[fhd2]

What baffles me most about RTO is what it does to romantic partnerships. If both can find career advancing jobs in the same city, that's cool.

But what if they can't? The options aren't great:

1. One of them takes a hit on their career for the benefit of the other.

2. Both move to an area with OK-ish jobs for both, sharing the sacrifice.

3. Both take optimal jobs wherever they are and move into a long distance relationship.

With kids in the mix, it becomes even harder, you might want to be around family to have a support network etc.

RTO mandates generally seem pretty tone deaf about this aspect.

[vrganj]

It's because there's a lot of overlap between people thinking "those damn lazy workers better get back to the office so they don't slack off" and people thinking "a woman's role is in the household, raising children and cooking".

Regressive attitudes tend to not come alone.

[lo_zamoyski]

Enabling women to be with their children during their early years is a good thing. Mothers are not replaceable by fathers or by strangers. You can do it, sometimes you must, but it's sub-optimal for young children. Being able to live on a single income during those years is fantastic, but when it isn't possible, WFH can be a big improvement.

(That being said, this isn't an excuse to be an absentee, deadbeat dad. Traditionally, most people lived in villages, living agrarian lives. Family life was much more involved. That meant both parents were generally present throughout the day. And with age, the fatherly role becomes increasingly important for development. The strict division of mom-in-suburban-home/dad-away-at-urban-office is hardly traditional or representative of historical realities.)

[pc86]

"RTO is sexist" is a hell of a take.

[ryandrake]

OP never said that. They said the venn diagram of attitudes promoting RTO coincidentally seems to largely overlap the regressive "women should be homemakers" attitudes.

[lux-lux-lux]

Why? The data supports it. Women were more likely to leave during RTO efforts than men. WFH being a massive boon for workers with childcare responsibilities or medical issues is widely recognized; there’s a reason why there was a baby boom during the pandemic. A lot of the backlash against WFH workers was blatantly sexist; remember all the rage against those “day in the life of a remote worker” type TikToks? Note how they got way, way more hate than the objectively worse ‘working’ several jobs or modern hustle culture scam stuff?

I don’t think it’s the be-all end-all explanation, but the shoe fits.

[pc86]

Women being more likely to leave than men because of a policy does not inherently make that policy sexist. You could say the same thing about a policy that requires police officers in full patrol kit be able to scale an 8' wall or drag a certain amount of weight a certain distance in a given time frame - that instituting that policy in a department that didn't have it previously would result in more women leaving than men doesn't make the policy sexist unless it's both actually unnecessary for the job and implementation with sexist intent.

Those meme-level DITL and older hustle culture stuff are two completely different things, targeting different audiences, and using different methods, so it makes sense that people would have two different reactions to them, even if you think both of them are stupid?

Are there any reports of someone moving their company from WFH to full RTO in order to get women writ large to leave their company? I think it's much more likely that capital owners just want their building full so they don't lose their investments, business owners and executives don't like WFH for various reasons including the extremely overblown risk of overemployment, managers on average want to micromanage and find it easier in-office, and there's no public health backstop to justify WFH like there was 5 years ago.

Separately but related, I don't think there's anything wrong with a factory worker getting paid $18/hr watching someone spread 2 hours of work over 7 hours in the office with two catered meals plus snacks and making jokes about "email jobs" not being real. I probably watched all the DITL things that went truly viral and the comments were never any more sexist than any other viral video on the internet.

[array_key_first]

It's a return to form, a reinforcement of the status-quo, and in that since it's inherently socially conservative.

You know what else is socially conservative?

RTO makes relationships outside of the traditional nuclear family more difficult. It discourages career building which, because of the patriarchy and our history, is going to primarily affect women.

Sexism and misogyny is actually very complicated. It's built-in to just about every system that exists in America. It's not the sort of simple "woman bad" some people think. It's the choices we make when we design structures. It's part of our DNA, it's not a symptom.

[scythe]

I have been thinking that this is a reason why the megacities are winning. In the largest cities, a couple can cohabitate and both find jobs. In smaller cities, you have to get lucky, and if one partner's job falls through (which may be unavoidable) then you might have to move! In a one-income household you can live in a city with one industry. Two is a coordination problem. The eleven largest cities have reached escape velocity. Detroit is hovering right on the edge. Seattle has favorable climate and a port. Other cities are boom and bust.

[pc86]

You might be the first person I've ever heard say "Seattle has a favorable climate."

[scythe]

I associate it with cool summers which are rare in the US. The rain and dark won't be everyone's cup of tea, but other places with similarly cool summers either have very harsh winters or rhyme with "Nabisco".

[pc86]

It seems like this comment boils down to "relationships require compromise and sacrifice and this scales with more people" which is almost tautological.

[fhd2]

Sort of. I was arguing that I see WFH as the superior model for people in relationships, because it eliminates the need for sacrifice and compromise on one dimension: Career beneficial location.

Not on all dimensions, of course. People with kids e.g. will have to find a solution for who gets to work how much, it's a similar conflict WFH addresses partly at best.

[bluGill]

Most people are not in a niche where finding a job depends on location, and those that are already live in that city.

Doctors can find a clinic to work at nearly anywhere. If their partner needs to move they can go with.

[fhd2]

Sure, depends on the field. Some fields can't realistically WFH to begin with. Some easily can though. If you have a doctor and a programmer, the doctor can work at a hospital that provides the best career opportunity for them, while the programmer can work at the place that provides the best opportunity for them, given WFH.

If both can WFH, they can even choose the place they want to live in regardless of where their optimal employment options are based.