Indra Nooyi may have led one of the world’s top soda purveyors for 12 years—but she keeps her advice sugar-free.
Over the course of the former PepsiCo CEO’s decade-plus tenure—during which sales grew 80%—Nooyi was named the most powerful women in business by Fortune five years in a row. She stepped down from the CEO role in 2018 and retired from PepsiCo’s board in 2019, after 24 years with the company.
At the 2019 Fortune Most Powerful Women conference, Nooyi was asked for her thoughts on balancing family and work as a woman. “To integrate work and family is going to be a challenge,” Nooyi said, and the first issue that needs to be addressed is unconscious bias in the workplace.
“When bias happens in the workforce, it strips away a woman’s confidence,” she said. “When it attacks your confidence, it attacks your competence.”
How can women address the “vicious circle” of unconscious bias? Nooyi found inspiration in an unexpected place: Sex and the City. It was Carrie & Co.’s Manolo Blahnik shoes and Christian Dior dresses that first caught Nooyi’s attention—but she ended up learning a surprising lesson from the show’s four main characters.
“Their sisterhood was so strong, they never judged each other, they supported each other,” Nooyi said. “They could talk about Mr. Big in a very private environment.”
Working women need their own sisterhoods, Nooyi continued, and to work together to call out unconscious biases. “We tend to compete with ourselves, and I think it’s getting better, but we have to really step it up.” she told Fortune in 2015.
And yes, Nooyi admitted to taking time out of her busy schedule to binge-watch the HBO show. “I loved the first episode, so I watched all 94 episodes of it, staying up at night,” she said.
Biological clock vs. career clock
Although she has led an illustrious career, Nooyi, who has two daughters, shared that she had felt “guilt” over balancing family and work. As she said at the 2014 Aspen Ideas Festival: “The biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with each other.”
The years women often dedicate to career development frequently overlap with the years they are expected to have children, Nooyi said. Children become teenagers just as their mothers rise to middle management, and “that’s the time your husband becomes a teenager,” Nooyi joked. As the years pass, aging parents require care as well.
“We’re screwed,” Nooyi said. “We cannot have it all.”
At the Aspen event, Nooyi shared an unconventional tip for coping with the guilt of not being able to dedicate more time to her home life. Her daughter’s school hosted weekly Wednesday morning “class coffees” with students’ mothers. When her daughter got home, she would name all the mothers who were there: “You were not there, mom.”
“The first few times, I would die with guilt, but I developed coping mechanisms,” Nooyi said. “I called the school and I said, give me a list of mothers who were not there.”
The next time her daughter brought up the class coffees, Nooyi listed off the other moms who didn’t show up. “I’m not the only bad mother,” she laughed.
Opening doors
Nooyi left PepsiCo in 2019 after 24 years with the company. Today, she serves on the boards of Amazon and the International Cricket Council. She has been celebrated for introducing design thinking and developing a culture of learning at PepsiCo—and being one of the first, and few, women of color to lead a Fortune 500 company.
“Given my background and where I come from—crossing oceans as an immigrant, a person of color, a woman—ascending to lead this iconic company was a tough slog,” Nooyi told Fortune’s Emma Hinchliffe in 2022.
“I’d love to see the most unusual, improbable people ascending to the top,” she continued. “Let’s give them the tools to move ahead.”
