Indra Nooyi Says Upbringing Influenced Her Thinking on Pay
Nooyi said the comments about a raise are in the context of her upbringing, and that she’s a firm advocate of pay parity.
(Bloomberg) -- Indra Nooyi, the India-born former chief executive officer of PepsiCo. Inc., said comments she made about never having asked for a raise should be seen in the context of her upbringing, and that she’s a firm advocate of pay parity.
As part of her personal background growing up in Chennai, Nooyi said said she was brought up never to ask for anything, and that rewards would come to those who performed well. In an interview published Friday in Fortune, Nooyi said didn’t want her comments on pay to be interpreted to suggest she thought others shouldn’t ask for raises.
“You can’t take the cultural upbringing out of me,” Nooyi, who retired from Pepsi in 2018, told the magazine. “This is not what I’m preaching at all, not what I’m suggesting, not what I’m recommending.”
In a separate interview with the Wall Street Journal published Saturday, Nooyi explained that employees shouldn’t have to demand pay parity for the same job. It should, she said, happen as a matter of course.
“I hope we have now progressed to a point where there’s enough sensitivity about equal pay for the same jobs that HR departments and companies are looking at this metric regularly and calibrating to make sure that they’re paying every person the same for the same job,” she told the WSJ.
Nooyi now sits on Amazon.com Inc.’s board and recently published a memoir called “My Life in Full.”
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