Emma Grede called working from home “career suicide.” The backlash tells us something bigger.

Working from home isn't career suicide. But calling it that might be the most dangerous career advice of the year... and the best book marketing.

Emma Grede built a business empire from nothing, no qualifications, pure hustle. She’s the co-founder of Good American, founding partner of SKIMS, and now the author of Start With Yourself. She’s not guessing about what it takes to reach the top of corporate life. She lived it.

And when she says visibility matters, that proximity opens doors, that being in the room makes a difference, she’s right. The system she navigated rewards exactly that. Show up, be seen, stay late, build relationships in person. That’s how she got every break she’s ever had, and she’s telling other women to do the same.

Emma Grede, author of Start With Yourself

So why are people so angry about it?

The surface answer is that it feels tone deaf. Grede has two full-time nannies and an estimated net worth of $400 million. It’s easy to tell women to get back to the office, when you can afford to outsource the school run.

But I think the real answer runs deeper.

What the backlash reveals is just how fragile and vulnerable working mothers’ ambition can feel. Not the ambition Grede is describing, ambition for outlier outcomes, corner offices, billion-dollar brands. I mean the quieter ambition that most of the women I speak to actually hold.

Their ambition looks more like: I want meaningful work. I want flexibility. I don’t want to miss bedtime five nights a week in hope of a promotion. I’ll take a longer route to whatever success looks like for me, and I won’t apologise for it.

That version of ambition is incredibly hard to sustain. It doesn’t get celebrated in a capitalist world that measures success in revenue and job titles. It doesn’t get profiled in Forbes. And it’s constantly being questioned, by employers, by culture, and by women holding it themselves.

So when someone with Grede’s platform says “working from home is career suicide,” women don’t just hear career advice. They hear: what you’ve chosen isn’t valid. The way you’re doing it is wrong. You’re falling behind.

And that’s what makes the reaction so fierce, because it comes from a place of fear.

Fear that a popular, well-marketed narrative is going to give cover to every manager who already wanted people back at their desks five days a week. Not because those managers are building billion-dollar brands and need everyone in the room. But because they default to presenteeism as a measure of commitment, and now they’ve got Emma Grede to quote when they enforce it.

Grede is describing a very masculine framework for success, money and power as the scoreboard. That framework works for some women. It worked spectacularly for her. But when it gets presented as universal advice, broadcast to millions through a book tour and press cycle, it actively erodes progress.

It erodes the confidence of women who’ve deliberately chosen a different path. It validates employers who haven’t updated their thinking on what good work looks like. And it narrows the definition of ambition at precisely the moment we should be expanding it.

Grede isn't speaking to everyone. She's speaking to women who want what she has. The backlash exists because the rest of us heard it anyway, and that's the whole point. Controversy sells books.

What it’s opened up matters more than the book. It highlights just how vulnerable ambition and motherhood is for women. Choosing flexibility isn’t a career compromise, it’s a different definition of career success.

And one that deserves to be defended.