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.
3. A job is a tool to turn time into money.
Let’s talk about where your career fits into your utility function. Your job converts time (the natural resource you’re endowed with to maximize utility) into money. Your job is like an ATM; you put time into it and get money out of it.
Ideally, it does this with minimal hassle and maybe some enjoyment, potentially adding to your utility rather than subtracting from it. But when I ask people what they would do with their time if money were no object, almost no one says they’d try to file more reports or climb higher on the corporate ladder. That’s because we recognize that a job is a means to utility, not an end.
If we didn’t need the money that comes from employment, we’d spend most of our time on things we really enjoy: being with loved ones, hobbies, nature, and taking care of ourselves. We need to think of our careers a little more transactionally than the business books at airports press us to. Exactly how much money do I need at each phase of my life, and how do I plot a career that gets me that while eating up as little of my precious time as possible? This means thinking hard about the lifecycle of your job.
Investing lots of time in your twenties can make sense because you’re not as squeezed by home responsibilities, and it can buy you a better time-to-money conversion rate from your job later in life. But you want to make sure you’re in a field where you are working toward the ability to take your foot off the gas at some point—like during the squeeze—and use more of that time making utility directly. Otherwise, the prize for the pie-eating contest is more pie! Your investment in your career should be proportional to the role money plays in maximizing your utility. Everything else is just chasing “success” at the expense of true happiness.
4. You can work like a girl and get paid.
There is no evidence that male traits are actually more productive, and there certainly isn’t any evidence that women will be rewarded for mimicking them. When I got to Wharton, a male colleague told me that students respect you more when you are tough, saying that I needed to show them who was boss right from the start.
So, I marked them tardy if they were a minute late, and guess what? They hated it coming from me. A female professor told me that she’d found her students expected her to be really nice, and she had to fulfill their social expectations to receive good reviews. Research backs up this anecdote: women are often penalized for failing to exhibit expected traits like “niceness” and community-mindedness.
“I want women to view their gendered traits as superpowers.”
While it’s also true that the evidence shows that men are, on average, more competitive, more risk-loving, tougher negotiators, and greater self-promoters, it does not say that those things lead to more productivity or higher profits. In a study on competitiveness, men were overcompetitive. Subjects performed a task and had to decide whether they wanted to receive payment for their efforts or participate in a tournament, where they would only be paid if they scored the highest. Of the worst-performing men (the men certain to lose the tournament), 60 percent still chose to enter rather than take the guaranteed payoff.
In my own research on negotiation, I found that male-male pairs were more than twice as likely to fail to reach an agreement and therefore walk away from a negotiation with nothing. I want women to view their gendered traits as superpowers, and find workplaces where they can get ahead by being themselves—not by pretending to be a man and getting punished for it anyway.
5. We must radically prioritize what contributes to our happiness.
When the deck is stacked against us, we can’t keep trying to “play fair”—meeting everyone else’s needs, and never our own. We have to become ruthless in aligning our time with what gives us utility. Take these three steps:
- Renegotiate how time and money are allocated in your household.
- Throw out your houseplants and make other hard choices.
- Pay yourself first with leisure time.
First, to renegotiate the deal in your household, I want you and your partner to track your time. Often, men think they’re doing about half the household work, but that’s only because they do half of the things they know about. While they’re doing half the school drop-offs, you’re the one making sure there are clothes in the right size, lunches packed, after-school care, and playdates are scheduled—half of which you multitask during work. If you track your time, you might realize there’s a lot more inequality than you think, and you can start reallocating.
Once you reallocate the household’s joint time budget, if there’s still inequality in work and leisure time, see if reallocating money can help. Not outsourcing a task is hiring yourself to do it. We rarely do this with male-coded tasks (like car repair and plumbing), but somehow, for female-coded tasks, we forget that doing something in-house has an opportunity cost of where else you could invest that time. If you’re a lawyer who bills at a certain rate, or a nurse who could pick up an extra shift, can you really afford that much of your own time for laundry?
“We have to become ruthless in aligning our time with what gives us utility.”
Second, throw out your houseplants is my pithy phrase for decluttering your time of anything that’s an obligation rather than a calling. For me, it was wilting houseplants that I didn’t have time to care for and made me feel like a failure. For you, it might be volunteering at your kid’s school, making homemade baby food, or planning the office retreat. Understanding how we’re being squeezed from all sides gives you the freedom to say, “Nope, this doesn’t add up for me right now.” Importantly, you can always say yes later when you’re in a different, and easier, chapter of your life.
Lastly, pay yourself first with leisure time. We do get some time to ourselves, but often it’s just little crumbles of time left over at the end of the day. By then, we’re so depleted we end up just zoning out on our phones. If we block out time for the things that bring us the most joy and meaning, everything else can claim the scraps! It’s like how we can suddenly get a project done in an hour before the deadline—things expand to fill the available space in our calendars. Block your leisure time like an important meeting, and let yourself be your own top priority.
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