I Am OK, You Are OK

Indra Nooyi, the Pepsi CEO, says women can only pretend to have it all. She has been among Forbes magazine’s ‘most powerful women in the world’ feature list since 2006; this year she is ranked at the 13th position. Her salary last year was £7.3m (yep). She has been married for 34 years and has two teenage daughters. It’s a pretty cheerful picture, I would say. If I were Nooyi, I would wake up every single mornings delirious with pride.

Last week, Nooyi was interviewed on stage at the Aspen Ideas Festival and, inevitably, the question of whether or not women can have it all came up. In reply, she told a story about the night she was made president of the company, 14 years ago, when she was only 44. Impressive.

She was working late when she got a call from the chairman, saying they were going to announce her appointment. “I was overwhelmed because, look at my background and where I came from–to be president of an iconic American company and to be on the board of directors, I thought something special had happened to me,” she said, not unreasonably.

So instead of staying at the office and working until midnight, which she normally would have done, she decided to go home at 10 pm and tell her family.

She found her mother waiting for her at the stairs. “Mom, I’ve got great news for you,” Nooyi said. Her mother replied: “Let the news wait. Can you go out and get some milk?”

Indra Nooyi, a naturalised American, was born in Tamil Nadu. And for a lot of people with an Indian mother of their own, this maternal authoritarian rhetoric will sound familiar.

The family has a staff. So Nooyi asked her mother why she didn’t ask them to get the milk. “I forgot,” she explained, “just get the milk, we need it for the morning.” So like a dutiful daughter, she went out and got the milk.

When she came back, she told her mother about her stellar promotion. Her mother’s reply was as follows: “Let me explain something to you. You might be president of PepsiCo. But when you enter this house, you’re the wife, you’re the daughter, you’re the daughter-in-law and you’re the mother. Nobody else can take that place. So leave that damned crown in the garage and don’t bring it into the house.”

Nice Indian women don’t tell their mothers to stick the milk where the sun doesn’t shine. So Nooyi took it on the chin, apparently not realising that this story makes her mother sound like a controlling and emotionally abusive husband. Of course, you’re a wife, a mother, a daughter and so on, but women should never forget that you’re also yourself.

In the interview, Nooyi went on to say that women could only pretend to have it all. She mentioned how she was blessed with all the people in her life that helped her. “You have to co-opt a lot of people to help you. We co-opted our families to help us. We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I’m not sure they will say I’ve been a good mom,” she said. One of her daughters used to list all the mothers who had gone to such and such, highlighting her own mother’s absence, and then say, “You were not there, Mom.” Nooyi said she felt as if she would die with guilt.

Do you? I don’t. I’m not running PepsiCo, but I don’t buy this at all, the idea that going out to work means women should be tortured with guilt. Work is what people do. You work, then you have some money, then you spend it to make sure your family has a nice time. So no, you do not die with guilt.

Nooyi has a child who needed a stiff face-to-face talk with a passive-aggressive, even aggressive mother. Her success should not cause her to feel guilty. It should cause her to say: “I could be at all the coffee mornings, but you’d have no toys, nor nice clothes. And mother—they bring milk to your room. Fancy it?”

Most of what Nooyi said was right, especially about the risky business of having teenagers and ageing parents at the same time. Nooyi also mentioned how the biological clock and the career clock are in total complete conflict with each other–something that is straightforwardly true. But, she is wrong about guilt. It’s important to understand this. And if the multimillion-earning, staff-employing, extended-family-living, 13th most powerful woman in the world can’t see it, it doesn’t bode well for ordinary people.

Families are organisms that evolve. Striving away from a medieval model is a good thing. Working women should feel pride, not guilt. Keep the crown in the garage? Nonsense. Stick the crown where it belongs, right on your head.