One of few women of color to ever run a large public U.S. company, former Pepsi Co. Chief Executive Officer Indra Nooyi, said she’s never asked for a raise and once turned one down during the financial crisis.
“I’ve never, ever, ever asked for a raise,” Nooyi said in an interview with the New York Times Magazine this week. “I find it cringeworthy. I cannot imagine working for somebody and saying my pay is not enough.”
“I never asked my board to give me more money,” Nooyi said in the New York Times interview. “In fact, one year the board gave me a raise and I said, ‘I don’t want it.’ They said, ‘Why not?’ It was right after a financial crisis, and I said, ‘I don’t want the raise.'”
In the early aughts, when Nooyi was still at Pepsi, a body of research suggested that women didn’t negotiate their salaries as frequently as men, a potential contributor to the gender pay gap. Sheryl Sandberg’s “Lean In” famously told women to just ask and they’d receive. Since then, research from McKinsey & Co. and LeanIn.org found women were engaging in the process just as much as men. But, there was a catch: They were less likely to get them, which might explain their initial reticence.
