Image by AFP/Getty Images via @daylife
At a conference organized by The Economist last September, Massimo d’Amore Chief Executive Officer, PepsiCo Beverages Americas, Pepsico [PEP] outlined the impact having of a female CEO. This brought to light some staggering imbalances in Pepsico’s hiring practices. It turned out that 90% of the buyers of Pepsico’s products were women, but most of Pepsico’s buyers had been men. As a result of the discovery of this mismatch, there had been massive staffing changes to Pepsico’s buyers to get more balance between the gender of the customers and the gender of the buyers. It was obvious that a wholly-male workforce of buyers would be less likely to understand the needs of customers who were 90% women. This wasn’t an issue of diversity as much as it was an issue of competence.
