Elon Musk and Julia Gillard (Images: AAP/Supplied)

Elon Musk, the world’s richest man (and avid Crikey reader) is the latest person to jump into the working-from-home (WFH) fray. 

In a leaked memo, the Tesla chief executive reminded his employees just how replaceable they are by sending a memo informing them they must return to the office for “a minimum [and I mean *minimum*] 40 hours per week”.

When questioned on Twitter about what would happen if employees found the idea of working into an office outdated, Musk responded: “They should pretend to work somewhere else.”

Neither Musk nor Tesla have confirmed that the leaked memo came from Musk.

You can feel his appreciation for employees — who in the midst of a terrifying global pandemic willingly blurred the boundary between work and life in unprecedented droves to help his company reach record growth, including most recently its most profitable quarter in the company’s history — from here.

It also goes against how other large tech companies have chosen to approach WFH. Facebook and Twitter have told employees they’re welcome to work remotely indefinitely.

Perhaps Musk, who spent the weekend holidaying in St Tropez, presumably by virtue of a private jet and fairly flexible working hours, is a little out of touch with the lives of ordinary workers. Or perhaps not — because he’s not the only public figure to come out against WFH.

Bringing up much more troubling concerns than Musk, former prime minister Julia Gillard warned that women who continued to work from home risked becoming “invisible” and thus falling behind men in the workplace.

Appearing on a panel discussion about the pandemic’s effect on workplace gender equality at the Australian National University, Australia’s only female prime minister urged bosses not to overlook women, saying:

There’s a risk that if nothing else changes in five years’ time, what we’ll see is a pattern where women have chosen, particularly in the family formation stage, disproportionately to work from home. And men, who have been much more regular attenders at the office … that very visibility, if nothing else changes, will show in who’s been considered for promotion, sponsorship, mentorship. The women will be kind of invisible behind the screen.

Surveys have found that women are more likely to want to work from home than men. It’s not because it’s easier — in fact, female remote workers report higher levels of stress, burnout and depression than men. It’s because during the pandemic women picked up more of what sociologists refer to as the “second shift” (the childcare, housework and planning) than men.

Women have evidently found this extra load of work easier to manage when working from home, rather than, say, wasting several hours of a day commuting, plus downing after-work drinks with management in the hope that when a promotion comes up their boss will remember they exist rather than just handing it to Greg, 42, who, thanks to a wife who works from home, is always available for “face time”, aka “sucking up to his boss at the office”.

It’s a painful paradox that as a result of women trying to do the best thing for their careers while also navigating an unfair role in society and at home, they could find themselves falling behind at work.

Now here’s a left-field theory that you heard here first and will probably never hear again: is Musk fighting the WFH fight to make sure women don’t fall behind at work?

No, probably not. But don’t take it off the table completely, because as Twitter punters (bless them) haven’t shied from pointing out, the Tesla logo looks extraordinary like a female reproductive system, or an IUD.

So maybe our mate Musk is fighting the good fight after all.