• Business Insider asked its readers on LinkedIn: Are shorts appropriate in the workplace?
• Instagram head Adam Mosseri recently said he was "pro" wearing shorts in the office.
• As of Friday morning, 54% of respondents said no, while 20% said yes. More debated dress codes in the comments.

Free the knee? Our readers want the knee locked away.

Instagram boss Adam Mosseri recently came out as "pro" shorts in the workplace. He said that it was a "hot debate" in the Instagram office, though "not all shorts are created equal" and not everyone can "pull them off."

We posted the question to our readers on LinkedIn: Do you think it's appropriate to wear shorts to the office? Over 7,000 people have cast their vote so far.

As of Friday morning, the majority of respondents, 54%, said no, compared to 20% who voted yes. Another 25% of respondents said "it depends."

The survey is far from scientific, and the results could shift as more readers vote. Still, the early results provide an interesting look into people's evolving views of the office dress code. Gone are the "Mad Men" days of mandatory suits. And with Gen Z firmly in the workplace and sweltering summer temperatures potentially swaying people's views, it's a good time to revisit the polarizing topic.

A lively debate over dress code and etiquette

Readers in the comments below the LinkedIn poll debated what, if any, shorts dress code would be appropriate.

Joella Shepherdson commented that chino shorts should be allowed, but basketball shorts shouldn't. She voiced worry of a "double standard."

"I think if skirts are acceptable, shorts should be too, but they should be subject to the same workwear rules as normal," she wrote.

Stephanie Cary wrote that it may depend on the industry. Startups and fashion may be more open to the apparel, she wrote.

What about a temperature threshold? Jay Martin wrote that shorts were okay if it was over 90 degrees.

Of course, the heat is outside the office for much of corporate America. Many workplaces pump cold air into their cubicles. April Weygand drew a comparison: "The men wear shorts in the summer while the women are wearing sweaters because of the crazy AC."

Donald Peace narrowed in on Mosseri's comment that "not everyone can pull it off." Peace called it a "clearly subjective judgement," describing the Instagram head's view as an "HR nightmare."

Working from home has changed standards of dressing. Brian Bower wrote that he sometimes wears pajama bottoms while working virtually.

"Businesses up top," he wrote. "Party below."

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• "The Mandalorian and Grogu" had the worst opening ever for a "Star Wars" release.
• Disney played it too safe, and the movie felt like an elevated episode of "The Mandalorian."
• "Star Wars" fans don't want TV when they go to the movies. They want big, original stories.

For the last seven years, Disney has been biding its time waiting patiently for the right moment to bring the "Star Wars" universe back to the big screen.

Over Memorial Day weekend, fans finally went back to theaters for the first "Star Wars" movie since the disappointing end of the Skywalker saga with "The Rise of Skywalker." And what they were rewarded with for their years of patience was the equivalent of a long episode of "The Mandalorian."

"Star Wars: The Mandalorian and Grogu" brought in $167 million at the worldwide box office over the four-day holiday weekend, making it the lowest opening ever for a "Star Wars" movie. It did worse than 2018's Memorial Day weekend release of "Solo: A Star Wars Story," which brought in $168 million worldwide and went on to earn only $392 million worldwide in its theatrical run.

It's put Disney brass in a similar situation to 2019, when then-CEO Bob Iger declared that "Star Wars" movies were going on a "hiatus" after the release of "The Rise of Skywalker." That break led to a savvy pivot to the small screen, with "Star Wars" spinoff show "The Mandalorian" launching Disney's streaming service Disney+ in 2019.

Led by showrunner Jon Favreau, "The Mandalorian" leaned into the deep mythology of the franchise with a unique Western gunslinger aesthetic. It also introduced the world to Grogu, aka Baby Yoda, whose improbable cuteness helped make "Star Wars" a sensation for the first time since Disney reignited the fanbase with the theatrical release of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" in 2015.

The show's success led to more live-action shows ("Obi-Wan Kenobi," "Andor," "Ashoka," "Skeleton Crew," "The Acolyte") that delved deeper into the "Star Wars" saga and were a satisfying feast for fanatics and casual fans alike.

Now, tasked with helming the return of "Star Wars" to the big screen, Favreau makes "The Mandalorian and Grogu" play like an extension of the beloved television show — and why would you head to theaters when you're used to getting your Mando fix at home?

All of which begs the question: Did Disney's pivot to TV kill "Star Wars" as we know it? Is the franchise no longer the gold standard for theatrical blockbusters?

'The Mandalorian and Grogu' felt like an extension of the TV show — not a full-blown theatrical event

Supersizing "The Mandalorian" into a feature film works on paper. It has the broadest appeal of any of the current "Star Wars" properties, and Favreau is a proven blockbuster hitmaker who's brought in box office coin directing movies like Marvel's "Iron Man" and live-action versions of Disney classics like "The Jungle Book" (2016) and "The Lion King" (2019).

But Disney and Lucasfilm seemingly didn't consider that "Star Wars" fans are a fickle bunch. Though fans love the nostalgic nature of a galaxy far, far, away, they're always craving something different. For every one fan who despises "The Last Jedi," there are two who love it for its big swings (or vice versa — such is the paradox of the fanbase).

Business Insider reached out to Disney for comment.

The fans weren't looking for "The Mandalorian and Grogu" to be an elevated episode of the beloved show, but that's what they got. Instead of Carl Weathers (RIP) giving Mando jobs, in the movie, it's Sigourney Weaver. And when the show gets nostalgic, it misses the mark. Watching the muscular son of Jabba the Hut (voiced by Jeremy Allen White), fighting alongside Mando against creatures that look eerily similar to the ones Chewbacca played on the chessboard in the Millennium Falcon (the floor they fought on even looked like a chessboard!) felt forced.

That's not to say the movie is a "Solo"-level disaster. The second half has a better pace and feels more cinematic, and the puppetry and stop-motion animation featured are some of the best the company has ever done, harkening back to its 1980s collaborations with Jim Henson on "The Dark Crystal" and "Labyrinth."

But the film's close ties to the show likely turned off those who didn't want to spend money on an IMAX-priced ticket to something they've been watching at home for years. This could be the start of a bigger problem for Disney: Like Pixar, Disney has programmed the "Star Wars" fan to settle for getting content outside of a movie theater. And there's only one way to stop that.

'Star Wars' fans are craving originality on the big screen

The lackluster opening for "The Mandalorian and Grogu" at the box office — by "Star Wars" standards, anyway — is disappointing, but the naysayers will get even louder if the movie underperforms in its second weekend in theaters.

This puts even more pressure on Disney to make sure its next "Star Wars" theatrical release, "Starfighter," is done right.

Directed by Shawn Levy ("Free Guy") and starring Ryan Gosling, the movie is a completely original story set five years after the events of "The Rise of Skywalker." That's all we know, and that's all we need to know!

Dangling a carrot of originality in front of "Star Wars" fans is essential right now, because they want to be challenged. If the success of "The Mandalorian" and "Andor" proved anything, it's that "Star Wars" fans will always show up — but they will show up and be loyal if the story being told expands on what they thought a "Star Wars" tale could be.

By iterating on an existing story, "The Mandalorian and Grogu" played it too safe. Fans want more daring, original stories; that should have been the biggest takeaway from the franchise's self-imposed hiatus. For "Star Wars" to get back to its theatrical glory, this is the way.

• US presidents have redecorated the Oval Office in different ways since it was first built in 1909.
• Most presidents have sat at the Resolute Desk, but others brought in their own personal furniture.
• President Donald Trump has added numerous gold embellishments to the Oval Office.

It's been more than a century since the Oval Office was first built at the White House under President William Howard Taft. In that time, US presidents have each made different design choices to redecorate the formal workspace.

Some presidents, like President George H.W. Bush, have brought in their own furniture to replace the Resolute Desk. Others, like President Donald Trump, have reinstated vintage Oval Office pieces while adding their own personal flair.

Take a look at how the Oval Office has changed through the years.

The first iteration of the Oval Office was built under President William Howard Taft in 1909 as part of an expansion of the West Wing.

Inspired by the White House's oval-shaped Blue Room, the president's formal workspace was designed by architect Nathan C. Wyeth.

Taft's Oval Office featured an olive-green color scheme.

President Franklin D. Roosevelt redesigned and moved the Oval Office as part of another West Wing expansion in 1934.

The Oval Office was moved to the southeast corner of the White House.

Roosevelt kept a variety of items on his desk, including photos of his sons, ceramic animal figurines, and an appointments easel with his daily schedule, according to the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library and Museum.

President Harry Truman's Oval Office was the first to feature a rug with the presidential seal.

Truman decorated the Oval Office with the turquoise rug and matching curtains. The walls were painted a lighter seafoam green.

President John F. Kennedy was the first president to use the Resolute Desk in the Oval Office.

The Resolute Desk, made of wood from the British ship H.M.S. Resolute, was gifted to President Rutherford B. Hayes by Queen Victoria in 1880. Previous presidents kept the desk in the second-floor office of the White House Residence and the Broadcast Room, according to the White House Historical Association.

President Lyndon Johnson replaced the Resolute Desk with his own desk, which he'd used as a US senator and vice president.

He also redecorated the Oval Office with white drapes with red trim, evoking the American flag.

President Richard Nixon chose bold hues of blue and yellow to decorate the Oval Office.

Nixon's Oval Office rug, in the same blue color as the American flag, was designed by first lady Pat Nixon.

President Gerald Ford changed the color scheme of the upholstery to burnt orange and khaki.

Ford's decor included the wheel from the SS Mayaguez, an American container ship that was seized by Cambodian forces in 1975 and rescued at Ford's direction.

Ford also added a mahogany Seymour tall case clock in 1975.

The clock, built between 1795 and 1805, has remained in the Oval Office under every subsequent president since 1975.

President Jimmy Carter brought the Resolute Desk back to the Oval Office.

Otherwise, he left most of Ford's decor.

President Ronald Reagan redecorated the Oval Office during his second term with a rug designed by first lady Nancy Reagan.

The rug featured the presidential seal in the center with sunbeams emerging from the middle, surrounded by a border of olive branches.

President George H.W. Bush redid the Oval Office in shades of blue and gold and brought in the C&O desk that he used as vice president.

The Resolute Desk was moved to the Residence Office.

President Bill Clinton chose Arkansas-based interior designer Kaki Hockersmith to give the Oval Office a new look.

Hockersmith designed the yellow curtains and the blue rug with the presidential seal. Clinton also chose to bring the Resolute Desk back to the Oval Office.

First lady Laura Bush designed a new rug for President George W. Bush's Oval Office.

The rug featured a sunbeam design with the presidential seal at its center, reminiscent of Reagan's rug, and a lone star in a nod to Bush's home state of Texas.

President Barack Obama added striped wallpaper and a new rug with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.

The quote on the border of the rug read, "The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice.''

During his first term, President Donald Trump reinstalled Reagan's rug and added a portrait of President Andrew Jackson.

He also brought back Clinton's gold curtains and chose a new off-white wallpaper.

President Joe Biden brought back Clinton's Oval Office rug and added new portraits.

Biden hung portraits of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Thomas Jefferson, and Alexander Hamilton.

In his second, non-consecutive term, Trump has made significant changes to the Oval Office, adding numerous gold embellishments.

Many of the gold decor pieces in Trump's Oval Office came from the White House collection, but Trump also imported some statuettes from his Mar-a-Lago estate in Palm Beach, Florida.

Trump also added flags representing different branches of the US military and additional presidential portraits, with President George Washington in the prominent center spot above the fireplace mantle.

Other additions include the same rug from his first term, originally designed for Reagan, numerous pieces of artwork, and a button on his desk that summons a staffer with a Diet Coke.

• Target is calling about 150 remote workers back to its Minneapolis headquarters.
• The relocation mandate impacts workers within its merchandising division.
• The retailer, which brought on a new CEO earlier this year, has been working to turn the business around.

Target is calling more remote workers back to its headquarters.

The retailer is requiring about 150 remote workers within two teams in its merchandising group to relocate to Minneapolis, a spokesperson confirmed to Business Insider. Bloomberg earlier reported the news.

The company is offering relocation assistance to those who decide to move and severance to those who choose not to.

A company spokesperson said in a statement that "increased in-person collaboration across a core part of our merchandising team will help us reinforce our merchandising authority, unlocking greater creativity and enabling us to move faster to deliver on our strategy."

The retailer, which brought on a new CEO earlier this year, is in the midst of a turnaround strategy to revive growth, and improving its merchandise is a pillar of that effort.

The relocation mandate comes as more companies, such as Amazon and AT&T, have been calling workers back into the office in recent years. Target last year ramped up in-office days for employees already based in Minneapolis.

Target does not have a companywide mandate and has left in-office requirements to team leaders.

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After having her first child, Lindsay Thomas went back to her full-time, in-office job. When a second kid came in 2024, Thomas says she knew she didn't want to juggle everything again, so she negotiated a part-time, remote version of her communications role in medical research — working anywhere from 2 to 40 hours a month — and started picking up freelance work on the side.

Now, when a kid gets sick and Thomas is up all night — something that would have made her "spiral," when she worked in the office —she knows she'll be at home with flexibility to schedule her day. If Thomas hadn't had the option to freelance, she says, she would have chosen to stay home with the second kid — even though she hadn't envisioned herself as a stay-at-home mom. "There are costs to everything," she says of leaving her full-time gig. "The cost to our family, the cost to the stress levels, to mental health, to going back to doing that and knowing what it was gonna feel like for all of us, especially with an older child involved," she tells me, "that was just a cost we didn't want to absorb."

After making employment gains during the height of the pandemic, women have begun a downhill slide out of the workforce. The number of working mothers of young children between 25 to 44 fell nearly 3% from January and June of last year, hitting its lowest rate in more than three years, according to a Washington Post report. In December, 91,000 women older than 20 dropped out of the workforce. The number of men over 20 employed jumped by 10,000 that month, according to an analysis of federal jobs data from the National Women's Law Center.

AI is also affecting America's gender imbalance in the workforce. A March report from Anthropic found that those who work in roles with a high exposure to AI automation are 16% more likely to be female, putting women more at risk for layoffs.

An uptick in return to office mandates is also disproportionately pushing women to choose whether they'll be able to stay in a job that requires a commute as they also balance after school pickup and domestic responsibilities. And a wave of mass layoffs has upended employment security, workplace loyalty, and the job hunt.

Women make 85% of what men make at work on average and take on twice as much of the domestic labor and caregiving tasks at home. "The real friction is we just haven't built systems that allow people to integrate their work and their lives and and their desires and what do they want their life to look like," says Brea Starmer, CEO of staffing firm Lions and Tigers, which focuses on fractional workers. "For anyone that doesn't fit this very specific narrow look and feel and mold, there is just not a lot of options." In a bleak job market, freelancing is one way working parents can claw back power. And as AI adoption transforms company needs and could shift the number of workers and hours needed to work, employers are starting to see more value in hiring part-time and contract workers.

There's autonomy in ditching the full-time gig; but it often means making a choice between several imperfect paths.

The pandemic showed that flexible, remote work benefitted parents, particularly women. As of 2023, 74% of mothers worked, up from 72% in 2019, according to the Institute for Women's Policy Research. But many CEOs who are calling workers back to the office have metaphorically shrugged at the costs to women. A survey from the freelance platform Upwork found that more than half of executives reported losing a disproportionate number of women after implementing RTO policies. Turnover among female employees at these companies is 82%, higher than those that allow for remote work. Nearly a third of women freelancers said RTO was a direct factor in leaving their full-time jobs. Forty-two percent of women who voluntarily left the workforce in 2025 cited caregiving and childcare costs as the main reason their choice, and these women were more likely than those who stayed employed to work at companies that did not offer flexible schedules, according to a survey from Catalyst, a nonprofit focused on women's progress.

But as many employers don't adapt to the needs of families, they're seeing the benefits in hiring freelance workers. Another survey of about 350 business leaders conducted by Upwork last fall found that 77% said AI was increasing the need for them to hire fractional, freelance workers with specialized skills. "What we historically saw was that business leaders were maybe a little more hesitant to embrace these kinds of non-traditional work models," says Gabby Burlacu, senior manager at the Upwork Research Institute. Now, "business leaders are far more open to working with the most skilled talent that they can, especially the most AI-enabled talent, because they're all trying to figure out: How are we going to unlock the value of this technology?"

It's hard to say how many people, and particularly women, are working in freelance roles. Upwork doesn't track gender of the freelancers on its platform, but tells me that in a recent report, 44% of knowledge freelancer workers were women, compared to 41% of people working similar jobs in full-time roles, among those they surveyed. Freelance marketplace Fiverr tells me there's been growth in areas like voiceover, user-generated content creation, and spokesperson or modeling projects specifically seeking female talent. In 2022, 9.8 million people were self-employed, according to the US Bureau of Economic Analysis. Other analyses of the freelance workforce estimate that as many as 75 million people participate in some capacity.

Working freelance has given women more flexible schedules and eased childcare costs, but that can also mean taking on even more unpaid household and caregiving labor.

Jaime Hollander previously commuted three to four hours a day roundtrip into Manhattan. She freelanced on the side, and split the care of two kids with her husband equally. Her mindset shifted after her father died in 2019. "You have those moments of reckoning where you're like, this can't be all that there is,'" she tells me. So, she cut back on work and shortly after quit her job. She focused on freelance marketing and copyrighting. The challenge with being a full-time freelancer, she tells me, is that the shift threw her into becoming "the default parent," on call for all of her kids' needs throughout the day. "If something has to get done between 7 and 7, I will do it," she tells me. "Sometimes, it's really challenging."

Paid parental leave has become more common, but just 40% of companies in the US offered it as of 2023, according to a survey from Society for Human Resources Management. A short period of leave tied only to the birth of a child doesn't answer for the flexibility working parents need as their kids age — there are sick days, potential disability diagnoses, and more hands-on needs at schools. "It's not just about retaining women in those early years," Neha Ruch, author of "The Power Pause: How to Plan a Career Break After Kids — and Come Back Stronger Than Ever." She says "there is recalibration happening" in the workforce, where more women may take fractional work, part-time roles, or freelance gigs. For companies, retaining women workers requires "thinking about parenting through the longitudinal experience of early parenthood," Ruch says, "going all the way up to college admissions and how and the demands that are made within the system on parents' time, and how we can make those work in the ecosystem of the professional space as well."

Many of the working parents I spoke to for this story chose the freelance or part-time route not upon having a kid, but as they grew up and demands of their families changed. When Erin Bartholomew's son was born, her husband stayed home to care for him. A few years later, she took her turn, wanting to have that hands-on time while her son was still young. She re-entered the workforce after a year into a remote job, logging on at 6 a.m. in Oregon to work in marketing for an East Coast company. But Bartholomew was laid off last year in 2024. Instead of searching for a similar role, she started her own marketing consultancy "It's so night and day," Bartholomew tells me. "It's allowed that balance that my husband and I really wanted."

As some women find flexibility in freelancing, others will be left out. Those who work in offices with 9-to-5 in-person mandates, or in education, retail, and healthcare roles, can't always make their own schedule. Parents who are the sole provider of income and health insurance for families often can't make ends meet working part-time. Others are pushed to stay at home with kids because the costs of childcare outpace their salaries. Leaving a full-time job can also disrupt a career trajectory toward leadership, and mean lost contributions to retirement accounts like 401(k)s. If companies don't adapt their schedules and remote work policies or future-proof roles for AI, many women will be forced to change how they think about their careers and priorities. They might not see going part-time or leaving a job as a choice they want to make, but something they have no choice in.

Amanda Hoover is a senior correspondent at Business Insider covering the tech industry. She writes about the biggest tech companies and trends.