The Hindu Business Line : <I>Women CEOs </I>

The appointment of Ms Indra Nooyi with effect from October 1 as the President and Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo, the world's fourth largest food and beverage company, with a turnover equal to Gujarat's GDP , truly stands out as the defining moment in corporate history.

It is rare even for a non-native male to scale such stratospheric heights as Ms Nooyi has done: Her record as the highest ranking Indian-born woman, and the fourth most powerful, with brilliant academic attainments and professional achievements in some of the most famous companies such as Motorola and Asea Brown Boveri, prior to joining PepsiCo, is unlikely to be broken for a long time to come.

It is but natural for the announcement to create a firestorm of interest in women executives in the world of business. However, there has as yet been no conclusive tally of the qualities required even among male executives for managing a globe-girdling business enterprise of great complexity and diversity, which can be rubbed out of existence with a single wrong step, as in the case of the Barings Bank, Sumitomo, or Enron.

It becomes much more of an esoteric exercise to divine the attributes that catapults women such as Ms Nooyi to their exalted positions. Do women executives require to work harder and be known to possess much greater calibre than their male colleagues to make it to the top? Yes, according to 69.4 per cent of women in a recent survey, while less than 35 per cent of male executives expressed the view (for reasons of political correctness, may be!) that a level-playing field is all that is necessary for women to score significant successes. Whatever it is, women hold fewer than 20 per cent of corporate office positions in Fortune 500 companies and only eight of those companies have female CEOs. In other words, spectacular career paths are not yet commonplace for women who continue to bump into the glass ceiling in most countries.

B. S. RAGHAVAN