Emma Grede is, by any measure, extraordinary. The British-born entrepreneur and CEO and co-founder of Good American, founding partner of SKIMS, and co-founder of Safely has built an empire that commands genuine respect.
As a biracial woman with severe dyslexia who turned ambition into a multi-billion-dollar portfolio, she is and should be an inspiration to women everywhere, particularly women of colour. Her new book, Start with Yourself, promises a roadmap to the corner office, and there is no doubt she has earned the right to tell that story.
Which makes her viral comments on Keke Palmer’s podcast this week so deeply, frustratingly disappointing.
“Work-from-home culture is career suicide. I believe that it disproportionately affects women. We all need an element of flexibility, but it shouldn’t be to the detriment of moving forward, and if anybody thinks that you’ll get the same promotion or the same pay increase without the visibility and the proximity to the people that make decisions, they are crazy. They don’t want to hear it. Your boss can’t tell you, but I’ll tell you” Grede declared.
It was a statement that seems tailor-made for the boardrooms she frequents, rather than the women she leads. As the CEO of “hundreds and hundreds” of women, she told listeners that proximity to power is the price of ambition, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is, frankly, delusional.
When it comes to productivity, the data on working from home tells us something else.
According to research from Stanford economist Nicholas Bloom, remote work delivers a productivity improvement of up to five per cent. A 2023 Pew Research Center survey found that 56 per cent of people working from home said it improved their productivity, and 71 per cent said it helped balance their work and personal lives. Studies from the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics found that industries with larger increases in remote work during the pandemic also experienced measurable gains in total factor productivity. So apparently, “career suicide” is producing better results than the commute.
Now, let us talk about the women for whom remote work is not a lifestyle preference but a lifeline.
According to the International Workplace Group, a Swiss-headquartered company that is the world’s largest provider of flexible workspace solutions, their 2024 research showed that 68 per cent of American women report benefiting from hybrid working models, 65 per cent say it has opened new career opportunities, and 53 per cent say hybrid work has empowered them to apply for a promotion. For women with disabilities, 25 per cent worked from home in 2024, a figure directly tied to record employment rates for disabled workers. The numbers in Australia align with the IWG data. In Australia women are the economy’s biggest untapped resource. These are not women opting out of ambition. These are women finally being given the conditions in workplaces to express it.
And yet, Grede suggests that without physical visibility, without standing by the proverbial water cooler, ambitious women cannot rise. The word “ambitious” here is doing a great deal of heavy lifting. Because one has to ask what defined an ambitious woman before COVID? Before COVID we were visible and dutifully filing into offices five days a week. We were ambitious whilst being present, punctual, and performing at the highest levels. And yet we were still passed over, underpaid, and uninvited to the tables where decisions were made. Not because we weren’t seen but because the structures weren’t built for us.
Women currently earn 83 cents for every dollar earned by men and the gap widened in 2025 for the first time in two decades, according to the Institute for Women’s Policy Research. For women of colour, the numbers are worse. In the 2024 Fortune 500, women held just 9 per cent of CEO roles. As of 2025, that figure has crept to 11 per cent, a milestone hailed as historic progress, which tells you everything about how low the bar has been set. At the current rate of progress, Catalyst estimates it will take nearly half a century for corporate America to reach gender parity in leadership. Half a century of water cooler conversations.
As a woman and a mother who has had to make career sacrifices, I have twice sat across a desk from a manager and been told there was no role for me if I couldn’t work full time, in jobs I was excellent at and loved deeply. I didn’t lack ambition. I lacked a chef, a chief of staff, and a rotating team of nannies, the very infrastructure that allows Emma Grede to spend her weekends on herself, guilt-free and unapologetically.
That is not a criticism. It is simply context. And context matters enormously when you are handing out career advice.
Grede’s comments do not reflect women’s lack of ambition. They reflect a leadership mindset rooted in the very patriarchal architecture that has kept women out of corner offices for generations and one that rewards presence over performance and visibility over value.
With her platform, the companies she leads, and her lived experience as a woman of colour in business, Grede could be doing something far more powerful than coaching women to work harder within a broken system, she could be dismantling the very structures that make proximity necessary in the first place. Instead, she is reinforcing them and telling us to play the game even though the game has always been ‘rigged’. And that, more than any flexible work arrangement, is what looks like ‘career suicide’ to me.