Indra Nooyi No 4 among 18 women in Fortune 500 listing

Indra Nooyi, soft drink major PepsiCo's Indian-born CEO, is one of the 18 women who have shattered the glass ceiling to lead America's 500 largest corporations, according to Fortune magazine's latest ranking.

Nooyi, who leads the 41st biggest company in America, is ranked fourth among top women executives by the leading US business magazine.

She "has overseen a shift in focus from soft drinks into less profitable, albeit healthier, snack foods market in recent years,"

The list includes more women executives this year. Meg Whitman of Hewlett-Packard (10th) and Ginni Rometty of IBM (19th) also made it to the list, even though both started within the last year.

Also on the list are Patricia Woertz of agricultural processors Archer Daniels Midland, Irene Rosenfeld who heads up Kraft Foods and Ursula Burns who is CEO at Xerox and Sherilyn McCoy at Avon.

Rometty is IBM's first female CEO and Xerox chief Ursula Burns is the first African-American woman to head a Fortune 500 company. The top five female CEOs on the list all held positions in strategic planning before being appointed.

There are an additional 21 female CEOs in the Fortune 501-1000, some managing steel, oil and energy companies.

About 10 per cent of the top 500 US companies, and almost 40 per cent of Canada's 500 largest companies have no women on their boards, according to Catalyst, a nonprofit research organization advocating for more women in business.

With IANS inputs