Fortune magazine's most powerful woman of the year in 2010 is clear about the challenges she faced in joining the handful of women at the top of the business world. "If you are a woman and especially a person of colour, there are two strikes against you," Indra Nooyi told the audience at a lecture at Dartmouth College in 2002. "Immigrant, person of colour, and woman, three strikes against you . . . So I would work extra hard at it. More hours, yes. More sacrifices and trade-offs, yes. That has been the journey."
The 55-year-old's trailblazing path has taken her from what she calls a "humble middle-class" environment in South India (her father worked for a bank) to a staggering paypacket of $10.66m last year. Nooyi has done this while being a married mother of two.
For this achievement she credits, as well as nannies, help from a "matrix of relatives". Family is so important to her, she is said to have once written to the parents of PepsiCo's senior managers to tell them how much they had contributed to the company "through the gift of their son or daughter".
At 23, she left India to study at Yale, working as a receptionist from midnight to 5am to help pay for her tuition. She started her career in a textile firm in India, and worked for Johnson & Johnson, the Boston Consulting Group and Motorola before joining PepsiCo in 1994.And after reaching the top, herself, she is keen to help other women – and minorities – up the ladder, by making the case for diversity in business. "There's a lot society can do, " she insists. "Flexitime. Leave policies when women give birth. We need women in the companies, some of the brightest candidates are women. We need to help them balance. And it doesn't have to be government, it should be corporations" She has also spoken out for this year's quota system at Davos, lamenting that it was just a "one-off" intiative when women should regularly make up 40 or 50% of the delegates.
