Commentary: Work-from-home goes from new path to dead end for working mothers

NEW YORK: Last Monday, I returned to work from maternity leave after having my second child. Getting back into the groove of doing my job has been the easy part.

Figuring out how to get everyone in the family to where they need to be with at least some semblance of all the stuff they require is, to put it politely, utter chaos. I’ve already worked a whole day by the time I arrive at the office to start my actual paid job.

I became a little more deflated and exhausted on my morning commute this week after reading this sharp but depressing New York Times article from Sarah Kessler: Is Remote Work The Answer To Women’s Prayers, Or A New “Mummy Track”?

When you see a headline like this, you can bet the answer is usually going to be the latter.

The question Kessler explores is more nuanced than others thrown around in the post-pandemic work-from-home discourse: What good does flexibility do for working mothers if it’s still attached to the same stereotypes that have always held them back - that those who ask their employers for anything other than the status quo aren’t working as hard as everyone else or are not as committed. 

We know that is still the default thinking at the top of much of corporate America because, as Kessler points out, the big bosses have not held back in saying as much. To Blackstone CEO Steve Schwarzman, remote workers during the pandemic “didn’t work as hard”.

JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon doesn’t know “how you can be a leader” and work from home. Elon Musk has called working from home “morally wrong.” Goldman Sachs’ David Solomon has said it’s “not ideal for us and it’s not a new normal”.

WORK EXPECTATIONS ARE STILL BASED ON MEN

To this group of white male CEOs, the ideal worker still seems to be one who can come into the office five days a week and is on call 24/7. Most of the time, that’s someone who looks a lot like them.

Harvard University professor Claudia Goldin, who recently won the Nobel Prize in economics for her research on women in the labour market, has demonstrated that it’s this unbending nature of the workplace that’s keeping women with children from advancing. If working mothers had more say over when and how they did their jobs, it would go a long way toward closing the gender gap.

There was a window during the pandemic when it seemed as if a large swath of workplaces were becoming increasingly agnostic about where and when their employees logged on. But as hiring has slowed and the possibility of layoffs looms, companies have walked back that concession.

It turns out flexibility in most cases was really just a perk that employers offered to lure workers in a hot job market rather than a big structural change they were willing to make.

CREATE JOBS EMPLOYERS WERE UNWILLING TO GIVE WOMEN

At least some women have indicated that if companies aren’t willing to redefine what the ideal worker looks like into something that gels with the reality of their lives, then they’ll just redefine success in a way that falls outside the bounds of corporate America.

A growing number of women have started their own businesses and are leaving full-time jobs to become independent contractors.

This doesn’t read to me as being mummy-tracked or giving up or opting out in the traditional sense. Instead, these women are creating the kinds of jobs that their previous employers were unwilling to give them.

Former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi once told me for a 2021 article I wrote for Fortune that female entrepreneurs might in fact be the ones to reset the way we do business in a way that actually works for women. Until now, men “made the rules, they live by the rules,” Nooyi said. “We need a critical mass of women to make our own rules."