James' World 2

Below, Corinne Low shares five key insights from her new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.

Corinne is an economist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. She also regularly speaks to and advises companies on their practices.

What’s the big idea?

Women face unequal demands at home and in the workplace, making “having it all” costly. Research shows how hidden factors shape choices and offers a way to reclaim time, energy, and joy.

1. It’s not in your head; it’s in the data

In 2017, I gave birth to my son—and had a midlife crisis. Things that used to work, like commuting two and a half hours to my job, just didn’t add up anymore. I was constantly stressed, angry, depleted, and so tired all the time. Pumping in the Amtrak bathroom, crying that I would miss my son’s bedtime because of a train delay, I wondered, Is it just me?

I started studying women’s time use, and the data told me I was far from alone. Women are getting squeezed from all sides. As our time in the labor market has increased, our time on home responsibilities hasn’t declined accordingly. This is for two reasons:

• Men’s time spent cooking and cleaning has stayed fixed since the 1970s.
• The way we parent has become much more intensive than a generation ago.

Mothers in the ’80s were not babywearing and pumping at work or driving to a million activities. I grew up in the ’80s, and we were out riding bikes with no snacks and no water bottles—we must have been very dehydrated! The parenting game has changed.

Some changes are great and have to do with our greater understanding of child development, but we spend almost twice as much time with our kids as compared to mothers only a generation ago. Without getting sufficient help from our partners, there just aren’t enough hours in the day.

The amount our partners do also doesn’t change when women are the primary breadwinners at home. Women who are the breadwinners still do twice as much cooking and cleaning as their lower-earning male partners—winning the bread and baking it too.

If you look at time usage over a lifecycle, you see women’s time use on kids and housework swells to a mountain in our thirties (a period I call “the squeeze”), and the mirror image of that is our time on leisure and career investments, which goes down like a valley. During that period, time inequality with men is also at its peak. They do less childcare and housework and have more work and leisure time. We need to figure out a different way forward.

2. Your goal in life is utility, not career success

The problems facing women in the workplace are structural. We’re trying to be a Frankenstein of a super career woman at the office and an Instagram mom at home. We feel like we’re falling behind because we’re trying to do more (succeed in a world built by and for men) with less. But economists model human beings as maximizing not career success, not prestige, but their utility function.

“Your utility function is unique to you.”

Utility is like a firm’s profit function. Your personal profit function is made up of all the things that bring you joy, meaning, and fulfillment over the course of your lifetime. If you were to look back at your life when you’re 85 years old, what would make you say, That was a life well lived? Your career is part of that, but it’s not the whole thing.

Your utility function is unique to you. Only you know what brings you the deepest feelings of satisfaction. So, you can’t compare yourself to someone else in terms of accomplishment because they’ve accomplished different things—their utility function is different! Meaning, they’re maximizing something else.