My Life in Full: Work, Family, and Our Future

In her work, Indra Nooyi makes the case that women’s contributions to workplaces and the economy have been undervalued and under-supported. The author celebrates the fact that women are more educated and empowered now than in previous generations, but she also argues that there are still significant obstacles to women’s professional success. These include gender discrimination in the form of unfair pay practices and bias in hiring, as well as a lack of paid maternity leave and childcare infrastructure.

Nooyi’s personal anecdotes reveal how these biases manifest in practice, persuading the reader that they are a persistent—and consequential—problem. For example, even as a top-level executive at PepsiCo, she learned that she had been paid less than her male counterparts and uncovered that HR systematically remunerated males more than females. She recalls: “[A] woman would get 95 percent of the base pay of a man doing the same work. If I asked why she was getting 5 percent less, I’d be told, ‘It’s such a small difference, don’t worry about it.’ Sometimes I’d fight back a little, with ‘Why don’t we pay her 105 percent of what he is getting?’ It was always an uphill battle” (171). Conversations like this help illustrate how quieter or smaller examples of sexism represent much larger systems of oppression.

The author persuades the reader that a lack of government or company-paid maternity leave and personal leave makes it difficult for women to balance their careers with having a family. As a consequence, many women who want to continue working leave their jobs, since they feel it is impossible to adequately care for their family and succeed professionally at the same time. As such, Nooyi believes that paid parental leave will help women continue to be productive at work, and it is an investment in individual success as well as overall economic health. She explains how essential these benefits are to creating a healthy workforce, as “[w]omen who take paid leave are 93% more likely to be in the workforce twelve months after a child’s birth than women who take no leave” (283). For people at any level of power to care about women returning to the workforce—and thus feel motivated to make changes in benefits—they need to realize the value of women in the workplace. Men express a disregard for women’s contribution to their companies throughout her memoir, but Nooyi disproves their ideas of her value as a businesswoman by notably improving each workplace. Her time as CEO markedly benefited PepsiCo. She required lots of help with childcare and paid leave to do so, however, and so she acts as an exemplar of what can happen when women are supported in the workplace.

To uproot the sexism that creates systems of bias like this in the first place, Nooyi discusses how the most basic expectations for women need to be scrutinized and changed. She uses personal narratives to make this point by discussing her upbringing. While her parents and grandparents were generally very supportive of her education and career, she felt that she was still judged by the traditional standards for women, namely that she become a wife and mother. She points to her mother’s mixed messages of achieving academic excellence but also maintaining a traditional family life. She remembers: “When I was a little girl, she asked me to make speeches pretending I was India’s prime minister. She also worried about me finding a husband. One foot on the accelerator, one foot on the brake” (184). These different pressures led Nooyi to feel as though she must be highly successful in her career without feeling openly proud of her accomplishments. Instead, she had to “capture the crown but leave it in the garage” (184). These mindsets pressure women to fulfill traditional patriarchal ideas of a woman’s role in society; even if they want to pursue a profession, they must still be tied to the home. Additionally, they need to be outstanding in each role without the support necessary. Her work argues that women must be allowed to fully embrace their ambitions and achievements and that practical support in the form of fair hiring, pay, and paid leave will allow them to do so, while also benefiting the companies they serve.