“Working women are screwed…”: Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi on why women struggle to balance career, children and family and can’t ‘have it all’

Photo credit: www.indranooyi.com

Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi once described the conflict many working women face as their careers and family responsibilities grow at the same time. In a 2014 conversation with David Bradley at The Aspen Institute, Nooyi spoke about the clash between building a career, raising children, supporting a spouse and caring for ageing parents. “The biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with each other,” Nooyi said. “When you have to have kids, you have to build your career,” she said. According to Nooyi, just as a woman begins moving into middle management, her children may enter their teenage years, when they need more attention from their parents. “Just as you’re rising to middle management, your kids need you because they’re teenagers, they need you for the teenage years,” she said.Nooyi then added another responsibility in a joking but pointed remark: “And that’s the time your husband becomes a teenager too. So he needs you.” “And as you grow even more, your parents need you because they’re aging,” she said. “So we’re screwed. I mean, we have no, we have no, we cannot have it all.”

“Build a support system around you”

Indra with her family. (Photo credit: www.indranooyi.com)

While Nooyi said women cannot simply “have it all”, she also spoke about ways to make demanding careers and family responsibilities work together. “But you know what? Coping mechanisms,” she said. Her advice was to create systems at work and at home instead of trying to personally handle every small responsibility. “Train people at work. Train your family to be your extended family,” Nooyi said.She gave an example from her own life when she was travelling frequently as PepsiCo’s CEO and her daughters were young. “When I’m in PepsiCo, I travel a lot and when my kids were tiny, especially my second one, we had strict rules on playing Nintendo,” she recalled. Her daughter Tara would call Nooyi’s office when she wanted permission to play. “She’d call the office. She didn’t care whether I was in China or Japan or India or wherever,” Nooyi said. The office staff knew exactly who was calling. “She’d call the office. The receptionist picks up the phone. ‘Can I speak to my mommy?’ Everybody knows if somebody says, ‘Can I speak to mommy,’ it’s my daughter.”The receptionist would then handle the request using a set of questions. “So she’d say, ‘Yes, Tara, what can I do for you?’ ‘I want to play Nintendo.’ And the receptionist has a set of questions. ‘Have you finished your homework?’” After going through the questions, the receptionist could make the decision according to the rules Nooyi had already established. “She goes through the questions and she says, ‘Okay, you can play Nintendo half an hour,’” Nooyi said. The receptionist would then leave Nooyi a message explaining what had happened. “But she leaves me a message. ‘Tara called at five. This is what the sequence of questions I went through. I’ve given her permission.’”

“If you don’t develop mechanisms… it cannot work”

For Nooyi, the example was not really about playing Nintendo. It was about creating a system that allowed her children to reach her office and receive an answer even when she was travelling. “So it’s seamless parenting,” she said. “But if you don’t do that, I’m serious, if you don’t develop mechanisms with your secretaries, with the extended office, with everybody around you, it cannot work.” She also compared the demands of full-time motherhood with those of running a major company. “Motherhood, stay-at-home mothering was a full-time job,” Nooyi said. “Being a CEO of a company is three full-time jobs rolled into one. How can you do justice to all? You can’t,” she said.

Nooyi said the spouse can feel left out too

Photo credit: www.indranooyi.com

Nooyi also spoke about the effect that such a demanding career can have on a marriage. She said the person who can feel neglected in the process is often the spouse. “The person that hurts the most with this whole thing is your spouse. There’s no question about it,” she said. She then recalled what her husband, Raj, would tell her about where he stood on her list of priorities. “You know, Raj always says, you know what, your list is PepsiCo, PepsiCo, PepsiCo, your two kids, our two kids, your mom, and then the bottom of the list is me.” “There are two ways to look at it. You should be happy you’re on the list,” she said with humour. After a pause, she added: “So don’t complain. Just don’t complain,” Nooyi said. “He is on the list, very much on the list.”