Can Marissa Mayer's Work-From-Home Ban Improve Pay Parity for Women?

If you're female or employ someone who is, then you probably know how terrible we are at making salary demands. There are lots of explanations why. We're too passive to properly ask for what we want, for example, or we're less inclined to ask peers what they make and therefore are worse at gauging our own value.

As long as we're dealing in gross generalizations here, I'll suggest with no substantiation whatsoever that perhaps in those regards, female bankers are just slightly less vulnerable than other women. I surmise this only because discussing money is something I presume bankers are more comfortable with versus the general population.

But there's another explanation for female timidity in salary negotiations that is likely as big a disadvantage for female bankers as it is for women who work outside the industry: when we have a job that affords us at least some of the flexibility we need to balance our lives outside of work, we don't want to risk rocking the boat.

Think about it. If you have a deal with your employer to work from home one or two days a week, you might fear that a request for a raise will be met with a request for more face time at the office. Or if you know you have the ability to leave the office midday to bring a sick parent to the doctor or to catch your kid in the school's spring concert, you might put so high a value on that freedom that mentally you make an equivalent deduction from what you estimate you're worth to your employer.

In this context, I've been watching the debate over Yahoo! CEO Marissa Mayer's no-working-from-home decree with a great deal of interest. Generally the declaration leaves a bad taste in my mouth. When you're a new CEO who has just constructed a private nursery for your own baby right next to your office, there ought to be some kind of waiting period before you can yank workplace flexibility perks away from everyone else at your company. What's more, it seems reckless of Mayer to put herself and her company in the middle of such a significant, inflamed debate at a time when Yahoo! can afford few distractions. More generally, it just seems weird for such a diabolical-sounding HR policy to come out of a company that insists on using an exclamation point in its name.

And yet I see two good reasons to let Mayer's idea run its course. For starters, as CEO, she deserves a chance to do what she thinks is necessary to resuscitate her company. If she thinks face time at the office is what will boost productivity or breed success, then who are we to stop her from finding out if she's right?

Second, what Mayer taketh away in flexibility she giveth in freeing employees, female and male, from a potentially major constraint on their own power when it comes to negotiating pay. If I no longer have the workplace flexibility I once did, I'm going to want to be sure that I'm compensated for that. And I'll be plenty motivated to make sure that I am, especially if I feel that my company's culture is becoming less caring or more cutthroat. (I also might be motivated to find employment elsewhere.)

So I'm game to see how Mayer's ideas fare in the free market. But I'll note that her strategy runs counter to the wisdom of women like HSBC USA's Irene Dorner, who says female CEOs have an obligation not only to refrain from pulling up the ladder behind them but to make the ladder sturdier for the next generation of women, by building workplaces that will be more hospitable to women.