Approach

Gender parity is a cornerstone of our robust Diversity, Equity and Inclusion (DEI) agenda. Having a diverse, equitable, and inclusive workplace is a competitive business advantage. Diversity fuels innovation, strengthens our reputation, and fosters engagement with the communities we serve and is a critical aspect of our pep+ (PepsiCo Positive) ambitions. 

We strive to improve the attraction, retention, and advancement of women as a key strand of our Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion strategy. This enables us to build a high-caliber pipeline of talent as well as create economic opportunity for women in the communities in which we operate.

As part of our Positive Value Chain ambition, we aim to achieve 50% women in managerial roles by 2025. The key to achieving our goal is fostering an equitable and inclusive environment where our employees can build successful and fulfilling careers, while providing continued support through different stages of their life and career. We aim to drive this agenda forward by doing the following:

Provides Greater Flexibility through Our Benefits & Policies

• Childcare: We provide on- or near site childcare at select locations around the world; care is provided by highly trained and reputable third-party providers. Back-up childcare services are available through third-party providers when a regular care provider is unavailable. 
• Facilities: In more than half of our locations worldwide with 500 or more employees, we have either dedicated mother’s rooms, wellness rooms, or alternate space available for nursing mothers.
• Caregivers: For our North American mothers and fathers under increased economic pressure during the pandemic, we enhanced work flexibility, educational support (virtual tutoring) and dependent care reimbursement.
• Parental Leave: In the U.S., PepsiCo offers 6 weeks paid parental leave for parents, plus 6-8 weeks of paid medical leave for the birthing parent, totaling a potential for 6-14 weeks of paid leave associated with the birth of a child.
• Flexibility: Navigating our new normal means providing employees the flexibility in where and how they work. And with our new program, Work That Works, we've done exactly that. Work That Works is about greater flexibility in where and how work happens. It's about working in a way that makes sense for a given employee's role, responsibilities and whole life. It depends less on the workplace itself, more on the ways we can do great work together — while identifying opportunities to connect, communicate and maintain the culture we love. In short, it's all about making PepsiCo Faster, Stronger and Better by prioritizing the health and well-being of our associates.

Development and Retention Trainings

• Our Transformational Leadership Program (TLP) is a unique program designed to equip women with the tools they need to elevate their business impact and achieve career fulfillment. By providing participants with the knowledge and skills to navigate a global matrix organization, and increase their effectiveness and influence, TLP helps propel high-performing teams and innovation at PepsiCo and is active in the U.S., Europe, Asia, Middle East, and North Africa across multiple functions and levels.
• PepsiCo's Pinnacle Group is an example of our efforts to grow the number of female leaders. The program was created to increase retention of PepsiCo female sales talent, while strengthening and diversifying our future leadership pipeline. The program selects female sales associates with strong performance records and provides them with career development, leadership training and mentoring opportunities with senior sales leaders.
• In Latin America, our INSPIRA talent development program is a multi-year program aimed at building a female bench, driving engagement, and reducing turnover by offering manager and executive women tools, knowledge and experiences to accelerate their growth. It also prepares men and women to act as change agents who intentionally eliminate barriers and shape a culture of inclusivity. 

Building Resilient Women-Owned Businesses

• PepsiCo sponsors The Women’s Business Enterprise National Council pitch competition, which gives women-owned business enterprises a stage to pitch for funding and highly-valued mentorship with PepsiCo leaders.
• Staying true to the roots as a female-founded brand, Stacy’s Pita Chips has committed to empowering and supporting women entrepreneurs on their paths to establishing a successful business. To further its mission, Stacy’s launched the Rise Project, a program dedicated to helping women grow their businesses through funding, mentorship, and community. To date, Stacy’s has invested more than $450,000 to #HelpWomenRise.

Mentorship and Workforce Readiness Programs

• Founded in 2014 in partnership with PepsiCo, Million Women Mentors is a program that leverages mentorship as a means of inspiring, developing and retaining women who seek to work in STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math) fields. PepsiCo STEM employees have pledged more than 23,000 hours of mentoring since 2014 across 11 chapters globally, including Plano, New York, Illinois, Florida, Canada, Ireland, U.K., Europe, Mexico, Turkey, and Hyderabad.
• PepsiCo’s Women with Purpose launched a partnership with FUNDES Latin America to provide education, employment and entrepreneurship opportunities to more than 12,000 women from 2016–2022. Between the PepsiCo Foundation, and the local markets, PepsiCo invested more than $1.5 million USD in this program.

As part of our Positive Agriculture ambition, we aim to economically empower women in communities within our agricultural supply chain. To meet this goal, we will strive to provide hundreds of thousands of women with essential resources for workforce readiness, focusing particularly on the food system and farming. We aim to advance this agenda through the following agriculture and farming initiatives:

• Globally, women in agriculture and farming are facing extraordinary hardships. In partnership with CARE, PepsiCo is supporting She Feeds the World, a program that trains female farmers around the world in everything from increasing crop yield to providing nutrition resources so they can be successful. The existing grassroots structure creates a support system during emergencies and shocks like the COVID-19 pandemic. Women farmers account for more than half the world’s crop production, but often don’t have the infrastructure and resources to support their work. When we invest in women farmers, it helps uplift communities and creates a more sustainable food system that benefits everyone.
• In 2020, PepsiCo announced a five-year, $20 million partnership with U.S. Agency for International Development to make agriculture more inclusive and empower female farmers, women-owned enterprises and women-led suppliers, especially during the pandemic. As part of PepsiCo’s efforts to make agriculture more inclusive, the partnership is designed to empower female farmers, women-owned small- and medium-enterprises, rural communities, and women-led PepsiCo suppliers to improve the sustainability and resilience of rural farming communities.

As we work to achieve gender parity across our organization, we have made progress but faced challenges along the way.

In 2021, more than 43% of management roles were held by women, up from 37% when we set our goal in 2015. Senior leadership roles held by women include our Latin America CEO; Chief Consumer and Marketing Officer and Chief Growth Officer, International Foods; Controller; President of Global Foodservice; Chief Strategy and Transformation Officer; and Global Chief Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Officer.

In 2020, the DEI team launched a mandatory Inclusive Leadership and Unconscious Bias Training for our U.S. executives — the first digital learning installment under the Global Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Team’s Inclusive Leadership training suite. The training offers lessons about the science behind unconscious bias, bias awareness, as well as mitigation tips, strategies, and success stories. As of January 2021, 100% of the required population completed the Inclusive Leadership and Unconscious Bias program. 

As we work to advance gender parity, PepsiCo has provided nearly 27 million women since 2016 with programming to support workforce development in farming and the food system, exceeding our 2025 goal of reaching over 12.5 million women. With the launch of pep+, we introduced a new goal to improve the livelihoods of more than 250,000 people in our agricultural supply chain and communities, including by economically empowering women. This goal is the evolution of our previous commitment to support women's workforce development in the food system. 

What's next?

After reaching all of our initial target audience for the Inclusive Leadership and Unconscious Bias program, we are expanding the program globally.

We created a Global Female Sponsorship Taskforce with an aim to build a framework and toolkit that will enable our global leadership teams to accelerate key female talent. It will also enable leaders to better identify and remove bias to deliver organizational change.