CEOs are setting post-pandemic return-to-work rules. If only 10% of CEOs are women, how can we be sure the new workplace works for all of us?

Back in September 2020, when offices were still shuttered, I surveyed 200 of my clients about how many days a week they would ideally want to go back into the office. A large majority said two days a week would be just about right. The most interesting findings were at the extremes: Only men said they’d want to go back five days a week and only women said they’d never want to go back with any regularity, save for special events. I admit my sample size was somewhat small. But the results do speak to just how fundamentally the pandemic changed our sense of work. It was nothing short of seismic.

For those of us with office jobs, being forced to stay home triggered a re-evaluation of where we worked, when we worked, and how we appreciated the demands of our domestic lives as they became physically inseparable from our work lives. Crucially, we learned that we did not need to be in an office to be productive, creative, or collaborative—or even to increase the bottom line.

When offices began to reopen and kids trickled back to school, albeit in fits and spurts, many of us—including just about every working mother I know and lots of working dads, too—resisted returning. Public sentiment about putting in facetime confirmed my survey findings. With few exceptions, people wanted to keep working from home, at least part of the time. And no wonder. The old rules of 9-to-5—or 7-to-7, in so many of our cases—were long out of date. Conceived by men for men at a time when most of them had wives at home preparing the meals and raising the kids, corporate culture simply didn’t take women into account.

Which is why women have been pushing for more flexibility for eons. It’s tragic that it took a global crisis to make so many of us (myself included) see that productivity and profitability are not compromised when you do things a new way. But employers are finally facing the fact that hybrid work is here to stay. 

Last week, The New York Times' Emma Goldberg reported that companies are grappling with how—and how often—to get employees back in the office. Most C.E.O.s (with the exception of those on Wall Street) understand that demanding five days in the office is a non-starter. But many corporate leaders are scratching their heads about how to strike the right balance of team togetherness and remote productivity. “Hybrid work has been choose-your-own-adventure,” Goldberg writes, “but now C.E.O.s are making their choices more permanent.”

I appreciate this conversation. Deciding what to demand of a workforce is complex and profoundly consequential. But, for me, the more important conversation needs to be about who gets to be a decider. Who is authoring this “adventure?”

If only a tiny fraction of C.E.O.s are women (in January, for the first time in the Fortune 500 list's 68-year history, 10% of the companies were led by women), guess whose voices are not being equally represented in decision-making, even though we make up more than 50% of the college-educated workforce? (Pew Research Center)

Yes, women. (You nailed it.)

It’s a circular problem: Leaders make policy. If women are not fairly represented in leadership, they can’t guide the structure and scaffolding that we need to get more women to the top. We are at an inflection point in corporate culture. Our COVID experiences showed us that another “adventure” is possible. Now, the question is, who is going to write it?