The Emma Grede drama and What it says about Us

Let’s discuss Emma Grede. For those that don't know her, she is the brains behind several companies including SKIMS and Good American. She’s business partners with the Kardashians, a mum-of-four and she just published her first book. She has a notably British, no-faff flair to her, she’s a serious grafter (which is as clear as day) and for the most part of the last decade she was doing it all behind the scenes. She recently launched a podcast (it’s actually very good) and has amassed over 1 million followers.

A comment she made in an interview published in the Wall Street Journal recently went viral. She described herself as a "max three-hour mum". She does not read school emails. She does not cut sandwiches into stars. She has staff. She has not apologised. And there has been a lot of noise about it. 

The first thing worth saying is that her actual maths is not as outrageous as the headline. She said three hours on Saturday and Sunday mornings, between 9am and noon. Not three hours total. She is then back home for dinner and bedtime, like she is on weeknights. On a weekday, by her own account, she is home for the morning routine and back for the evening one. Which is, more or less, what most working parents in offices around the world do. A standard 9-to-5 gives you one hour with your kids before school and two or three hours at dinner and bedtime. Nobody has ever called that wild. 

The assumption underneath nearly every piece of criticism is that physical presence and good child-rearing are the same thing. That a mother who is in the same building as her child, by virtue of proximity, is doing motherhood and those who aren't are failing. Says who.

Where is the actual evidence that uninterrupted physical presence is the variable that matters most? Where is the study that says a child raised by a mother who was technically at home for ten hours, but on her phone for eight of them, has better outcomes than a child raised by a mother who was at the office until five and then fully there, looking her in the eye, for two? Nobody can have an opinion on what Emma Grede's three hours actually look like without being in the room with her. They could be transformative. We have absolutely no way of knowing. 

We have arrived at a strange place culturally where we have started to confuse hours with presence and presence with love. They are not the same thing, and on some level we all know they are not. Having watched it in my own home, and in the homes of other working mothers, I have come to think the real variable is not duration but intention. 

The other thing nobody asked Emma Grede was how she built two of the most successful direct-to-consumer brands of the last decade. We did not demand a public accounting of what it cost her to build SKIMS. We assumed, correctly, that it took a particular allocation of hours, energy, attention, and absence. We did not require her to confess to it. We celebrated the result. The moment she describes, with the same matter-of-factness, how she allocates her hours at home, she is suddenly unfit to mother. The honesty is the offence here, not the maths. 

What she is being punished for, I suspect, is saying out loud something a lot of women already privately do. There is, of course, always a trade-off. The mother who builds a company that employs hundreds of people is not the mother who is at every assembly and the thing I love most about Emma is she did not pretend otherwise. The question is whether we are mature enough, as a culture, to let women describe their trade-offs in the same matter-of-fact way men have always been allowed to describe theirs.

Part of me feels the outrage is largely due to staring at a "successful" woman who has not made being a mother the centre of her identity, she has irked people by going out of her way to highlight her absence. People assume she's abandoned the duties of being a mother, a duty that she should absolutely bow down to given she made the choice to be a mother in the first place. To hold Emma to this level of accountability is to confuse physical presence and love. And to accept that love, care and attention can be demonstrated over and above physical presence in countless ways, would free so many women and allow more women to do incredible things in the world. 

I know which side of the argument I want my daughters to grow up on.

With love,

Roshni