Working mum who has bottle to own up

IT is always disheartening when someone who knows what they’re talking about shatters a close - held myth. So i t was this week when Indra Nooyi, a wife, a mother and CEO of PepsiCo, admitted t hat, actually, women can only pretend to have it all.

‘I try all kinds of coping mechanisms,’ she said during a speech in Colorado. ‘You know, you have to cope because you die with guilt.’

Nooyi knows what she’s talking about. PepsiCo is the world’s second largest food and drink business. Her marriage has lasted 34 years. She has two well-adjusted daughters. On the surface, she’s the poster woman for having it all.

That even a working mother with all the childcare and assistance that a £7.3million salary presumably brings thinks it is an impossible achievement is, on the surface, depressing.

What hope do the rest of us have if even she can’t make it work? Yet I don’t find Nooyi’s declaration upsetting in the least.

The truth is that women – all women – need someone like Nooyi, who is ranked this year at number 13 on Forbes list of the world’s most powerful women, to stand up and admit that it’s hard.

She is the antithesis of individuals such as Nicola Horlick, the City superwoman with six children who brushed off any suggestion that the work-life balance was a compromise, or Karren Brady, who went back to her job as managing director at Birmingham City FC two days after she gave birth.

Such women are about as helpful to working mothers as Gisele Bundchen in a bikini is to an insecure teenager with an eating disorder.

The truth is that most women have to grub along, making do, making compromises, trying to make it work where they can.

Thank heavens someone like Nooyi has finally pointed that out.