Most US media took note of her elevation in brief matter of fact reports on a day dominated by Bush’s first budget sent to the Congress.
WASHINGTON: Set to take over May 2 as PepsiCo chairperson, Chennai-born Indian American Indra Nooyi is what the US media calls the ‘first woman of colour’ to head a Fortune 100 company.
“Only 11 Fortune 500 companies have female CEOs, only two of whom — including Nooyi are women of colour,” Diversity Inc said on the announcement by the over $32 billion global snack food and soft drink company. Earlier, when PepsiCo announced Nooyi would become chief executive in October, it made headline news, the Washington Post recalled describing it as “a let’s-face-it moment”.
But this time most US media took note of her elevation in brief matter of fact reports on a day dominated by President George Bush’s first budget sent to a Democratic controlled Congress.
Women hold just 16.4 per cent of corporate officer positions in US, up 0.7 percentage points from 2002, according to Catalyst, a non profit research and advocacy group that studies women at work, cited by the Post.
“We’ve seen growth for the last 10 years, but we’re also seeing a slowing down of the growth,” Ilene H. Lang, Catalyst president said.
PepsiCo, the Post noted in a recent article is one of the four US companies along with Goldman Sachs, PricewaterhouseCoopers and Scotiabank that “open more doors for women”.
In 2002, PepsiCo decided to study how women of colour were advancing in the company. Turnover among women of colour was higher than among other groups, the Post recalled.
The company intensively interviewed women of colour who had been in senior positions but left.
After the research, PepsiCo thought the main problem was that the women didn’t think they had the same relationships with managers as their co-workers did.
Since then, PepsiCo has started a programme in which women of colour and their managers can develop a deeper understanding.
They go through the process again in three to six months, this time with the boss’s boss as well, and determine how they did with their plan, the Post said.
The results thus far? In 2001, 72 of the company’s 1,806 executives were women of colour, and that number grew to 144 out of 2,165 at the end of 2006.
In addition, turnover had dropped by double digits, and the retention gap is almost indiscernible, the Washington Post noted.
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