Dear Ms. Nooyi,
I heard the news that you’re stepping down as CEO of PepsiCo, and I wanted to take this opportunity to thank you. Not for doing a great job at PepsiCo, although I have no doubt you did, but for saying the things you did four years ago last month at the Aspen Ideas Festival.
I’ve spent much of my writing career drilling home the same point you made that day — that women can’t ‘have it all’ — so to hear someone in your position admit as much was refreshing. Women who are just starting out need to know that, as you said, in the end it’s about trade-offs.
“I don’t think women can have it all,” you told David Bradley of The Atlantic. “I just don’t think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all. My husband and I have been married for 34 years, and we have two daughters … We plan our lives meticulously so we can be decent parents. But if you ask our daughters, I’m not sure they will say that I’ve been a good mom. I’m not sure.”
As if your candor weren’t impressive enough, you went on to say something terribly unpopular yet obviously true:
Because of this, mothers who work to the degree that you did — you said you would typically remain at the office until midnight — suffer from a gnawing sense of guilt. “You have to cope,” you said, “because you die with guilt. You just die with guilt.”
To be fair, you aren’t the only woman in such an advanced position to make unpopular observations about work-family conflict. Just last year, Melinda Gates said this in an interview: “You can’t be the CEO and go as hard as you’re going and — somebody has to be at home, right? We didn’t want our children raised by somebody else. I said [to her husband Bill], ‘You know, if we want them to have the values we have, somebody has to be home.’”
And way back in 1998, Joyce Purnick, former Metropolitan editor at The New York Times, started a firestorm when she told the graduating class of Barnard College she’s “absolutely convinced I would not be the Metro editor of the Times if I had a family.”
These are all truisms our culture ignores in the name of gender equality. Motherhood is a full-time job of its own, as you admitted. “Being a CEO for a company is three full time jobs rolled into one,” you added. “How can you do justice to all? You can’t.”
No, you can’t.
That’s why women who plan to have children someday need to hear from women like you about what they’ll have to sacrifice in their climb to the top. They need to hear that motherhood is not only work but that it’s all-consuming. They need to hear that the women they’ll be after they become mothers bears no resemblance to the women they were before — and that’s a good thing. They need to hear that not only will their priorities change, but also that their children need them to be physically and emotionally present. They need to hear that the only way to avoid the guilt they’ll feel in not being there for their children is to, well, be there.
Your answer, you said, was to train your family to be your extended family. “If you don’t develop mechanisms with your secretaries, with the extended office, with everybody around you,” you said, “it cannot work.”
I appreciate that this plan worked for you, but American families are different from families in India. Most women here don’t have extended family to step in the way yours did. That’s one of the reasons you’re one of a small number of women who lead large corporations.
Now that you’ve left, there are a mere 24 women CEOs in the S&P, and the media elite — here and here, for example — are up in arms about it. The Economic Times says you haven’t done enough to promote women’s equality, what with your admitting how guilty you felt trying to be both a good CEO and a good mom.
I don’t know or care what you did or didn’t do to promote women’s equality. All I know is that the things you said that day were a thousand times more poignant, meaningful, helpful, and courageous than anything you could have or should have done in the name of equality.
Real women need real talk and real answers, and that’s what you’ve given them. And I, for one, thank you.
Suzanne Venker (@SuzanneVenker) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner’s Beltway Confidential blog. She is an author, speaker and cultural critic known as “The Feminist Fixer.” She has authored several books to help women win with men in life and in love. Her most recent, The Alpha Female’s Guide to Men & Marriage, was published in February 2017. Suzanne’s website is www.suzannevenker.com.
