Priya Nair, Hindustan Unilever
Vibha Padalkar, HDFC Life
Vishakha Mulye, Aditya Birla Capital
Prabha Narasimhan, Colgate-Palmolive (India)
Jasleen Kohli, Digit Insurance
Kiran Mazumdar Shaw, Biocon Ltd
Falguni Nayar, Nykaa
These are just a few names of female corporate leaders that I fossicked up after watching Indra Nooyi’s eyebrow-raising conversation with former US Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice at an interview conducted by Stanford’s Hoover Institute.
“I could never have become CEO in any other country in the world, including in India,” said Nooyi, former CEO of PepsiCo, drawing a collective gasp across the Indian Internet. “It’s because the system [in the USA] is meritocratic. Mentors don’t care whether you’re male, female, ethnicity, gender, they don’t care, they just want the best brains to rise to the top.”
The chat and the kerfuffle it brought in its wake, plunged me down a rabbithole of remarks on gender disparity by Nooyi.
In a Freakonomics podcast with Stephen Dubner in 2018: “I’d say that when you become a CEO and you’re a woman you are looked at differently. Whatever you say people do — they say things like, ‘Well a guy CEO wouldn’t have said that. Or a guy would have said it differently.’ You are held to a different standard, there’s no question about it.”
In an interview with the New York Times in 2019: “The pipeline is leaking at the early stages. Because we get enough women coming into the work force in various stages. But by the time they get to Level 2 and Level 3, they just drop out of the work force for several reasons…We can ill afford to be a country where women drop out of the work force.”
She isn’t wrong. Women lead 55 of America’s 500 largest companies, according to the 2025 Fortune 500. This is a number that is higher than ever before, yet a mere 11% of the total (compared to 5% in India). So perhaps we must ask why progress still drags, even in ‘meritocratic’ mature economies such as that of North America?
It is equally sobering to hear the words ‘USA is the greatest country in the world’ used at a time when the news cycle is riddled with polarization. Certainly, the USA opened its arms to her in 1978. Certainly, she got to test her mettle against a legion of privileged Americans (and triumphed). Certainly, the country built her into the titan that she is today. And yet we must ask — does the Great American Dream gild every immigrant in the same way? To many others, the Dream, perhaps, is not one door but many — some wide open, some revolving, some bolted tightly shut.
Onwards to her other jarring statement. “India is a chaotic country. The beauty of India lies in its chaos. Absolute chaos. And if you are familiar with India, and you’ve travelled in India before and you like that chaos all around you, you go back. It’s like a drug. You get addicted to it,” she said.
This she pitted against an orderly ‘homogenous’ China. Although her words were meant to be complimentary, to pick the one stereotype used to tar India for decades is…certainly a choice. India is by no means a perfect country. It is fraught with inequality — caste, class, gender and religious schisms yawn as deep as chasms. But to diminish a country as baldly as she did, one that provided the bedrock of the very education that catapulted her to Yale, one that afforded her the privilege of progressive parents, is to come across as tone deaf.
For many Indians and Indian Americans, Nooyi is a beacon, bolstering their idea of the Great American Dream, and equally an exemplar of the model minority. In some ways, she is perfectly positioned, a first-generation immigrant ricocheting between two democratic colossi. For someone in her position, a little nuance, a little sensitivity might have come in handy. For Nooyi, all roads lead to New York. But there are different New Yorks now, and the old ones have lost some of their lustre.
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