Gender Equality and Corporate Governance: PepsiCo and Google Analysis

This report examines the issue of gender equality in the workplaces of PepsiCo and Google, highlighting their differing approaches and outcomes. It begins with an executive summary and table of contents, followed by an introduction that establishes the importance of gender equality and sets the stage for a comparative analysis. The report provides detailed profiles of both companies, including their industry, products, employee numbers, and governance structures. It then explores the concept of gender equality in governance, referencing the Corporate Governance Principles of the OECD. Key findings regarding the governance practices at PepsiCo and Google are presented, along with a discussion on the importance of selecting the best person for the job regardless of gender. The report analyzes the impact of gender equality on company performance and share value, noting PepsiCo's success in achieving gender equality and Google's struggles. Recommendations are provided for both companies, with PepsiCo aiming to sustain its positive record and Google working to improve its image. The report concludes by summarizing the key findings and emphasizing the significance of promoting gender equality in the corporate world. References are included to support the analysis.

Running head: GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
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1GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
Executive Summary
The aim of this report is to highlight the issue of gender equality at workplace of two
companies, namely PepsiCo and Google. The report gives a brief description of both the
companies and discusses on how PepsiCo has been successful in achieving gender equality
whereas Google is still failing to prove itself as a company that supports gender equality.
The report also discusses on the governance factors and policies that helps a company to
achieve gender equality. The report includes valid recommendations for both these
companies with the help of which PepsiCo will be able to sustain its tag of being a leading
company to achieve gender equality and Google will be able improve its overall image of
being a company that systematically discriminate its women employees with less pay and
promotion scopes.

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Table of Contents
Introduction................................................................................................................................3
Discussion..................................................................................................................................4
Profile of the two companies..................................................................................................4
Gender equality in governance...............................................................................................6
Corporate Governance Principles of OECD..........................................................................6
Key findings about the governance at both the companies....................................................7
Why consider best person for the job irrespective of gender?...............................................7
Impact of gender equality on company performance and share value...................................8
PepsiCo being successful in achieving gender equality.........................................................8
Google – less successful in achieving gender equality..........................................................9
Recommendations....................................................................................................................10
Conclusion................................................................................................................................11
References................................................................................................................................13

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Introduction
Gender inequality is a real and a serious issue that exists in our society as well as at
workplaces. The outdated beliefs that certain roles are suited for men and certain for women,
not only have negative impact on female employees but also affect the male employees too.
At many places, due to these kinds of outdated thought processes many women have to suffer
with lower salary and poor career progression (Yang & Aldrich, 2014). Yet there are many
companies, who have realized that promoting gender equality is good for their businesses and
accordingly have successfully fought against the negative gender stereotypes.
PepsiCo, being one of top beverage and food processing company, is being lead by
CEO, Indra Nooyi for more than a decade now (George & Lorsch, 2014). From its inception
to today, PepsiCo has been a shining example of promoting gender equality at work place
having a woman as one of the board members (Mittal, Agarwal & Agarwal, 2014). PepsiCo
Australia, was awarded three times in a row, last being in 2016 for proving to be one of the
leading companies to promote gender equality. Whereas companies like tech giant Google,
stands accused with issues including gender pay gap, with women employees getting paid
less than their male counterparts.
This report discusses the topics of gender equality and inequality in governance of both of
these companies and how it impacts the companies performances along with the shares value.
The report highlights how PepsiCo has successfully established itself as a champion of
gender equality and Google even though claiming to be a supporter of gender equality is
failing to back its claim with recent allegations of gender pay gap.

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Discussion
Profile of the two companies
Brief description of PepsiCo, a globally recognized company and a supporter of gender
equality at workplace
• Industry – Beverage, Food and Snacks
• Country – Global presence with more than 200 countries including Australia
• Number of employees – PepsiCo Australia and New Zealand has more than 2500
employees (www.pepsico.com.au, 2017).
• Products – The total portfolio of PepsiCo has 22 brands including Pepsi products,
Frito-Lays snacks products, Gatorade and Quaker.
• Number of years in existence – PepsiCo came into its existence in the year 1965.
• Ownership structure – The top five holders of the PepsiCo institutional holdings are
Vanguard Group Inc, Blackrock Inc, Bank of America Corp, State Street Corp and
Wellington Management Group LLP (Nasdaq.com, 2017).
• Review of governance structure of the organization – PepsiCo has adopted
comprehensive and detailed corporate governance standards as well as policies to
ensure proper governance of its operations.
• Total board size in numbers and ratio of female and males – PepsiCo board of
directors includes thirteen directors (one executive and 12 independent). The ratio of
female to male member in the board is 3:10.
• Total senior management and number of females – The number of females in the
global senior management comprising of 26 members is eight, including Chairman

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and CEO Indra K. Nooyi (George & Lorsch, 2014). PepsiCo Australia and New
Zealand too have almost fifty percent of their executive leaders as females.
Brief description of Google, a Company taken as an example of failing gender equality
• Industry/sector – Internet Software and Computer Hardware
• Country – Global presence including Australia
• Number of employees – Approximately 74000 employees worldwide and 1500
employees in Sydney, Australia
• Services / products – Numerous services and products including Google Adwords,
Google Adsense, Google Apps, Google Maps.
• Number of years in existence – Founded on 4th September, 1998 (Ward, 2013). It
has been in existence since the last 19 years.
• Ownership structure - The top five share holders of the institutional holdings of the
company are Vanguard Group Inc, Blackrock Inc, FMR LLC, State Street Corp, Price
T Rowe Associates Inc/Md/
• Review of governance structure of the organization - The founders of Google and
the executive chairman, Eric Schmidt in the year 2004 adopted a dual class stock
structure in order to ensure their voting power. After Alphabet’s becoming the parent
company of Google, new corporate governance rules and guidelines were adopted
which still lack in terms of gender pay and diversity (Gabl, Wieser & Hemetsberger,
2016).
• Total board size in numbers and ratio of female and males – The Total board
members of Google is 12. The female to male ratio is 3:12

6GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
• Total senior management and number of females – Twenty four percent of the
total leadership positions at Google are held by women whereas 31 percent of its total
employees are women.
Gender equality in governance
Gender equality is becoming one of the major part of the inclusive growth of any
company. In order to get the better results of gender equality, good governance plays a vital
role. In many of the OECD (Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development)
countries, advancing and promoting gender equality in the market is one of the main policy
objectives (Robertson, Diyab & Al-Kahtani, 2013).
Corporate Governance Principles of OECD
Over the last 10 years, OECD has been the leading organizations to become successful
in promoting better corporate governance. The principle of governance of OECD has been
accepted by all countries even the non-OECD countries. The various principles recommended
in the OECD are pointed down as follows (Tricker & Tricker, 2015):
 Effective corporate governance framework ensured by laying more emphasis on the
framework’s role in promoting fair and clear market.
 Identifying the rights of the basic shareholders and providing them with equitable
treatment.
 Analyzing the importance of fair price in the stock markets as well as highlighting
the needs of institutional investors and other intermediaries.
 Giving importance to the role played by stakeholders in corporate governance by
encouraging active co-operation.
 Providing proper disclosures and showing transparency.

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 Providing with proper guidance and the responsibilities to be fulfilled by the board
members.
Key findings about the governance at both the companies
PepsiCo has shown and proven its commitment to engage the shareholders effectively in
the following ways (Kyprianou, 2013):
 By expanding its efforts for shareholder engagement by starting shareholder
engagement program and by regularly outreaching its shareholders
 By actively participating in renowned corporate governance organization, PepsiCo’s
team members have demonstrated that the company is committed to the corporate
governance role in business as well as society.
 The company includes a section wholly dedicated to the proxy statement that contains
details of the company’s shareholders engagement activities.
 PepsiCo has been continuously enhancing the proxy statement by increasing more
readability to ensure better communication with its shareholder (Verseman, 2017).
Google does have separate role for both the CEO and Chairman. There are certain issues
related to the board of directors including fewer female board members that if addressed
properly will help in significantly improving the performance of the company. Even though
Google has come up with new improvement to its corporate structure, their governance
structure has been termed as archaic making them less innovative.
Why consider best person for the job irrespective of gender?
The tech industry including the Silicon Valley has been struggling for a long time to
improve the gender parity and achieve gender equality. Companies like Google with its latest
gender diversity report clearly indicated that it has nearly 31 percent of its employees as
females, making itself clear that it is still far behind to achieve gender equality (Eadicicco,

8GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
(2017). Many a times, companies end up hiring wrong candidate as their employees by being
unconsciously biased. Giving men and women equal opportunities irrespective of considering
their gender would improve the company’s image and reputation of being more inclusive and
supportive to talented people (Barak, 2016). Apart from this, getting the right people for the
task will help the company to improve its overall productivity and market value.
Impact of gender equality on company performance and share value
One of the fundamental rights of human beings is gender equality. Several studies and
researches has been done by Companies including Morgan Stanley and International
Monetary Fund. It was found that addressing and promoting gender equality will help
companies to increase its investment value (Roberts, 2016). Gender equality does not always
comes with opportunities, it also posses certain risks too. Any kind of discrimination based
on gender has the potential to discourage stakeholders from getting involved with the
company that in turn end up damaging the company’s reputation in the market. Not only this
but if any kind of gender discrimination gets noticed then it might land up in legal troubles
with increase costs (Levit, Verchick & Minow, 2016). Thus, majority of the shareholders and
investors agrees and seems it reasonable that conclude that promoting gender equality
improves the company’s performance as well as its shares value.
PepsiCo being successful in achieving gender equality
By realizing the importance of creating an atmosphere filled with gender diversity at
workplace, PepsiCo has been committed to the agenda of successfully achieving work place
gender equality. For this, it has continuously given and is still giving great efforts by
providing flexibility at workplace and by encouraging the quality of work life of all its
employees (Spreitzer, Garrett & Bacevice, 2015). PepsiCo has been supporting females at
every level of the company to progress and move on to take more senior roles both at senior
leadership level and at junior levels by ensuring that both the male and female employees get

9GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
equal pay for the same work (Mulligan-Ferry, 2014). PepsiCo Australia and New Zealand has
around 70 percent of their sales leaders in the team as females and in their research and
development team, the females constitutes of 60 percent of the whole team .
With enhanced and improved parental leave policies, the company is trying to ensure that
the employees get the required support that they need from the company. For all these efforts,
PepsiCo got awarded ‘Employer of choice for gender equality’ consequently for three times
in a row last being in 2016 (www.pepsico.com, 2017). PepsiCo with its commitment to
global agenda, ‘Performance with Purpose 2025’ is trying to achieve equal pay for its women
employees as well as achieve the gender equality ratio in all of their management and
executive roles. The CEO of PepsiCo, Indra K Nooyi teamed up with Target’s CEO, Brian
Cornell for ‘Network of Executive Women’s (NEW) Future Fund’, a campaign in order to
achieve 50 – 50 ratio of gender parity at workplaces (Shayon, 2017). By continuing with
these kinds of productive and effective initiatives and remaining committed to the cause of
gender equality, PepsiCo will be able to sustain its record of being a company who
successfully achieved gender equality.
Google – less successful in achieving gender equality
Google, being one of the leading tech companies in the Silicon Valley, has been over
time accused with allegations of discriminating its employees with gender pay inequality as
well as sexism. In 2014, U.S Department of Labor accused Google for paying its women
employees less than their male counterparts and this difference in the pay exists in the senior
executives and leaderships roles too. For this, the U.S Labor Department asked Google to
submit a portion of their employee wages datasheet that the Company objected to initially
citing that compiling such large data and submitting it to the court is too costly and an act of
breach of its employee privacy (Levin, 2017). Google got accused by more than 60 women
employees (both current and former employees) for pay disparities and sexism.

10GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
Thus, even though Google continues to deny these allegations, it has become more
evident over time that the culture that exists in the company is way more hostile to female
employees. The labor department in its initial audit found that there were deviations in the
pay scale of men and women employees at different levels of the Company that has proved
wrong the claims made by Google that it has never discriminated women with lesser salary
and promotion chances. Google came up with its gender diversity statistics revealing that the
company is slowing and steadily progressing to achieve its goal of a becoming a workplace
that is more inclusive and equal to all gender. According to the data, out of the total
employees of Google, only 31% of the employees were female with 19 percent of the
technical job profiles and 24 percent of the company’s leadership roles held by female
employees (Eadicicco, 2017). Google committed to spend $150 million in order to promote
gender diversity in 2015. Though, the company has shown slight progression in increasing
the number of women employees, it still needs to put a lot of effort to come clean of its image
of being discriminatory to women by following standard policies to achieve gender parity and
equality.
Recommendations
By doing the research for this report, it was found that in PepsiCo Australia and New
Zealand (ANZ), five of the total 11 members of the executive leadership were female.
Though, PepsiCo ANZ has been able to prove itself successful in achieving gender equality
at workplace, it still needs to continue with its commitment to support the progression of
women employees. PepsiCo at its global level has yet not been able to achieve 50-50 gender
parity and for this it is recommended that it adopts the similar workplace practices as of
PepsiCo Australia to ensure being recognized as one of the best organization supporting
gender equality globally.

11GENDER EQUALITY AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE
Google, being one of the Company, failing to achieve gender equality needs to learn
from its past history of being accused with gender discrimination and move on to adopt new
and effective corporate governance and including more women on its board. By increasing
the gender diversity and giving equal pay and growth opportunities to its women employees,
Google might become successful in achieving gender equality.
Conclusion
This report highlights the fact on how PepsiCo over the time has been able to achieve
gender equality at workplace successfully and at the same time Google, being a tech giant has
been failing over time to be recognized as a company that supports gender equality. The
achievement of PepsiCo came by it giving continuous effort and commitment to the cause of
eradicating gender pay gap and making workplace more comfortable for women employees
to work at with fair opportunities to grow to higher leadership roles. This report also
discussed on how PepsiCo has been working on its goal to achieve equal gender parity by
increasing the number of female employees in the Company through new campaigns and
agendas.
On the other hand, it also discusses on how Google has been systematically
discriminating the women employees in a veiled manner by paying them less salary and also
less chance to grow up to a senior roles. With the latest statistics given by Google, it is
evident that the female to male employee ratio in the company is still far behind the mark of
equal gender parity. Thus, this report concludes that PepsiCo has clearly been a champion of
gender equality at workplace and is continuously striving to sustain and improve its set
standards to remain being recognized as one of the best Company to work at. Whereas
Google on the other hand needs to do more to promote and practice gender equality at
workplace and set better governance guidelines to ensures that it become successful in

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eliminating all kind of gender stereotypes from its system and become a Company that
successfully supports gender diversity and equality.

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