoys without giving up a fulfilling family relationship."
Barbara Barrett may well be describing herself. As I watched her helicopter take off, I wondered if this remarkable woman would take over the controls of the private plane that would take her to KL.