PepsiCo, the makers of Doritos, thinks it has the solution for women snackers: cleaner and quieter chips. I admit when I first read that “Lady Doritos” was trending on Twitter, I thought it was some sort of joke. But I was wrong. As explained by the CEO, the company sees a need for cleaner and quieter snacks for women so they will make less noise and less mess than their male counterparts. The interview made its rounds on the internet, and users dubbed the idea ”Lady Doritos.”
Did the makers of the snack foods hop into some sort of time machine when no one was looking and head back to the 1950s? Because this “genius idea” (insert sarcastic eye roll) seems to be the machinations of some antiquated person or people who are completely out of touch with modern women. Or perhaps, this is PepsiCo’s attempt at a rebuttal to all the progress women have made over the last sixty or so years, or even just the last several months, in an effort to keep women acting “ladylike”?
In an interview aired on the Freakonomics Radio podcast, PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi said: “When you eat out of a flex bag — one of our single-serve bags — especially as you watch a lot of the young guys eat the chips, they love their Doritos, and they lick their fingers with great glee, and when they reach the bottom of the bag they pour the little broken pieces into their mouth, because they don’t want to lose that taste of the flavor, and the broken chips in the bottom. Women would love to do the same, but they don’t. They don’t like to crunch too loudly in public. And they don’t lick their fingers generously and they don’t like to pour the little broken pieces and the flavor into their mouth.
“…we are looking at it, and we’re getting ready to launch a bunch of them soon. For women, low-crunch, the full taste profile, not have so much of the flavor stick on the fingers, and how can you put it in a purse? Because women love to carry a snack in their purse.”
Not surprisingly, the internet erupted with sarcasm at PepsiCo’s absurd plans.
Rebecca Gerber started a Care2 petition asking PepsiCo to make sure the new Lady Doritos are cheaper to reflect the gender wage gap women still face.
On Twitter, Mark Campbell @MrWordsworth wrote that women need a chip that crunches so loud, “it shatters the glass ceiling.”
Thankfully, the internet has helped remind PepsiCo that women are fed up with being told what exactly constitutes “ladylike” or attractive female behavior. The reality is that we’ve been quiet too long and don’t need snack food manufacturers to contribute to the sexism and misogyny we’ve all experienced for way too long.
I can’t help but wonder if Lady Doritos will cost women more for the same amount of chips to reflect the gender-based pricing so many women still face in the marketplace when they try to get their hair cut or their car repaired.
Doritos won’t lose me as a customer as I have never been one. They lost me years ago when I read the ingredients list (now there’s a place where they don’t discriminate: they throw every garbage ingredient into a package and call it a snack food).
But I hope this backlash encourages PepsiCo to rethink its policies and hire more free-thinking women. Indeed, at the time of posting this article, PepsiCo says it will not launchLady Doritos as a product.
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