SKIMS founding partner and Good American CEO Emma Grede is facing backlash after saying working from home is “career suicide” for women. The 43 year old British entrepreneur made the comments on Keke Palmer’s podcast Baby, This Is Keke Palmer during press for her new book Start With Yourself: A New Vision for Work & Life. Clips spread fast. The discourse followed. And she is not backing down.
Grede’s position is blunt. Visibility in the office drives promotions, pay, and access. Remote work, she argues, is quietly costing women the career ground they think they are protecting.
What I think is that work from home culture is a career killer for women,” Grede said on the podcast. We talk about all of this sort of upside of Zoom culture, but none of the rigidity of it.
She reinforced the take in an Elle interview published April 15. “I double down on that all the time: work from home culture is career suicide,” she told Elle. “I didn’t back out of it and go, ‘Oh my god, I’m so sorry I said that.’ I believe that it disproportionately affects women.”
Grede believes women are already fighting for visibility in male dominated workplaces. Take them out of the room, she says, and the gap gets wider. Decisions are made in meetings. Assignments get handed out in hallways. Raises get signed off by leaders who know your face. Zoom cannot replicate the politics of proximity.
That is the frame she is asking women to reconsider.
Grede is not a trust fund kid preaching grind from the penthouse. She was born in Plaistow, East London, and raised on a council estate by a single mother. She is the oldest of four daughters. Her father, a Trinidadian man, was largely absent. Her mother worked constantly, and Grede has said watching her mom’s anxiety over bills shaped her entire work ethic.
She left secondary school at 15. She is openly dyslexic. She started delivering newspapers at 12.
Grede founded London talent marketing agency ITB Worldwide at 26 and sold it a decade later. She launched Good American with Khloé Kardashian in 2016 and became a founding partner of SKIMS in 2019. She is now worth roughly $400 million and became the first Black woman investor on ABC’s Shark Tank.
Her supporters say that background is why the take has weight. She came up with no shortcuts and built every relationship in person. Her career strategy is not theory. It is the path she walked.
The reaction from Black women is what turned a quote into a cultural moment. The argument coming back at Grede is that visibility does not save women who were never going to be seen in the first place.
Yahoo senior editor Taylyn Washington responded publicly. “I understand how Ms. Grede believes that visibility is everything, but for Black women, I believe that if you can put your peace first, advancing your career in the digital space is entirely possible,” Washington said. “I’ve recovered from years of burnout and anxiety by choosing to work from home, and my skills and portfolio afford me that luxury.”
Black women still earn roughly 63.7 cents on the dollar. Those women did not lose the promotion because they were on Zoom. They lost it before they walked in the building.
Others flagged the class issue. Grede owns a reported $24 million home in Bel Air and a $45 million Malibu property once owned by Ellen DeGeneres. She has nannies, private schools, and a husband, Jens Grede, running his own empire. Telling working mothers without backup that they need to clock office hours to prove their worth reads different when you cannot afford the commute or the childcare in the first place.
Grede is mixed race and chairs the 15 Percent Pledge, the initiative that pushed retailers to reserve 15 percent of shelf space for Black owned brands. She sits on the Obama Foundation board. She speaks openly about wanting more Black women in CEO seats.
And now she is the face of a workplace philosophy that many Black women see as working against them.
Covid proved companies can run from kitchen tables. It also proved some workers will coast from anywhere. The real question Grede is stepping into is not whether remote work functions. It is whether the cost of flexibility falls harder on the women who already have the least leverage to absorb it.
Grede says yes. A lot of Black women are saying she is only half right.
Emma Grede is where she is today largely due to wealth and ACCESS. Black women have been showing up at the office for DECADES; highly educated, prepared and skilled. More often than not we still do not get to share in the corporate power game. We are STILL subject to micro aggression and dismissive attitudes. We are STILL often “the only one” or one of few black women in any given work setting. Working from home often saves our sanity and leads to MORE productivity, not less.