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, women of color account for about four percent of senior level officers and managers at S&P 500 companies, while white women make up about 21 percent.

This week on Money Talking, host Charlie Herman examines why so few women are leading companies with Sheelah Kolhatkar, staff writer for The New Yorker who wrote about Nooyi and the vanishing female CEO.

Women and men enter the workforce in equal numbers, but only less than five percent of the top 500 companies in the U.S. are led by women.