During an interview earlier this year, Indra Nooyi, the C.E.O. of PepsiCo, made some comments about men, women, and snacks. “You watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips,” she said, during an appearance on the “Freakonomics Radio” podcast. “They love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don’t want to lose that taste of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom.” Women, Nooyi said, were different. “They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public,” she said. “And they don’t lick their fingers generously, and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.” She went on to say that PepsiCo, a hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar company that owns dozens of well-known brands, including Mountain Dew, Gatorade, Ruffles, and Tropicana, was looking into developing a Doritos-like product specifically geared toward female consumers. Such a product would be less messy, easier to eat, and, most importantly, come in bags small enough to fit nicely in a handbag. “Because women love to carry a snack in their purse,” Nooyi said.
These remarks were criticized as sexist. (I didn’t hear them that way; I’d be interested in a snack that doesn’t leave your hands greasy and covered with bright-orange flavor powder.) But the controversy about eating habits missed a bigger point: Nooyi is one of the few women running a major American corporation, and the problems of gender inequality are as endemic on the top rung of the corporate ladder as they are anywhere else in our society. Women make up less than five per cent of the C.E.O.s of major public corporations; they’re paid less than their male counterparts, on average; and they’re prone to having their looks analyzed and their comments blown out of proportion—all of which makes the complex task of running a company even more difficult. On Monday, Nooyi announced that she will step down as PepsiCo’s C.E.O., in October, after twelve years in the role. Her departure will leave only twenty-three women with top jobs at companies in the S. & P. 500 stock index.
Nooyi’s personal story is remarkable. She grew up in Chennai, India, in a middle-class family. When she was young, her mother encouraged her to be academically ambitious, regularly putting Nooyi through an exercise in which she had to imagine that she was the Prime Minister or another world leader giving a speech. But her mother was also deeply traditional, and insisted that girls should get married when they turned eighteen. Instead of marrying young, however, Nooyi moved to the United States to attend business school at Yale, on a scholarship. She then worked for several years as a management consultant before a recruiter called on behalf of PepsiCo, where Nooyi became the head of corporate strategy, in 1994. Two of her initiatives—PepsiCo’s purchases of Tropicana and Quaker Oats, which owned Gatorade—were regarded as major successes that brought the company new kinds of customers beyond soda drinkers. In 2006, after serving as the company’s chief financial officer and as its president, Nooyi became the C.E.O. That year, there were ten women running Fortune 500 companies.
It was a difficult moment: the impending financial crisis and the backlash against junk food and soda would put extreme pressure on PepsiCo and other processed-food producers. More consumers were opting for sports drinks, iced tea, electrolyte water, and smoothies rather than soda. Nooyi led a campaign to reshape PepsiCo, moving the company into healthier areas by buying Naked Juice and Sabra (which makes hummus and other food products), selling high-end bottled water, and developing lower-sugar Pepsi, which had mixed results. She also tried to position PepsiCo as a responsible corporate citizen, devoting company resources to promoting healthy eating habits.
Despite the lack of female C.E.O.s at big companies to begin with, Nooyi’s departure comes as part of a trend: in recent months, Denise Morrison, of Campbell Soup Company; Margo Georgiadis, of Mattel; Meg Whitman, of Hewlett Packard Enterprise; and Irene Rosenfeld, of Mondelez, have left their jobs. That’s a twenty-per-cent drop in the number of female C.E.O.s.
There is no legitimate reason for this situation. More women than men are now earning college degrees, and about as many women as men go into business careers. But, within just a few years, men begin earning more than their female counterparts and start moving up more swiftly. (The disparity is even worse for women of color.) Despite this, according to a 2017 study by LeanIn.org and McKinsey & Company, many men believe that gender equality in the workplace has already been achieved. The study identified several other glaring problems. Not only are women not promoted at the same rates as men but they receive less mentoring and other kinds of professional support. Parenting takes a far larger toll on women’s professional advancement than on men’s. Recent revelations about sexual harassment have highlighted the prevalence of the problem across many industries. Other studies have pointed to a phenomenon called the glass cliff, which suggests that women are often given C.E.O. jobs only after a company is already in trouble, essentially setting them up to fail. (Marissa Mayer, the former Google executive who, in 2012, was brought in as the C.E.O. of Yahoo, is an oft-cited example.) Addressing this thorny list of challenges will require a combination of policy and cultural shifts, but the most important factor may be getting men in the workplace to acknowledge the problem.
Until there are more women in high-placed positions, the job of the female chief executive will likely remain one of the most difficult and lonely there is. “When you become a C.E.O. and you’re a woman, you are looked at differently. . . . You are held to a different standard. There’s no question about it,” Nooyi said during the “Freakonomics” interview. “I think this group of women C.E.O.s, all of us, are going through that right now. Hopefully, as the numbers get bigger—and I hope they do—nobody’s looking at us as women C.E.O.s but just as leaders of big enterprises. I hope that day comes sooner than later.” Nooyi’s replacement will be Ramon Laguarta, a two-decade veteran of the company, and, also, a man.
Sheelah Kolhatkar joined The New Yorker as a staff writer in 2016. She is the author of “Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street.”Read more »
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