'Successful Career Women Can't Have it All' - Pepsi CEO, Indra Nooyi

It's always been said that it is possible for women to both lean in to their careers and have a happy and successful home life, however, PepsiCo chair and CEO Indra Nooyi acknowledges that’s a real struggle.

Speaking at the Aspen Ideas Festival this week, Nooyi said that women “cannot have it all,” and that “the biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with one another. Total and complete conflict.”

“Stay-at-home mothering was a full-time job,” Nooyi says. “Being a CEO of a company is three full-time jobs rolled into one. How can you do justice to all? You can’t. The person that hurts the most with this whole thing is your spouse.”

Having a successful career and children is an exercise in hard choices, compromise, depending on other people, and coming up with coping mechanisms, she says:

"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. My husband and I have been married for 34 years. And we have two daughters. And every 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. I'm not sure. And I try all kinds of coping mechanisms.

My observation, David, is that the biological clock and the career clock are in total conflict with each other. Total, complete conflict. When you have to have kids you have to build your career. Just as you're rising to middle management your kids need you because they're teenagers, they need you for the teenage years.

And that's the time your husband becomes a teenager too, so he needs you (laughing). They need you too. What do you do? And as you grow even more, your parents need you because they're aging. So we're screwed. We have no... We cannot have it all.

The person who hurts the most through this whole thing is your spouse. There's no question about it.

“Raj always says to me,’Your list is PepsiCo, PepsiCo, PepsiCo, our two kids, your mom, and then at the bottom of the list is me,’” Nooyi says."