I heard with
a sinking feeling that PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi has added her voice to the chorus
of successful, high-earning women opining that women can't have it all, but
even I was not prepared for the level of incredulity felt when I actually read her
interview. I struggle with her message not because I believe that women can
have it all – I don't; I don't believe men can have it all either – but because
I wonder why women, even successful women, are so quick to blindly reinforce
that "women can't have it all." Why can't high-profile women
turn around and ask the better question – the right question: why is all this
angst arising in women alone?
When was the
last time we heard men acknowledge and worry publicly about not having it all?
Children grow up while fathers are in boardrooms, courtrooms, schoolrooms,
hospitals, and city councils, yet men don't tell each other that they are
missing an important part of life by working till midnight. From an early age,
and over countless generations, men have swallowed, imbibed, absorbed the fact
that days are made of finite hours that need to be handed over to the world of
work. And the nature of work, when strategically chosen, will give back enough
to take a wife who will keep house while raising babies. Men have thus always
pretended they have it all.
I am not
saying that the ways of men are in anyway superior to the ways that have been
handed to, and meekly embraced by, middle- and upper-class women. I am saying
that my writer-husband, who is the stay-at-home father and primary care-giving
parent, who wrote minimally in the last 12 years while appreciating the
opportunity to raise three young children, knows better than to turn around and
tell other men that they aren't having it all or that I, as a woman, am not
having it all.
My husband's
day-to-day routine is very different from those of other men, but his decision
to take over for me gives us both some peace and calm. There is some angst on
his part on devoting less time to his writing and the consequences for his
lifelong earning potential, but he figures that something will work out when
the time is right. Most importantly, my husband knows better than to accept
snide, put-us-down comments from other people (men and women alike, including
an occasional friend or relative) as justifications for why we cannot dream of
a different life than the ones expected from both sexes.
It is
frustrating that even powerful women like Indra Nooyi refuse to see the forest
for the trees; refuse to question the system; refuse to acknowledge that some
of our most vicious and powerful and inadvertent detractors are other women around us.
Sometimes, these women live in our homes or hearts and subtly and effectively
undermine the confidence and dignity we have managed to earn gradually over the
years. Yes, I am alluding to Nooyi's now-famous milk-buying episode that has
several women gushing with awe that even the most powerful, corporate woman
that India has ever produced meekly went out to buy milk on the day she was
appointed president of PepsiCo.
As a good
Indian daughter, Nooyi takes her mother's words at face value. But I am distressed that she actually used it
to justify the glib idea that women, and women alone, cannot have
it all. In my view, the episode inside her home was unfair and discriminatory
towards her. Perhaps her mother was having a bad day, but if Indra Nooyi were a
man, I am convinced that her mother would not have taken it out on her in such
a manner.
Here are the
facts as she recounted during the recent Aspen Ideas Festival: Her husband was
home at 8 p.m. but her mother accepted that he was tired. They had a couple of
people at home who were hired domestic help, but her mother apparently forgot
that they existed. Nooyi came home at 10 p.m. with news that only one in a billion
women has the privilege to announce – that she had just been promoted to
president of a multinational corporation – but her mother dismissed it like so
much spoilt milk. Worse, even after Nooyi finally told her, her mother did not
soften up or give in; did not congratulate her or apologize for having been
preoccupied with an everyday detail. Instead, she justified putting her and her
accomplishments down. Now imagine if she were a son, instead of a daughter.
This is how her mother's words would sound:
Let me explain something to you. You might be president of
PepsiCo. You might be on the board of directors. But when you enter this house,
you're the wife husband, you're the daughter son, you're the daughter-in-law
son-in-law, you're the mother father. You're all of that. Nobody else
can take that place. So leave that damned crown in the garage. And don't bring
it into the house.
The question
is not whether anybody else could have taken her place; the question is whether
she was treated reasonably well even under her own roof. Why does Nooyi internalize
this and recount this as a story about her
gender? Why not blame it on her mother's
gender, disposition, generation and upbringing? Maybe the fixed values and
expectations of our culture need to shoulder some blame.
More
depressing is Nooyi's implied acceptance of this personal incident as an
anecdote to support the theme that even women in her stature can't have it all.
What is the moral of this story to middle- and working-class women? What are
women like me supposed to take out of it in our quest to better juggle our work
and family?
Ms. Nooyi,
if ever your PR folks stumble upon this blog post, here is my humble list of 'dos
and don'ts' requests to you:
- Please don't make it easy for naysayers of either sex by doing their facile job for them. Think about the power of your utterances.
- Talk to us about how to recognize sabotaging and undermining, at work and at home. Keep the progressive people's collective morale up by highlighting the unusual strides in parenting that pockets of men and women have quietly achieved with and without the help of their spouses, family, friends, and bosses.
- Give us solid, usable advice about how to "develop mechanisms with…secretaries,…extended office,…everybody around [us]" to practice "seamless parenting" when most of us don't bring in billions for our companies; when most of us cannot reasonably expect to "train people at work" to be our extended family.
- Tell us what policies you and your company have implemented to ensure that even your receptionists and secretaries can hope to co-opt men and women around them to support them in their parenting responsibilities.
- Help the younger generation understand which job sectors and industries, which companies, genuinely care, and at what levels of pay, about their employees' commitments as parents, caregivers, and socially responsible people.
- Ask why only women have begun to tell each other that they cannot manage to balance it all. Are male spouses the elephants in the family room that everybody ignores? Do women allow their husbands to 'lean back' and not 'lean in' at family meetings?
Nooyi has
more influence than most people in this world, men or women. She has the power
to think, talk and act in ways that can bring about some change in this world. Yet,
when she too casually reinforces the idea that the problem is in women's
expectations, we have to wonder if and how the system benefits from all this visible
hand-wringing by women. If she really cannot
see how far she has come, then we might as well all give up here and now, as
her interview has already been described as the "interview of the year."
