Aug 10, 2018
Where are All the Female CEOs?
Indra Nooyi, the CEO of PepsiCo, announced this week that she is stepping down after leading that company for 12 years. With her departure, that leaves 24 female CEOs at companies in the S&P 500 index, less than five percent.
Earlier this year, during an interview with the podcast Freakonomics, Nooyi spoke about the challenges of getting and keeping women in top positions. "How are you going to attract women to the workforce, where we need them, but allow them to balance having a family…and still allow them to contribute productively to the workforce?" she said. "I don’t have an answer to that. It’s got to be a concerted effort on the part of governments, societies, families, companies — all of us coming together."
Yet despite efforts to promote women to leadership roles in companies, the number of female CEO’s declined compared to last year, and for women of color, the situation is worse. According to statistics from Catalyst, a nonprofit research and consulting firm, wome…