Nooyi is not a second-generation immigrant making good but a first-generation Indian born and educated here who went abroad.
With Indira Nooyi’s elevation to CEO of Pepsico, she made history of all kinds. Apart from the well-publicised first woman to take on the top job at the food and beverages company, she made it to the membership of another rare group: she is one of only 11 women Fortune 500 CEOs.
Within that group too, she set a record. She is one of two non-white women in that gallery (Andrea Jung, chief executive of Avon Products Inc. is the other.)
The glass ceiling is very slowly, but quite surely, coming under attack.
In this section, DNA has taken a closer look at one angle of this onslaught on deeply-entrenched bastions.
What is interesting to note however is that Nooyi is not a second-generation immigrant making good but a first-generation Indian born and educated here who went abroad and eventually rapidly scaled the corporate ladder.
In this category at least, Nooyi will find plenty of other women to keep her company.
Closest home would be her sister, Chandrika Tandon. Earlier partner at McKinsey and Company, she is now chairman of Tandon Capital Associates, Inc. an advisory and investment firm that she founded in 1992. Nooyi and Tandon had studied in Chennai.
Padmasree Warrior is the chief technology officer at Motorola and was an alumnus of IIT, Delhi, where she did her chemical engineering. In Wall Street, where less than 10 per cent of senior posts are held by women, Sheila Hooda is managing director, equities, Credit Suisse.
She graduated from IIM, Ahmedabad, and worked in American Express, Mumbai, before doing an MBA in finance from Chicago. In an earlier interview to DNA, Hooda said “being a woman in a male club was neither an advantage or a disadvantage.” But being a brown woman?
In an interview to Mercury News, Warrior commented that she did not see Nooyi’s rise in terms of her gender or ethnicity but individual achievement. “I don’t think of it in that sense,” says Padmasree Warrior, Motorola’s chief technology officer. “I think of her as a leader.”
Warrior knows Nooyi, who serves on Motorola’s board. “She is very strategic in her thinking. She is very sharp. She can get to the heart of issues. She is a very clear thinker and very people oriented. She has the ingredients necessary to lead Pepsi.”
According to a Catalyst study on the informal networks that “women of colour” use in their organisations, of two primary networking strategies Asian women tended towards the “blending in” option over the “sticking together.”
“The blending in strategy encourages women of colour to form relationships with those who have power in their organisations and is used most commonly by Asian women.”
The other strategy that women like Nooyi advocate is to be, simply, one’s self. As she once told Forbes, “Being a woman, being foreign-born, you’ve got to be smarter than anyone else.”
According to Forbes, Nooyi as the president of Pepsico takes home a combined salary and bonus of over $ 4 million annually (and holds in excess of $30 million in stocks.)
When she takes on the mantle of CEO from October 1, this is undoubtedly like to rise. It pays to be woman, foreign-born and very smart.
Compiled by Manjula Sen, with inputs from Uttara Choudhary and Swati Pujari
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