Ask Insights
Case Studies
PepsiCo
Snapshot: A partnership that started with one workshop in 2012 and now spans eight countries across PepsiCo’s AMENA region.
The relationship goes back to a single workshop in 2012, run for the Direct Reports of then-Global CEO Indira Nooyi at PepsiCo’s US headquarters. That one session was the seed for what’s now more than a decade of continuous work across the organization.
PepsiCo was among the first companies in India willing to have an open conversation about DEI at all, which is part of why it’s often held up today as a reference point other markets look to. The India team’s early commitment was recognized with the Harvey C. Russell Award, presented by Indira Nooyi herself, after the initiative was rolled out globally.
The work has since expanded well beyond India. It now covers the entire AMENA region for PepsiCo’s R&D function, and Ask Insights’ team has traveled in person to PepsiCo offices in India, the UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and South Africa to deliver it. On the manufacturing side, PepsiCo India was one of the first companies to bring Gender Intelligence programming directly into plant locations, starting in 2014, with Dr. Niru Kumar visiting nearly every PepsiCo plant in India herself, more than once, to help shift culture on the ground rather than just in a boardroom.
Countries Covered for PepsiCo by Ask Insights
Objectives
- Notably limited women’s representation, especially in frontline, Sales and Supply Chain roles
- In 2019-20, women represented only 6%, 8% and 7% of Sales, Supply Chain and frontline functions respectively
- A lack of the right physical infrastructure and inclusive mindset
- Rural and remote plant locations making it harder to attract women talent
- No women role models in leadership roles across many functions
- Inclusion challenges for women in Finance, Research and Development teams
The picture looked different market by market. In Saudi Arabia, Egypt and the UAE, the core issues were building a women’s pipeline, leadership power distance, and helping women communicate without fear of pushback. In Egypt and South Africa, the work had to go further, into racial inequality, power distance, cross-cultural friction, and violence against women.
Interventions
Rather than run one generic program company-wide, the approach picked a specific diversity theme each year and paired it with building Inclusive Leadership Competencies among senior leaders. PepsiCo’s Top Leadership, HR, Sales, Finance, Franchise, Supply Chain, R&D and Plants teams each had different starting points, so each got a customized version of the work rather than the same deck.
Out of that came a DEI Roadmap built top-down, with a few signature pieces running through it:
- Gender Intelligence programming for the entire organization, customized separately for functions like Finance, Sales and R&D
- An Inter-organizational Reach Out Program for high-potential women leaders looking to move up
- A Women Leadership Program run as an inter-organizational initiative with Microsoft, TATA, American Express and Reckitt
- An Allyship Program for Plants and Frontline teams
- Policy, ERG support and Sexual Harassment Committee consultation
- Assessments and benchmarking to measure impact and progress over time
Star Programs for PepsiCo
Three programs stand out by name: Wings on Dreams, built specifically for women in sales; Reach Out, an inter-organizational program helping women leaders unlock their next move; and the Gender Intelligence Workshops, run across the organization for years and customized separately for sectors like finance, sales and R&D.
Key Results
The numbers moved in a fairly consistent direction across every level:
- Best-in-industry gender diversity ratio: PepsiCo now stands at 39% at mid-management levels, ahead of the FMCG industry benchmark of around 27%
- More than 3x increase in women’s representation at senior executive levels, from 8.8% in 2020 to 29.4% in 2023
- Equal hiring: 50% women and 50% men hired
- More than double women’s representation in Sales across levels, from 5.7% in 2020 to 16% in 2023
- A 7x increase in women’s representation in Franchise, from 7% in 2020 to 47% in 2023
What’s harder to put a single number on is the shift in how leadership actually talks about this work day to day. Ask Insights also partnered with PepsiCo on policy, including gender-inclusive parental leave, dedicated parent rooms, menstrual leave, supportive infrastructure, organization-wide sensitization training, women’s leadership journeys, inclusive leadership and allyship programs, supportive ERGs, DEI tied to KPIs, inclusive vocabulary, and flexible schedules and work locations.
"Dr. Niru, thank you for another excellent session, this mentor-mentee training was a critical step to take our Athena mentoring program forward. As a continuation of our diversity and inclusion journey, the sessions on Gender Sensitization and Mentoring have been an invaluable input to the PepsiCo India finance team. Thank you once again for your support on this critical agenda."
"Dr. Niru has played a stellar role in our D&I journey. The deep and meaningful work she has done on gender intelligence and inclusive leadership has created a significant impact in the organization. I really value her partnership and her commitment to making a genuine difference to this agenda, and more importantly, to impacting people in different ways."
Reckitt
Snapshot: A women’s leadership journey that started at Amsterdam HQ and grew into a five-year inter-organizational program.
Challenges
- Lack of career progression for women employees
- Need for a gender-balanced workforce
- Need for conscious effort to build a culture of inclusion
- Need for LGBTQIA+ inclusion and hiring
Interventions
This engagement started at the top, literally, with a global program for Reckitt’s leadership at their Amsterdam headquarters in 2019. From there it moved to an Inclusive Leadership session for the India CEO and leadership team at RB Hygiene, and eventually into a rollout to the entire population of managers at the Global Hub, which began in 2024 and is still running, alongside LGBTQIA+ sensitization sessions for all people managers there.
A 6-month Women Leadership Journey called PowerFluent ran in parallel. At the Amsterdam HQ, that meant an Inclusive Leadership workshop for top management plus an inter-organizational reach-out program that Ask Insights designed and ran for five straight years, pulling together high-potential women leaders from Reckitt, PepsiCo, Microsoft, TATA, PwC and American Express.
On the ground in India, RB Hygiene got diagnostics, focus group discussions, a workshop with the CEO and top management, and Gender Intelligence sessions built for the sales team. At the Global Hub, the work went even deeper: diagnostics and assessments, focus groups, two full years of PowerFluent, Inclusive Leadership and Gender Intelligence sessions for managers and leaders, and dedicated LGBTQIA+ sensitization work.
Key Results
- Gender pay equity: Reckitt implemented regular gender pay equity assessments, actively closing gaps and promoting transparency
- Training modules on unconscious bias and diversity are now embedded into onboarding, building an inclusive mindset from an employee’s first day
- More than 3,000 training hours delivered in 2023 alone, covering 80% of employees in inclusion training programs
- An 81% score in the recommend-workplace category of the Glint survey among women staff at the Global Hub in Hyderabad
- A series celebrating unique career stories of women at the Global Hub
- Gender-inclusive recruitment strategies have built a more diverse talent pool, with gender diversity currently at 41% and hiring diversity at 47% at the Global Hub
"This is an appreciation note to acknowledge the facilitation you and your organization have provided to us in terms of our stated goal to significantly strengthen our diversity and inclusion program in RB Hygiene Home South Asia. What my fellow leaders and I really appreciated was the way you took us through the fundamental reasons for diversity and inclusion gaps in organizations in India and around the world, including case studies of good practices and a mind-opening understanding of how the brains of different sexes are wired differently. Your subject matter expertise was excellent, the method followed was engaging, and we ended with thoughtful strategies and practical ideas to implement going forward. We know this is a journey, not an end state, and I thank you for your support in getting us off to what I’m sure will be a memorable and inspiring path."
Hindalco
Snapshot: Plant-floor DEI work across 14 locations, where women’s representation in plants nearly tripled in six months.
Locations Covered in Person
Challenges
- Low women’s representation in plants
- Need for women role models at senior levels
- Need to build a culture of inclusion and psychological safety for women
- Building leader ownership of DEI
- Prevalence of unconscious gender bias in industrial settings
- High attrition rates among women employees
Interventions
Ask Insights didn’t start with a workshop here, it started with data. The engagement opened in 2017 with audits and assessments to understand what was actually happening on the ground, and only after that did the work move to a session with Managing Director Satish Pai and his team, before rolling out to the wider workforce.
From there, the sequence looked like this: a Top Leadership Gender and Inclusive Intelligence session with Satish Pai and his direct reports in Mumbai; the audits, assessments and DEI strategy work itself; multiple rounds of sessions at plant locations for managers and frontline employees, covering roughly 1,500 people in total; and a Women’s Conclave for all women employees, held in Mumbai.
Key Results
This became one of the more visible rollouts in Ask Insights’ portfolio, not just because of the scale, but because the shift on the shop floor was hard to miss.
- A complete turnaround in mindset across the organization
- Women increasingly valued and visible on factory shop floors, a real change from where things started
- Unconscious gender bias dropped noticeably, with a corresponding rise in psychological safety reported by employees
- Significantly lower attrition rates among women employees
- Women’s representation at plant locations rose from 10% to 30%, an industry-best figure, within just 6 months
"I would like to thank you for conducting a thought-provoking and impactful session on gender intelligence for the senior management team of Hindalco on Monday, 7th August 2017, in Mumbai. Our senior management team learned some new insights that helped us understand gender intelligence and harness the full potential of both genders in our organization. I’ve attended many gender diversity forums, but your session gave me a new perspective. Diversity and Inclusion are very important for every corporation today. Getting a work environment that’s diverse and promotes inclusivity has become increasingly important, not only to become a high-performing organization, but also to attract and retain good talent. We started this journey at Hindalco 6 years ago, right from a course for senior leaders where I was also present. We then covered about 1,500 managers at Hindalco, going through case studies and her own examples, trying to get people to understand what diversity and inclusion really means. She also helped us put together the Women in Hindalco Conference. I congratulate Dr. Niru, and I wish Ask Insights continued success in the important work they’re doing."
Jubilant Ingrevia
Snapshot: A six-month leadership immersion that helped women’s plant representation jump from 3% to 10% in half a year.
Challenges
- Low women’s representation
- No women role models
- Need to establish a culture of inclusion and psychological safety for women
- Need for leaders to understand their role in building an inclusive environment
- Unconscious gender bias
- High attrition rates among women employees
Interventions
A lot of women were reluctant to even take plant roles at Jubilant Ingrevia, largely because the infrastructure and facilities weren’t built with them in mind. Getting past that meant working closely with leadership to actually name the unconscious bias, policy gaps and awareness gaps that were keeping things that way, rather than treating it as a training problem alone. The work took shape as:
- An industry-specific DEI strategy built for Jubilant Ingrevia’s context
- A 6-month intensive top leadership journey called Inclusion Immersion, focused on inclusive and gender intelligence leadership
- The Inclusive Leadership Index 360, based on the 6Cs of Inclusion competencies, for top leadership
- A Gender Intelligence rollout to people managers, sensitizing them and building skills to leverage the strengths and diversity of thought of the opposite gender
- A Gender Intelligence rollout at every plant, with the Ask Insights team personally visiting each location across the country
- Specifically curated Gender Intelligence and Inclusion programs covering 285 people managers
- Participation in Ask Insights’ Global DEI Summit and Awards
- Infrastructure consultation, policy restructuring, and guidance to improve women’s retention in plants
Key Results
- A broad shift in how people actually think about inclusion, not just how they talk about it
- A move from the existing culture toward one built on equal opportunity
- Employees increasingly describe the plants as psychologically safer, with unconscious bias showing up far less in daily interactions
- Significantly lower attrition rates
- The industry’s fastest recorded increase in women’s representation, from 3% to 10%, within 6 months
- Physical changes at plants to better support all genders, plus more inclusive policies and stronger leadership commitment
"I have realized that your sessions have touched me profoundly. You have a wonderful knack for gently nudging our biases and directing their course correction without rubbing it in too hard. This is the kind of wake-up call that is the need of the hour among all CEOs and CXOs. My colleagues and I at Jubilant can vouch for the need and relevance of your sessions across the industry."
ABB
Snapshot: A six-year women’s leadership program, RISE, with a 92% completion rate and gender diversity nearly doubling.
ABB, a Fortune 500 Swedish electric equipment manufacturer with operations in 100 countries, approached Ask Insights in 2018 wanting to get ahead of three connected problems: unconscious bias, low representation of women employees, and a lack of LGBTQIA+ inclusion. The goal wasn’t a one-off intervention, it was an authentic strategy framework that could actually hold up over time and support women’s retention and progression. That engagement has continued without interruption since.
Challenges
- Prevalence of unconscious gender bias
- Need for sensitization and hiring from the LGBTQIA+ community
- A lack of inclusive culture
- Limited growth opportunities for the women’s workforce, despite favorable policies already in place
Interventions
The starting point was diagnostic: understanding the specific unconscious biases, stereotypes and limiting beliefs already present at ABB, before trying to fix anything. From there, the focus shifted to sensitizing managers and the broader workforce, and gradually building a base of genuine allies and Employee Resource Groups rather than a top-down mandate. In practice, that meant:
- Unconscious Bias and Allyship Training delivered across workforce segments
- A high-impact women’s development program called RISE, run for 6 consecutive years to help high-potential women employees reach senior roles and build a career growth strategy
- Participation in Women’s Day sessions and the Global DEI Summit and Awards, where ABB won the Times of India and Ask Insights DEI Award 2023 in the Best Allyship and ERG Practices category
Key Results
- 16 Unconscious Bias sessions delivered, sensitizing 81% of people leaders
- A gamified platform built to promote allyship at ABB
- The flagship RISE Women Leadership Program successfully completed by 92% of participants, a completion rate worth noting on its own
- A Women Mentorship Program launched to support career growth for women employees
- Gender diversity nearly doubled, from 9% to 16.5% between 2018 and 2021
- ABB is now an equal-opportunity employer with a specific focus on LGBTQIA+ talent and reasonable accommodation
"Thank you, Dr. Niru Kumar, for taking our women leaders through several batches of the six-month development journey. It means a lot to us and strengthens our organization’s backbone for taking on future challenges. It has been delightful to hear very warm, transformative feedback about the program from the participants. I’ve also received equally revealing feedback from participants’ supervisors, who now observe higher confidence, aspiration and willingness to take on greater initiative. Your passion and expertise through the program has helped participants immensely in their journey of self-discovery, and in bringing their whole self to work and giving their best."
"The RISE Women Leadership Development Program from Ask Insights was very well customized and fits well with our vision of developing women leaders. We’ve received very warm feedback from participants."