It’s understandable that Mayer is instituting changes to reverse the fortunes of this once prominent information superhighway goliath. However, the blowback from his shocking mandate has come from layman and prominent businesspeople alike. British billionaire Richard Branson spoke for many when he told the Los Angeles Times that Mayer should “give people the freedom of where to work. This seems a backwards step in an age when remote working is easier and more effective than ever.”
Mayers defends her inflexibility on this issue, not so much from words, but from her actions: she took only two weeks maternity leave, paid with her own money to create a nursery adjacent to where she works, in order to stay at the job longer while caring for her infant.
Good for her. Give her a cookie.
But there are several issues with this. The United States already lags behind the rest of the industrialized world in flexible work arrangements, claims Jennifer Glass, a sociology professor and research associate in the Population Research Center at the University of Texas, Austin.
“It’s sad to see a large employer go in this direction,” Glass said. “There is no functional reason that people who work from home can’t work just as productively as they do from the office.”
Not to be mistaken, Mayer has some prominent defenders. Donald Trump praised Mayer on Twitter, saying she’s “right to expect Yahoo employees to come to the workplace vs. working at home.”
With this decision, Mayer exemplified incredible insensitivity, inflexibility and loyalty to work environments that are becoming increasingly antiquated in the new millennium. Here are 10 reasons why women should not go to work for Yahoo.
