Getty; Marianne Ayala/Insider
Ever since COVID began to recede, America's CEOs have been waging a determined campaign to haul their employees back into the office. Big banks led the charge, ordering everyone back to their cubicles and threatening to fire those who refused to comply. In recent months, even holdouts like Disney and Salesforce, which just two years ago declared that the "9-to-5 workday is dead," began pushing many employees to report to the office four days a week. And after a yearlong fight to get workers on-site full time, Goldman Sachs now boasts attendance rates that are pretty much back to where they were before the pandemic.
Ask these executives why they're pushing the office so hard and you'll get some HR-concocted jumble of "productivity" and "creativity" and "culture." But their less-filtered peers will tell you what they really think. Jamie Dimon declared that working from home "doesn't work for those who want to hustle." Elon Musk demanded that employees commit to an "extremely hardcore" schedule consisting of "long hours at high intensity." And in a recent op-ed article in The New York Times, the finance executive and professional blowhard Steven Rattner railed against working from home as evidence that America has "gone soft."
I mean, they might as well just say it: They think working from home is for sissies. Even after their employees proved they could work just fine away from the office, the country's old, white, male CEOs want to go back to the way things were. And the old way was clear: The office is for work, and the home is for — well, for whatever unpaid stuff it is that women do while their men are at work. In the minds of many bosses, work from home is an oxymoron.
"These are men with very traditional views, who see the home as their wife's domain and work as men's domain," says Joan Williams, the director of the Center for WorkLife Law at the University of California College of the Law. "These are people like Elon Musk, for whom everything is a masculinity contest, and the workplace is the key arena. They have no desire to continue to work from home. This is not about workplace productivity. It's about masculinity."
Three decades ago, Williams gave this masculinity contest an academic-sounding name: She called it the norm of the ideal worker. "The ideal worker," she explains, "is seen as someone who starts to work in early adulthood and works full time, full force for 40 years without a break, taking no time off for childbearing, child-rearing, or really anything else." It's better known to the rest of us by a catchier phrase: hustle culture.
Outdated? Yes. Sexist? Definitely. The norm emerged, after all, at a time when men worked and women didn't. The whole reason men could devote themselves so fully to their jobs was that they had wives at home to take care of the family. Even as more women began to stream into the workforce in the 1970s, the expectation of total devotion to the job didn't budge. Women tried to live up to the norm, but they couldn't — unlike their husbands, they didn't have wives of their own to whom they could outsource all the caregiving and the housework.
There were two obvious solutions to this dilemma: Either men could do more laundry and childcare, or employers could make jobs flexible enough so women could juggle the obligations of both work and home. Many well-meaning companies offered employees the option to work from home or go part time. But the flexibility came at a steep price. Skeptical that work — real work — could be done at home, bosses quietly penalized the women who opted for flexible schedules by sticking them with boring assignments and denying them promotions. Studies suggested that egalitarian-minded men who asked for flexibility paid a price as well: As they were shunned by their bosses and coworkers for violating masculine norms, their careers took a serious hit.
Work from home became a "feminizied ghetto" that trapped women in dead-end jobs.
So women who started families found themselves forced to step back from their jobs. They wanted to lean in, but what could they do? With young kids, they couldn't stay late at the office or fly to Hong Kong every other month or be reachable 24/7 — the price of admission for what Claudia Goldin, an economic historian at Harvard, calls "greedy jobs," the ones that pay more and get you on the management track. Someone had to stay home to take care of the children, and that someone was almost always the wife. Working from home became, in the words of Williams, a "feminized ghetto" that trapped women in dead-end jobs.
Then the pandemic hit, and things changed in two big ways. First, in many professions, everyone — men and women, parents and nonparents, old and young — was suddenly working from home. That meant flexible work stopped being a "woman" thing. And second, once everyone tried it, it wasn't just mothers who liked working from home — fathers discovered they loved being around the kids, and young workers found they focused better without the distractions of an office. In a national survey conducted by economists at Stanford, the University of Chicago, and ITAM, two-thirds of workers said that, among the people they knew, perceptions of remote work had improved during the pandemic. Virtually overnight, flexibility lost its stigma.
Second, even "greedy jobs" became more flexible, because many of them no longer required full-time office attendance or frequent business travel. Remarkably, they also became less labor-intensive. A recent study found that the top-earning 10% of men worked 77 hours less in 2022 than they did in 2019. And according to another analysis, married men used their new free time to help out around the house. It looked as though it might be the beginning of a virtuous cycle — one in which a whole new world of jobs would open up to women with families, while their husbands would take on a more equal share of responsibilities at home.
But instead of locking in these gains and enabling women to get ahead in the workforce, some CEOs are striving to re-stigmatize flexibility by outlawing work from home. They're so busy trying to get back to the way things were that they're missing an opportunity that took something as huge as a pandemic to crack open. "To go back to where we were before is to not make any gains at all," says Goldin, the economic historian. "To say that we can't do anything better is a mistake."
So what does doing better look like? It's not as simple, unfortunately, as going fully hybrid. Embracing remote work is a good start, but it comes with risks of its own. Surveys have found that women are more likely than men to prefer a predominantly remote schedule — as do people of color, who prefer to avoid the daily microaggressions they experience in the office. If white men are the only ones coming into the office all the time and hobnobbing with the bosses, they're likely to have a leg up over everyone else. Companies that encourage and support working from home need to ensure they don't treat remote workers as second-class citizens.
On a practical level, it's understandable that so many CEOs long for the days of office-only. After all, it's easier to manage large operations when you take a "one size fits all" approach. Everyone needs to be at their desk from 9 to 5 every day — no whining, and no exceptions. It can start to feel crazy-making when you try to cater to all the wildly different preferences among employees of varying demographics and personalities. Plus, different jobs require different levels of collaboration: Product managers often get together with other stakeholders to hash out their disagreements, while software engineers mostly code on their own. Since the pandemic hit, I've heard a few CEOs liken remote work to opening Pandora's box. Lift the lid, and there's no telling what kind of employee demands will come streaming out. (The distressed CEOs are likely unaware that Pandora, in Greek mythology, was the first human woman.)
CEOs liken remote work to opening Pandora's box. Lift the lid, and there's no telling what kind of employee demands will come streaming out.
But turning back the clock and chaining the box shut is no longer an option. Whether America's chest-thumping CEOs like it or not, a new normal has been established. Women working from home are no longer the aberration — tradition-bound executives are. Steven Rattner, in his Times op-ed article, even went so far as to praise China — where many workers are expected to toil from 9 a.m. to 9 p.m., six days a week — for its "extraordinary" work ethic. The old white men who lead corporate America may long for the good old days when every employee had to show up, in person, to toil in the mines for 72 hours a week. But the pandemic has disproved the myth that work and home function best as separate, gender-divided domains.
"The ideal worker in most industries has changed from 'full-time onsite plus overtime' to hybrid," Williams says. "That's a huge change. It's better for women. It's better for men who actually want to show up at home. It's better for people of color." It's better, in short, for everyone — even, ultimately, the corporate executives who are desperately trying to force their employees back to the office. Perhaps it would help if they knew that Pandora's box, in the earliest telling, was full not of evil plagues, but of gifts bestowed on her by the gods, at the order of Zeus himself. The more America's CEOs can unlock the gift of remote work, however "soft" or insufficiently "hardcore" it may feel to them, the stronger and more profitable their companies will be.
Aki Ito is a senior correspondent for Insider.