Emma Grede’s words rang out across my living room: “The idea you can be successful from your dining room table is about as much of a joke as this work-life balance conversation.”

The Skims co-founder was talking on a panel of women at The New York Times Dealbook Summit back in December, but this snippet of the conversation made its way to me in February via the Instagram algorithm. Grede’s point was that she believes working from home hinders career development. She added: “You ain’t gonna get far unless you surround yourself with people because nobody is successful on their own. We build teams, we build cultures, we come together. I am a person that has a singular strength, and what I’ve done uniquely well is bring people around me who have other strengths and build teams to build companies, and you can’t do that from your bedroom. You can’t do that from your dining room table.

“I think as a female leader, flexibility is absolutely necessary, right? Nobody misses mystery reader [or] parent-teacher conferences in any of my companies. They’re able to have that balance so that they can have a progressive career, but also balance that with their home life: that’s completely a given in the way that we’ve set the companies up in this time.

“But to think that you’re gonna do that from the comfort of your own house is just not true, and it’s not true if you want to lead, if you want to actually be at a decision-making level in any company. And I haven’t seen it work for any women.”

As a working woman with two young children, I listened to Grede talking with fear fluttering in my stomach. I add this video to my mental list of headlines and news programmes about return to work orders being made across the country that are undoing the flexibility I rely on to survive one diktat at a time.

“To understand why I need to work flexibly, I think of my life in chapters”