There is and always has been an element of remote work in every multinational corporation (even small ones). When a company is globally distributed, its employees are rarely or never all in the same place at the same time.
People learn to deal with this. It means strange hours sometimes, and in the past meant travel (though that is now difficult). Remote collaboration can always be done better, and we all have more to learn and invent about this way of working, but many businesses have for decades been working effectively with far-flung colleagues (some of my Sun Microsystems colleagues spoke about managing globally distributed teams at GHC 2009). Somehow, teams do manage to thrive and innovate across international borders.
As part of my regular commute, I used to drive past the Nvidia HQ building while it was still under construction. No one flying in or out of San Jose airport could miss Apple’s giant donut, completed around the same time. Facebook bought the (already large) Sun Microsystems campus ten years ago, and added the world’s largest open plan office as part of a suite of new buildings across the road. Last I heard, Google was still going ahead with plans to build a big new campus in “downtown” San Jose, and Amazon continued constructing new buildings in Seattle even as it was one of the first companies to tell its staff to work from home last year.
How does all this affect remote work? My suspicion is that, the more a company is invested (both financially and otherwise) in big, gaudy real estate, the less likely it is to support remote work for its employees. It’s hard to justify billions spent buying prime land in some of the world’s most expensive locations, and more billions spent building gigantic monuments to executive hubris upon that land, if you’re now allowing all that to stand empty.
As the primary caregivers of their children, homes, and often their aging parents as well, women benefit greatly from the flexibility that remote work can offer – simply not having to commute every day can be a major timesaver. “Hybrid” working models, where employees are expected to be in an office one to three days a week instead of five, can facilitate this. But that model assumes that you’re still able to live within commuting distance of your office, which is not always the case.
In a heterosexual couple, even if both spouses work, it is typically the woman who bends her career to that of her husband, staying with or following him to where his work is, even if that limits her own job options. This often makes economic sense because he is also the higher earner in the family. But it’s a classic Catch-22: As long as the family is prioritizing his career, she’s not likely to become the higher earner. (It may not help if she does: there was a point in my first marriage when I was earning three times my husband’s salary, but he still refused to move to Silicon Valley so that I could pursue my career. And studies show that, when women earn more than their male partners, domestic strife, violence, and divorce become more prevalent.)
When I got my first non-temporary job in the US, I had health insurance, but I soon started to experience the pains of for-profit healthcare. I was recently returned from study abroad in India, with lingering exotic health problems requiring expensive testing, which I had to pay up front and then wait to be reimbursed. This was a recipe for disaster when I was living paycheck to paycheck.
The insurer was slow to pay, and I was short $300 to pay my rent. After a fruitless phone call to hurry them up, I started crying in the office – I had no other resources. My manager personally loaned me the money to tide me over. Which was very kind of him (thank you, Larry!) but it was absurd that I’d needed it.
Update Aug 16, 2021: If I were still unvaccinated today (or even weeks ago), I would of course have a completely different view of the risk: the risk of me getting COVID is now much higher, and hugely outweighs the risk of blood clots. Risk is always relative.
First, let’s get a few possible misconceptions out of the way:
I’m not an anti-vaxxer
I already got my flu shot, as I do every year. I have been vaccinated frequently throughout my life, having lived in many “exotic” countries when you had to travel with a vaccination record to show you weren’t carrying yellow fever, typhoid, etc. I raised my daughter in Italy, where kids cannot go to school without being fully vaccinated. I had no problem with this, in fact I considered it a favor when we were reminded to get her childhood vaccines on time and it was easy to do so with the family GP. Her entire school was once given Hepatitis B vaccines without parents even being informed. I had no problem with that, either. I am grateful that vaccines exist and have even gotten better over time.
