02468%8.2%1998 2010 2021SHARE OF FORTUNE 500 CEOS
WHO ARE WOMENFORTUNE OCTOBER/NOVEMBER 2021 97culture, and ran the company from
2009 to 2015.THE PANDEMIC has thrown
work culture into a mind-
numbing chaos. But that
chaos has also challenged
the rigidity of corporate America,
which punished workers—especially
women—for asking for anything out-
side of its norms. “This is one of the
largest reorganizations of work for
professionals that’s ever happened,”
says Marianne Cooper, a sociologist
at the Stanford VMware Women’s
Leadership Innovation Lab. While
the majority of our survey respon-dents said working remotely would
have hurt their own trajectory, more
said that going forward remote work
would help women’s careers rather
than hurt them—a sign that change is
underway. “You can’t have a flexibility
stigma anymore if everyone is home,”
says Erin Reid, a professor at McMas-
ter University’s business school, who
studies gender in the workplace.
Jennifer Morgan left her job as
co-CEO of SAP last year and took
eight months off to spend some time
thinking about what she wanted to
do next. She is now the global head
of portfolio operations at Blackstone,
and the time she spent reassessing herown career has made her think more
broadly about what work should and
can look like. “We talk about digital
disruption, we talk about business
model disruption,” she says, “yet we
all still have a very traditional notion
of talent.” As she’s been building her
team, more candidates have been ask-
ing for something different: part-time
work for a very senior role, a scaled-
back position for a woman returning
from maternity leave. She has said yes
to all of it—something she might not
have done in the past.
Some academics believe that
a radical change in how jobs are
organized could really make a differ-
ence for working parents. But there
are clearly limits to how far up the
chain this kind of restructuring can
go. Like many companies, Kullman’s
Carbon instituted a no-meetings
policy one day a month to free em-
ployees from the tyranny of Zoom.
Kullman says it reenergizes people
and opens up mental space to dig
into big issues or problems. The
one person who does have meetings
that day? The CEO. “There’s always
something that comes in,” Kullman
says. As Nooyi puts it, “There is no
flexibility at the very top.”
Ex-PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi says women are rethinking their career aspirations.ERIK TANNER—REDUX