NRI Indra Nooyi Becomes World’s Fourth Most Powerful Woman

Chennai born Indra Nooyi has been assigned the responsibilities of the Chief Executive Officer of world’s second largest soft drink maker, PEPSICo. US media has honored her as the “first woman of colour” to head a Fortune 100 company. She has also been named the by Fortune magazine, ahead of illustrious names like Oprah Winfrey and eBay CEO Meg Whitman.

There are just 11 Fortune 500 companies which have female CEOs, only two of whom-including Nooyi-are women of colour.

When the company announced Nooyi to become the next CEO, the news spurtly came into limelight thereby making headlines of newspapers. As per the data showcased by Catalyst, a non profit research and advocacy group, women hold just 16.4 percent of corporate officer positions in US, up 0.7 percentage points from 2002.

The hard work of Nooyi came before when PepsiCo. Decided to see the progress of women of colours in the company. Interestingly, turnover among women turned out to be high as compared to that among other groups. As a part of the same research, the company interviewed women of colour who had been in the senior positions but left. The research investigating the cause of dissatisfaction among women of colours came up with with the result that women didn’t think they had the same relationship with managers as their colleagues did.

This encouraged PepsiCo. to begin a program to develop a better understanding among women of colours and their managers. Thereafter, a third-party facilitator met the woman and her manager separately and discussed about their professional relationship, investigating whether they share same vision towards achieving the targets and what their targets are.

Photo: National Highway 6 to Guwahati by Arindambasu2, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.