Johnson & Johnson will break itself up into two.

Johnson & Johnson said on Friday that it would break itself up into two publicly traded companies, in the latest instance of corporate giants shrinking themselves to please shareholders.

The 135-year-old company announced that it planned to spin off its consumer-products division — home to Tylenol, Band-Aid, Neutrogena beauty products and more — into a separate business. That would leave J.&J. with its pharmaceutical and medical devices division, which includes its coronavirus vaccine manufacturing.

The decision comes days after General Electric, another icon of corporate America, revealed a plan to break itself up into three companies. And it was announced hours after Toshiba, a stalwart of Japanese industry, said it, too, would split itself up.

Behind the moves is pressure on corporate executives to simplify their sometimes sprawling business empires, in hopes of bringing more focus to their companies and lifting their stock prices.

But J.&J. has also grappled with legal claims that its talc-based products may have caused cancer. In October, a division the company had created to manage those lawsuits filed for bankruptcy protection.

The company’s share price rose more than 5 percent in premarket trading.

Single mothers — those who have never married — have made up a growing share of home buyers over the past three decades. But the pandemic threatens to dampen that progress, experts said.

Women have borne the brunt of the job losses over the last year and a half, while also shouldering most of the child-care responsibilities, Tara Siegel Bernard reports for The New York Times. At the same time, the housing market has grown highly competitive: Prices of single-family homes rose nearly 20 percent in August, the latest data available, from a year earlier, according to S&P CoreLogic Case-Shiller’s National Home Price Index.

The pandemic, combined with the challenging market landscape, has eroded women’s confidence about their likelihood of becoming homeowners: Nearly 60 percent of single female heads of households who rent — those who never married, those who are separated or divorced, and widows — said they could not afford to buy and didn’t know if they ever would, according to a September study by Freddie Mac, the government-backed mortgage giant.

Single women accounted for 19 percent of home buyers from July 2020 through June 2021, up from 18 percent in the preceding year, according to an analysis from the National Association of Realtors released on Thursday. The slight increase is above prepandemic rates, but may partly be a result of the decline in the number of Americans getting married, said Jessica Lautz, vice president of demographics and behavioral insights at the Realtors group.

“Women have a lot of headwinds right now,” she said. “We know they are buying on a lower income even as prices have increased and inventory has decreased.”

Across the country, employers are struggling with how, when and even if they will bring employees back to the office. In conversations with leaders at companies in a broad variety of industries — the people charged with making the ultimate call — the consensus was that there was no consensus.

C.E.O.s are struggling to balance rapidly shifting expectations with their own impulse to have the final word on how their companies run. They are eager to appear responsive to employees who are relishing their newfound autonomy, but reluctant to give up too much control. And they are constantly changing policies in response to worker demands, re-examining aspects of their business that they might not have tinkered with otherwise.

David Gelles, The New York Times’s Corner Office columnist, talked to several C.E.O.s to learn how they’re thinking about working from the office at this point in the pandemic.

• In early October, PwC announced that remote work was a permanent option. Workers had two weeks to decide what they would do. Those who decide to change cities or remain remote may have their assignments changed, but are not at risk of being let go. “I believe what we announced will be commonplace for the mass employers in a matter of months,” said Tim Ryan, the U.S. chairman of PwC.

• “What employees are saying they want in their work environment going forward is going to be a lot more important than a bunch of senior executives at the top of an organization determining what that will be,” said Andi Owen, the chief executive of MillerKnoll, the maker of the Aeron chair and other office furniture, which has yet to bring all of its own white-collar workers back full time.

• As Google prepares for more employees to come back to the office next year, it is planning a makeover of many of its office spaces. Sundar Pichai, the chief executive of Google and its parent company, Alphabet, said that Google, where some workers have returned on a voluntary basis but most are still working remotely, remained productive (and profitable), but that going so long with limited in-person interactions with colleagues was getting old. “We are working on some borrowed time, in terms of working on memories of the relationships you have and the connections you have,” Mr. Pichai said. “It’s taking a toll.”

• A full third of workers said last fall that they were putting in more hours than they had been before the pandemic, according to Pew. This was especially the case for people who used to commute. For many, the hours spent driving or taking public transportation had simply been subsumed into the workday. “I think people are working harder,” said Ms. Owen of MillerKnoll. The blurring of the lines between the workday and the rest of life has contributed to a growing sense of disaffection in the labor force, and may help explain the mass resignations that are upending the job market.

C.E.O.s are eager for employees to return — and afraid of alienating those who have grown accustomed to working from home. READ THE FULL ARTICLE →