Why Aren’t There More Indra Nooyis?
The CEO of PepsiCo is stepping down after spending 12 years of ushering the brand into the future. But the landscape for female executives hasn’t changed all that much.
When the PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi’s younger daughter, Tara, was a child, she would call her mother’s office to ask for permission to play Nintendo. The receptionist would answer the phone and run down a list of questions Nooyi had prepared—“Have you finished your homework?” and so on. “She goes through the questions and she says, ‘Okay, you can play Nintendo half an hour,’ Nooyi recalled in a 2014 interview with The Atlantic. “[My receptionist] leaves me a message, ‘Tara called at 5, this is the sequence of questions I went through, I’ve given her permission.’” She added, a bit archly, “It’s seamless parenting.”
