Working from home: career nirvana, or career suicide?

According to Emma Grede, for women, it’s emphatically the latter. As an investor, entrepreneur and co-founder of brands including Good American and Skims, Grede knows a thing or two about being a successful woman in business. She also knows the realities of building a business from scratch. The eldest of four children brought up in East London by a single-parent working mother, Grede doesn’t come from privilege, even if she now speaks from the lofty advantage of its golden throne.  

Which is why, on one hand, it’s disappointing that she’s so negative about working from home. According to Grede, 43, home workers are routinely passed up for pay increases and promotion compared to workers who are office-based - and if you disagree, she claims you are “kidding yourself”.   

Grede recently gave a series of interviews espousing these views. “You want the next promotion?” she said, speaking on the podcast How To Fail. “You want the big corner office? Guess what: you need to be there. You might not want to hear it, but the facts are the facts.” 

The ‘facts’, as she sees them, have not been well-received. Unlike those with generational wealth and family connections, the only factor in Grede’s success is Grede herself. Shouldn’t she therefore be an ally, rather than sounding like the sexist CEO of a Fortune 500 company?

On Instagram, one woman called her “a disgrace to her sex”, while another accused her of “playing to the patriarchy”. Many pointed out that Grede, a mother of four who lives in a $24 million mansion in Bel Air, has no business speaking about the work/life balance when she has an estimated £300 million fortune that can buy her all the childcare she wants. Balance is easy when the tightrope walk of working motherhood can be subcontracted to the nanny. 

Grede has just published a book, Start With Yourself (Simon & Schuster), and it would be a shame if the current backlash prevented women from reading what is, on balance, a wisdom-filled manual that genuinely wants women to succeed. Working with the Kardashians, she’s no slouch in the art of self-promotion. She knows that outrageous statements garner more attention than anodyne ones, and yet I wonder if she’s misjudged the British mindset, or the systemic failures in the British childcare system.  

To use her own words, Grede doesn’t sugarcoat it. “No-one will really tell you that careers require proximity and visibility,” is one of her most contentious statements. It’s all too easy to call out a problem, and far harder to propose a solution. Every profession is different, but in mine, proximity bias is real. 

As a journalist and editor, my lived experience accords with Grede’s: you’re more likely to be promoted if your bum is on the office chair. Whatever their gender balance, in any office, the cultivation of personal relationships is integral to securing your job and your future. Yes, these relationships can flourish remotely. But it’s called ‘remote working’ for a reason. It’s hard not to seem remote when you’re rarely in the room. 

Is this ideal? No. Is it fair? Also no. Without doubt, proximity bias affects mothers and caregivers more deleteriously than fathers, which is why employers need to think of ways to solve it. This involves a mindset change, starting at the top. If the reactions to Grede’s comments are anything to go by, in some businesses, these changes seem already to have started. On social media, women from Big Five law firms testified to how they’ve been promoted despite working from home. Others said they balanced WFH with a degree of visibility in the office. 

Everyone is different, but for most mothers and caregivers I know, a hybrid approach is the dream. Working from home has its own challenges: it can be lonely and isolating, especially for those who thrive on human contact. But working from an office can be frustratingly unproductive. Many women swear they get more done at home.

The work-life balance conversation is not the same for everyone. Women with flexible, supportive partners will always have it easier than those whose partners have views that belong in the 1950s. You’d be surprised - or perhaps you wouldn’t - by how many men in 2026 still consider their ‘main breadwinner’ status according them mandatory preferential treatment on the work-life seesaw, prioritising their own visibility over their partner’s. 

For single mothers, it’s likely not even a conversation at all. Unless they are extremely well-paid, the UK’s eyewatering childcare costs, the second most expensive in Europe after Switzerland, will make it impossible to work in an office five days a week. No wonder so many women are furious at Grede, whose immense success inures her from these problems.  

These problems are real. They’re also getting worse. Be angry at Grede by all means, but not to the extent that flaming her for telling it like it is stops us from debating how it should be, and how it could be. That’s the hard part. Grede has started an important conversation. Let’s keep talking, and working together to change the structure, and build a better one that serves all women.  

Instagram: @lauracraik