Do we like them?

Do we like Indra Nooyi?

Our score: 7 out of 10. A decent record on women and workplaces, but no LGBTQ+ record to go on, and a stint on a Trump advisory forum that drew fire.

Indra Nooyi is the former boss of PepsiCo who now spends her time in boardrooms. As of May 2026 Fortune lists her on the boards of Amazon, Honeywell and Philips. She is one of the best-known corporate names to come out of India, and these days she mostly talks shop about leadership and technology.

Her messiest patch was politics. After the 2016 US election, supporters of Donald Trump called for boycotts of PepsiCo products over remarks about how some employees felt, and some of her comments were misreported online as attacks on him. She also said she congratulated Trump in the same interview, and Food Dive reports she was then named to his Strategic and Policy Forum.

The sting came in August 2017, when racial justice group Color of Change urged her to quit Trump's business council after his response to the Charlottesville riots. It called it “reprehensible” for any CEO to keep supporting the administration, and its director called PepsiCo an “enabler”. That is a group's criticism of her choice to stay on the council, not something she said herself.

On the harm check, her own words lean the right way. Food Dive reports she spoke out against derogatory talk about women at a post-election event, with the line “How dare we talk about women that way?” and that she had publicly backed Hillary Clinton. We found nothing from her either way on LGBTQ+ people or the climate, so that part of the file is simply thin.

Nothing new on her lately beyond the boardroom circuit. In May 2026 she told Fortune that directors who don't keep learning about AI may not be able to judge whether a company is serving shareholders. In 2021 she copped a social media pile-on over saying she'd never asked for a raise, then explained it was about her upbringing and said she supports equal pay.

The honest read: a respected executive with a long run of speaking up for women at work, one awkward chapter on a Trump council, and no sign of cruelty in anything we read. No court cases or misconduct allegations against her turned up. We couldn't open a few pages on her charity and honours, so we've left those out rather than guess.