Indra Nooyi, PepsiCo’s chief executive and one of the 11 female head executives amongst 500 companies, predicted that the number of women in charge of large US companies could double in the next five years as more female managers infiltrate corporate America’s glass ceiling.
In a statement to Financial Times, she asserted,
the next five to 10 years I think are very promising . . . I am meeting more and more fantastic women at what I call almost-CEO levels. There is a lot of hope.
Her statement was compared with the pervasive fears of a slowdown in women’s rise to the zenith of corporate America.
Catalyst, an organization which talks about the gender and equality issues revealed that last year, women lost ground to men in the share of both board memberships and corporate officer positions.
The findings concluded that, in spite of accounting for nearly half of the US workforce, women make up only 15 per cent of directors and 16 per cent of senior officer positions in Fortune 500 companies.
Ms Nooyi, who spent the first 23 years of her life in her native India before winning a place at Yale University in the US, said the lack of women in senior positions was one of the historical reasons for their small presence in the boardroom.
She said that companies had a responsibility to break any remnants of a glass ceiling by setting up programs to help women rise to the top.
After all, women have shown that they are fully equipped to take charge of the desk force as well.
