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As leaders, women rule at Pepsico
By siliconindia
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Friday, 19 November 2010, 18:08 IST |
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Bangalore: Twenty five years after women first started pouring into the labor force and trying to be more like men in every way, from wearing power suits to picking up golf clubs .New research is showing that men ought to be the ones doing more of the imitating.
But now things have turned around and women are judged to be more effective than their male counterparts. The best example is PepsiCo. Leading in food and beverage products, Pepsico has one of the highest representations of women in its senior leadership. Women constitute about 25 percent of the leadership team.
HR professionals say PepsiCo India is one of the better employers in terms of gender diversity at the top."Other than ICICI Bank and PepsiCo, I don't know of any large company that has so many women executives in their top leadership,""says Uday Chawla, managing partner at executive search firm Transearch.
Comparing Pepsico to its Global standards, we see that Pepsico India still has a long way to go to reach its other sister companies in terms of Women leadership. Pepsico U.S. has 35 percent, PepsiCo China 30 percent and PepsiCo UK has 25 percent of women in the leadership team. Pepsico India aims at 50 percent as more women enter the workforce in the next few years.
Positive Moves Consulting, a Delhi-based executive search firm, has been hiring for PepsiCo India for 10 years now and is reported to have placed 30-35 people at senior levels. "PepsiCo India has been a bold client," says Vibhav Dhawan, its managing partner.
In 2005 diversity reports of Pepsicon India reported that women made up only 4 percent of its workforce and just 12 percent of its senior leadership team. In order to rectify the imbalance, Pepsico start giving preference to women in hiring without diluting their merit.
For the first time in its 20 year history, PepsiCo India has a woman as its chief financial officer (CFO). Kimsuka Narsimhan, a lean and petite 46 year old, joined as the CFO of Frito Lay in 2006 from Unilever. In January 2009, she was promoted to CFO of PepsiCo India. "Leadership positions in finance are isolated for women," she says.
Although official rubbish of rumors that there is no reservation procedure that they follow, some male employees feel the diversity. "It s not said officially, but everyone knows," he says. "The HR team has to meet a target for women in senior management roles."