“One of the many reasons I’m glad I no longer work for anyone but myself is that – unless I crack under the pressure of erratic income, increasing bills and no-one to explain basic accounting to me – I will never find myself in the position that Yahoo!’s 11,500 employees recently suddenly found themselves in.

Their new boss and former chief of Google, Marissa Mayer, has told them all that from now on there is to be no more remote working. In order to foster the collaborative, cooperative environment Mayer deems essential to the productivity of staff and success of the company, everyone is to head back into the meatspace pronto, or consider themselves fired. (Sidebar: I have never used the word ‘meatspace’ before. I feel both thrilled and utterly desolate.)

Cue uproar – from the employees, from campaigners for flexible working who were beginning to think the tide was turning in their favour, and from working-and-childbearing-age women who are the group who, broadly speaking, benefit most from such arrangements. There was an underlying – and indeed sometimes overlying – pained tone in much of the reporting of Mayer’s decision that stemmed from the fact that she herself is a new mother and should therefore, so the reasoning goes, be much more sympathetic to the benefits of working from home to that demographic.

In an ideal world, I would agree. Then again, in an ideal world, everyone should dedicate their every action to delivering the greatest amount of happiness to the greatest number of people. But as we don’t live in an ideal world, I am loathe to criticise Mayer for a decision that a male CEO would have made in a heartbeat if he held the same views as Mayer and who probably wouldn’t have drawn nearly as much criticism if he did. But I am also loathe to criticise Mayer on gender grounds because in this instance I think it obscures a much greater and more pressing problem, which is the relationship between the modern individual and the modern job.

“Your Boss Can’t Help Abusing Their Power”