There's no such thing as 'having it all': What Indra Nooyi doesn't tell us

“I don’t think women can have it all. I just don’t think so. We pretend we have it all. We pretend we can have it all,” said Pepsi CEO Indra Nooyi in a brief Q&A with The Atlantic owner David Bradley that is now going viral on Twitter. Bradley asked Nooyi just two questions and received answers that were shockingly candid, more so from a CEO of a blue-chip company. The first response describes the reaction of her mother to Nooyi’s appointment as President of the board of directors 14 years ago. It was underwhelming, to put it mildly. [caption id=“attachment_1599853” align=“alignleft” width=“380”]  Indra Nooyi. AFP[/caption] When Nooyi went home, excited to share the news with her, she first ordered her daughter to get milk from the grocery store. Nooyi does as she is told, and then complains that her mother doesn’t care about her success. To which her mother replies: “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, you’re the daughter, you’re the daughter-in-law, you’re the mother. 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. You know I’ve never seen that crown.” It’s reads like a 80s Bollywood flashback, except this isn’t fiction, but a very painful moment in one daughter’s life. . Nooyi offers the anecdote as an example of how a woman’s professional success always entails a tradeoff – and inevitably, a tradeoff that the family is unlikely to appreciate. “[E]very day you have to make a decision about whether you are going to be a wife or a mother, in fact many times during the day you have to make those decisions. And 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 that I’ve been a good mom.” In an era of Sheryl ‘lean in’ Sandberg, Nooyi delivers a bracing jolt of honesty that reveals the price of having it all. Someone, somewhere is always unhappy, whether it is your boss, or your kid, or your husband, or the other parents at the PTA. This isn’t exactly welcome news for working mothers like me, but it is reassuring to know that Nooyi too “die(d) with guilt” when she couldn’t make it to parent meetings in school. To know I am not alone in that constant feeling flailing at life, never quite being on top of things either at work or at home. (Though if I may point out, Nooyi’s homemaker mother is most certainly not a contender for mother of the year) What I appreciate most about Nooyi’s comments is that it is one more blow against the pernicious discourse of “having it all”. Those three little words have ruined many a woman’s life, condemning her to a perpetual sense of dissatisfaction or failure. And taken together, they constitute a giant lie perpetuated in the name of women’s liberation. But Nooyi doesn’t go far enough in that she buys into Sandberg’s notion that all women (and men) would want to scale the peaks of corporate ladder if given a choice. That in itself constitutes a false burden that we need to discard. The discourse of ‘having it all’ first emerged when middle class women left the home to enter the workplace. Of course, poor women have always worked, often leaving their children in distant villages and towns, to support their families. But since employment for middle class women was considered a “choice,” they were allowed to do so only if they fulfilled their obligations at home. This social expectation soon turned into a personal standard of success as women became more ambitious. Having at all now means excelling both at home and at the office. Middling jobs with easy hours just don’t cut it any more as a marker of success for the modern woman. And at a time when the 21st century workplace grows ever demanding with long hours and constant travel. At the same, as Rosa Brooks points out in the Washington Post, the idea of a “good” parent is being defined ever upward, requiring constant engagement and attention.

And just as work has expanded to require employees’ round-the-clock attention, being a good mom has also started requiring ubiquity. Things were different in my own childhood, but today, parenting has become a full-time job: it requires attendance at an unending stream of school meetings, class performances and soccer games, along with the procurement of tutors, classes and enrichment activities, the arranging of play dates, the making of organic lunches and the supervising of labor-intensive homework projects.

More than any time in the past, anyone who tries to have it all today is doomed to failure. It may be time to ask whether any of us, man or woman, ought to – or even want to – aspire to such a goal. The truth is no one has it all. No one has ever had it all. Not even men. Societal expectations make it easier for working fathers to accept the price of long absences as the designated breadwinners, but it is no less of a loss, as many modern men increasingly realise. Increasingly, however, the joy of parenting cannot compensate for the loss of intellectual and professional engagement. Women, much as men did before, don’t see career as a luxury but as a necessity – both for their financial and emotional well-being. But none of this means we all have to become super parents and super-achievers, all at the same time, in the name of having it all. This is why so many are rethinking their life-work balance today – at least those who have the privilege to do so. Each of us has to choose our own brass ring, make our own individual trade-offs, and live with them the best we can. Some of us want to be CEO, others dream of flexi-hours, and others still of child-free vacations in the sand. We’re tinkering, experimenting, sometimes failing, other times succeeding, as we figure out the meaning of that much-desired “all”.