Indra Nooyi responds to backlash over asking for raise

Indra Nooyi, who recently made headlines about her comments on never asking for a raise, addressed concerns about her stance on gender pay equity.

The former CEO of PepsiCo said her views should be read in light of her personal history, having been raised in Chennai where she learned the value of hard work and being rewarded for it. 

"You can't take the cultural upbringing out of me," she told Fortune amid earlier backlash.

A recent interview with the New York Times Magazine included her personal views on how she never went out of her way to ask for a raise – it's a practice she said she finds "cringeworthy".

Her comments, however, shouldn't be seen as her refusal to fight for pay parity. "This is not what I'm preaching at all, not what I'm suggesting, not what I'm recommending," she said.

Nooyi also tackled the issue of gender pay inequity and overall sexism in the workplace in a conversation with the Wall Street Journal. 

"I never thought about pay until Steve Reinemund became CEO [of PepsiCo] and made a big adjustment to my base salary and gave me a big stock option grant," she said.

"We lived way below our means because we were brought up a certain way, and so asking for a raise was just not in our vocabulary."

"In today's world, people shouldn't have to ask for pay parity," Nooyi said. "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."