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.