“Paid leave is a human issue. It’s not a political issue”

BIANNA GOLODRYGA: Well, our next guest is a trailblazing business woman who made her name as the first female CEO of drinks giant, PepsiCo. Indra Nooyi was the first woman of color and immigrant to run a Fortune 50 company. Well, now, she’s looking back at the experiences that shaped her in a new book called “My Life in Full: Work, Family & Our Future.” And here she is with Hari Sreenivasan.

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HARI SREENIVASAN: Bianna, thanks. Indra Nooyi, thanks for joining us. So, you grew up in India, self-described as a tall nerdy girl that played the guitar and you had the support of your parents to not just play the guitar but go away to school, who didn’t pressure you into getting married right away. I mean, culturally speaking, that sort of support from your father and your family, that’s sort of hitting the lottery ticket in itself.

INDRA NOOYI, AUTHOR, “MY LIFE IN FULL: WORK, FAMILY & OUR FUTURE”: You’re absolutely right. If there’s one big place where I won the lottery of life, it’s the family that I was born into and the time that I was born into it. Because, remember, I was born eight years after independence. It was very early in the evolution of India. And nobody knew what the role of women was going to be in society at that time. And here I am in this very progressive family, where my grandfather and my father are saying, the women should be allowed to be educated and they should soar, they should dream, they should do whatever they want to do. And we’re not going to differentiate between the men and the women. And my poor mother, who, you know, on the one hand, was living her life vicariously through her daughters, on the other hand, had to conform to society and think about what guys should we match make with the daughters for the arranged marriage. So, she had one foot on the break and one foot in the accelerator. We were allowed to dream and do whatever we wanted to do, within the frame. So, there was freedom but within a frame. So, it was a great upbringing.

SREENIVASAN: There’s a quote that I wanted to read out. It says, “As a study in contrast, India respected worshipped women and mother remained the most revered person in our family. But she was ignored in a most curious way, unpaid and toiling to keep everything going even when her husband retired. No one seemed to ask too many questions about any of this, even though it was the labor that formed the backbone of society. You know, and I think back in my own life when I was kid and my mom working two jobs and I never really thought about how it was magically a hot meal was still there for my father and I every day.

NOOYI: And, you know, many families that I see, the father, even if he’s retired, is sitting on an easy chair and calling for the wife to bring a cup of coffee and that poor mother has to make herself her own cup of coffee. Nobody does it for her. So, I think the mother has been unpaid worker and the backbone of all families. And, you know, people rarely say thank you to the mom. She’s the punching bag. And I think that in today’s world, mothers are still the backbone, but I think mothers also want economic freedom and financial freedom in saying, hey, you know what? I count.

SREENIVASAN: You know, as we read through the book, you have this pattern diving very deep and doing the homework in whatever you’re about to tackle, whether it’s, you know, a chemistry or an engineering problem. And so, I want to ask like, when you started to look at this about performance in the workplace, about women, about leadership, what did you find as the sort of common best practices that exist today that we’re not taking advantage of?

NOOYI: Well, I must have read research papers published world over, I read book, I talk to authors, talk to people from thinktanks. There isn’t a stone that would be left unturned. Really did the homework. And numbers were not pretty at all. Because every which way I turn in whichever county, women were getting more college degree. They were hungry to progress in the workplace. They wanted to power of the purse. They want economic freedom. They don’t want to be borna and be viewed as the unpaid laborer for life. They want to be counted as people. And all the women I was coming across are reading about were unbelievable talents. But for some reason, the same women were struggling to balance, you know, family, you know, nurturing and the job. And even inside the workplace, even though we’ve made some progress, they were all facing incredible bias, you know, subtle bias, improving over time but it was still there, which was sapping their confidence and in turn, their competence. I throw one statistic out to you, Hari. MIT has got 47 percent women engineers. Caltech, Georgia Tech, these topnotch engineering schools are 30, 35 percent. Do you know that Silicon Valley only has 2.3 percent of its funding going to women founders? 2.3 percent. That’s not a number. That’s a rounding error. So, I sit there going, what happened to all of these brilliant, brilliant, brilliant women? They go to Silicon Valley. They’re dead. And I think we have to really start to rethink how we view women as a talent, not as a gender. You know, gender is secondary. They’re just an awesome talent.

SREENIVASAN: You advocate for different policies near the end, but you also write about how lucky and privileged you were to have paid family leave when your father was ill. How you had good medical care when you got into a car accident. You had good health care and family leave when you had your children. This is just not the norm for the bulk of workers in the United States right now.

NOOYI: And I feel guilty about the fact that I had it and they don’t. If the first paid leave at BCG and my father was — you know, a guidance to cancer was not given to me, I don’t know what the trajectory of my life would have been, because I would have had to quit the job because my family came before everything else and I was going to take care of my father. And, you know, even though they gave me six months, at the end of three months he died and at three months, two days, I was back at work. So, didn’t abuse the paid leave. So, I really worry about the people who don’t have access to any paid leave. Now, I will tell you, I think paid leave is a human issue, it’s not a political issue. Having children is a family issue, not a female issue. And if we think economists, not feminists, I think we would be doing everything possible to encourage family creating, nurturing families and paid leave as a part of that. Now, I understand small and medium size enterprises will have an issue with paid leave because if you have few employees and two people leave because they’re going to have a child or take care of an ill parent, we have a problem. But let’s start with the concept of saying, we want to implement paid leave. And then, put the best brains to figure out how to come up with solutions.

SREENIVASAN: I want to ask a little bit about your time as the head of Pepsi. I mean, here you are implementing or trying to implement these changes, which are, in some part, cultural. You said — you had a story in there about the search for a sea level executive in PepsiCo India. What happened there?

NOOYI: This is one perhaps one that amused me so much. I was in PepsiCo India and the senior management were all men and I said, hey guys, you’re looking for a CFO. Why don’t you use that position to bring a really qualified woman into the job? And they looked at me and said, no, not really because if woman comes in and her husband gets transferred, she will leave. I said, oh, really? So, what? What happened to the CFO that you had, the guy? Oh, his wife got a big promotion, so he left. I couldn’t believe they were telling me this. You just told me the guy moved for his wife, which makes all the sense in the world, it’s a partnership. But you’re telling me that if a guy moves, you automatically compliment him for being supportive of his wife? But if the wife moves, it’s a destruction. Why this double standard? You know, when it was pointed out to them and they sort of were embarrassed for a while, they went out and got an outstanding woman who was a CFO for a long time. I think in many cases, we have to call people out on their behavior, which they don’t even understand as crazy, and then coach them into changing their behaviors. And I think we have to do more and more of that because that’s just one example I put in the book, Hari. There’s just so many of these that are amusing in retrospect.

SREENIVASAN: One of the insights that you gained was that you had visibility into how people were getting and giving performance reviews. And you talk about the sort of and but dichotomy. Explain that.

NOOYI: So, one of the things I found sitting in performance appraisals, as a senior, on my direct reports of bringing sort of the very senior people and their teams and talk about their performance for the year, and I found a disturbing pattern. When it came to the men’s performance appraisals, it would say, he delivered on most of his objectives and his potential is fantastic. When it came to the woman, it would say, she delivered great on all her objectives, but I’m not sure she has potential. And I just look at them and say, he didn’t deliver on all his objectives but his potential is great. She did great during the year but for some reason, you decided her potential was not great. Can you help me understand this? And they look at me and said, well, she’s too abrasive or she’s just too tough on people. For men, that was considered normal behavior. Some for the woman was considered not acceptable behavior. So, I had to tell people, go back, figure out how to work with her to give her the right coaching, but I want you to figure out how to make it work. Now, to be honest with you, Hari, in some cases, I managed to change people’s attitudes about that particular female executive. In some cases, I didn’t because the points of view were very entrenched or they had a point. So, I had to make allowances for that, but pointing out this behavior of and and but, I sensitize the organization to an implicit bias that needed to be rooted out.

SREENIVASAN: Now, recently, I heard a CEO of a major retailer say that the pandemic gave him an opportunity to watch his granddaughter learn how to crawl, how to stand, how to walk and he realized that he hadn’t seen that of his own children, that he was too busy on airplanes and hotel rooms. And I’m wondering, do you feel like that? I mean, here you are advocating for this better balance but do you feel like you missed out on a lot as you were climbing these rungs on the ladder?

NOOYI: I missed it and my husband missed it. Both of us missed it. We were very good parents and that one of us was always home every night and if my kids were ill or they needed me, I was the first one out of the office to go to the kids. If the school called to said, your daughter sprained an ankle, I was the first one out. But I did miss a lot of seminal moments. And the technology had not progressed enough when I was rising. So, there was no smartphone, there was no Zoom, there was no nothing. So, if I traveled, I was on a different clock. And so, I couldn’t even respond to the kids right away. Pagers was as advanced as we got. So, if I had to do it all over again, Hari, I wish I was CEO in these times because I would have had the glory of all technologies, I would have had flexible work hours. Boy, I would have been such a hands-on mom, my kids have gotten crazy but — having mom around, but at least I wouldn’t have missed as much as I missed.

SREENIVASAN: You know, there’s also this dichotomy that the pandemic revealed white collar work who have access to flexible schedules and remote work, and then what were largely categorized as essential workers or shift workers who can’t zoom into their jobs, right? So, ho doesn’t an employee who has workers, who have to show up at cash register every day for whatever, on the factory floor for a number of hours, what can they do to try and improve that relationship that the employee has with their families?

NOOYI: You know, that’s a great question because want to, you know, almost challenge CEOs and say, the amount of time you’re talking about future of work for their workweek, hybrid flexible work hours for the office worker who actually has the luxury of thinking through all this, I wish we could spend as much, if not more time thinking about the essential worker. What are they getting paid? What kind of support structures are we building for them? Do we have traditional hours and non-traditional hours? Because what happens to the third shift worker who is working the, you know, 8:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. shift? I think the effort we are putting in for the office worker, which is very necessary because you need them to keep the companies going. The knowledge worker. I think we have to expand that much if not more energy figuring out how to keep the essential worker on the job and happy and engaged. Because they don’t get paid big bucks. They don’t have potential, for huge outside stockings, they don’t get all the benefits that office workers get. So, I think it’s critically, critically important that along with putting families at the core of the discussion, the essential worker has to be in the core of the discussion because they enable the life that we’re all leading today and will lead in the future, Hari.

SREENIVASAN: When you came in, there were very few, if any, women leading Fortune 50, Fortune 500 companies. And when you left, sadly, it hasn’t improved that much. I mean, it’s — when you look at these numbers, they’re still startling, how systemic and structural the changes need to be to see leadership in the biggest companies in the world reflect half the population.

NOOYI: You know, it doesn’t happen often overnight though, you’ve got to build the pipeline very, very systemically, and that’s where I started. Because when I stepped down, people kept saying, you didn’t replace yourself with a woman. How come? So, you know, first, I feel terrible about it. Believe me. But then, I had two thoughts as I thought through why I didn’t replace myself with the woman. First, I gave industry a lot of women executives, because they left PepsiCo in about the third or fourth level of the company to run smaller companies because they didn’t want to stick around for, you know, the choice to run this big company, this big behemoth. So, they left to become CEOs with smaller companies. That’s OK, but I still didn’t replace myself with a woman. The problem lies here. They never asked the male CEO when he steps down, why didn’t you replace yourself with a woman? But they asked women CEOs, why didn’t you replace yourself with a woman? Very fair. 8.5 percent of the Fortune 500 companies have got women CEOs, tiny, versus 0 and 94, about 2 percent in 2006 and now it’s 8.5. So, I’ll take this progress, glacial though it might be. What do we need to do? Let’s look at the pyramid, Hari, it narrows massively when it gets to the top. So, there’s about 10,000 people at the entry level, it becomes 15 people as direct reports to the CEO and then then one CEO. And after 15 reports, probably six or seven are CEO contenders. For a woman to be considered, that person is going to have to be super extraordinary or there’s going to be a lot of people at the senior management level that you can pick from. So, for a disproportionate representation of women at the senior level, we need to build a pipeline. And what we find is we’re losing women about the second and third level in their prime childbearing years. They go, can’t do it. There’s no support structure. I can’t come into work and face unconscious bias and then go home with all that baggage. I just can’t do it. So, they their leave big companies or they leave the job, you know, situation completely or start up something on their own. And so, I think that if we put in place in large companies the right support structures to keep them, even from workplace flexibility, I think we can actually keep them. And that’s what prompted them to put the onsite childcare in PepsiCo, onsite and nearside childcare. And the employees paid for it but it was a fantastic perk, which actually gave families peace of mind where they could come to work and their child was very well taken care of and they could actually go and check on the child now and then. Now, you add flexibility. I think our chances are getting better that we could actually see women advance in the workforce a lot more provided we don’t say, people who come into work five days a week are going to get preferential treatment over people who only come in three days a week. I worry about these two classes of citizens emerging. If that doesn’t happen, Hari, we have a chance to see women in public (ph) America to be leaders of big companies.

SREENIVASAN: Indra Nooyi, thanks so much for joining us.

NOOYI: Thank you, Hari. Thank you for inviting me. It was a pleasure talking with you.