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When Corinne Low gave birth to her son in 2017, everything seemed to be lining up. A tenure-track economist at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School, she was working in a career she had long dreamed of. Her husband, stepchild and baby lived in New York City and the two-hour commute to Philadelphia was inconvenient but sustainable. She was embarking on a journey to do it all: a working mom, supporting her family with a career she loved.
As track repairs tripled her commute time, things suddenly felt like they were falling apart. Instead of getting home in time to put her baby son to bed, Low found herself sobbing while breast pumping in an Amtrak bathroom.
As an economist, Low searched for a more precise term to describe how she and other working moms often find themselves stretched for time and energy. She came up with “the squeeze”, and it’s backed by data that shows how women often get burnt out trying to manage competing demands at home and work, especially when they are parenting young children.
Low has spent much of her career as an economist trying to understand how women navigate a modern world that has prioritized the careers of men. In her new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours, Low outlines how structures around women’s work and home lives fail to truly accommodate working women.
Low calls the book a “love letter to women”, an effort to let women know that society has so often made them feel like something is wrong with them instead of the system. Much of the book is dedicated to offering advice on how women can figure out what “having it all” means to them in the face of stubborn expectations around work and home.
In an interview with the Guardian, Low said the book encompasses how women are “economic agents” just like men. They make rational decisions to optimize outcomes. As obvious as this may seem, the field has tended to discount women’s economic contributions.
“When we think about the fact that women spend, on average, more time outside the labor force and spend more time with children, we’re like: ‘Oh, well the gender wage gap is because women have different preferences, and this is their choices’,” Low said. But women aren’t “just having these feelings and preferences that are perpendicular to economic realities”.
Historically, the work women did at home was drastically undervalued compared to the salaries that their husbands earned. Low and other economists have pointed out that “home production” – childcare, laundry, cleaning and cooking – is a full-time job.
When a woman specialized in home production, it meant that her husband could fully focus on his career and earn a salary that could support the entire family. On the surface, it appears to make sense. Two people for two full-time jobs.
But economists have noted that this setup only works when the relationship remains intact. It’s no coincidence, Low points out, that women entered the workforce right as unilateral divorce laws were introduced in the US in the 1970s, and getting a divorce became easier in most states. Low cites a paper that traces the connection between these divorce laws and rising college graduation rates for women and is aptly titled Degrees Are Forever.
“Men could walk away from their marriages, taking their paycheck with them,” Low writes. “Wives could have spent years investing in home production and easing the path of someone else’s career that they now couldn’t benefit from.”
Low notes that poorer women and women of color have always been working because their households could not afford only one person with a job. Being a stay-at-home mother, for a time, was actually seen as a privilege.
But, among other factors, the possibility of divorce pushed women to develop their own “human capital”, a term used to describe the skills and expertise a person has to earn an income, which allowed for economic freedom in case something went wrong in their relationship.
There were a few catches. First, just as women were starting to make their way into the workplace, expectations around parenting started to become more intensive. Instead of outsourcing breastfeeding to powdered formula and meals to microwave TV dinners, parents were expected to be present with their children.
But while data shows that many women are now earning just as much, or sometimes even more, than their partners, the time men spend on home production hasn’t budged.
“If you understand women entering the labor force as a gender revolution that came in and changed our attitudes about women’s role in society, then of course, men’s role would change, too,” Low said. But “there was no force acting on men requiring them to do something different.”
Instead, much of the societal focus has been about how women can adapt to workplaces that were built and designed for men, rather than encouraging men to take on home production tasks, especially things like childcare or cleaning a home. While men fix windows and mow the lawn, these “exterior maintenance” tasks take less time than the tasks more often done by women.
Books like Lean In by former Facebook boss Sheryl Sandberg’s and Sophia Amoruso’s #Girlboss in the early 2010s ushered in a new era where women were told to take up space in the workplace and show their male colleagues they can keep up and work harder.
The consequences of this have manifested in what appears to be the modern “feminist” movement against work – a backlash, Low said, to the “girl boss” era.
Low argues that the advice of Sandberg and co falls short. “It ignores the structural realities that put the onus on women,” she said. “It’s rational to say well, because the structural barriers are standing in my way, maybe I don’t feel like pursuing a career where I’m going to feel like I’m … a battering ram against these structural forces.”
Where the Lean In ideology can ignore gender differences, under the guise of achieving equality, Low writes that some gender differences are important to acknowledge. When she was pregnant with her son, three of her male colleagues’ wives were also pregnant. “I bitterly clocked the ways in which our investments in this miracle of creation diverged,” she writes. “Whereas I was exhausted all the time and often bent over a toilet with morning sickness, they were merrily skipping (so it seemed to me) down the office halls.”
The ongoing gender divide has seeped into the dating sphere, where women often complain about how men on dating apps are uncommitted and balk at the idea of non-casual dating. Low notes that women who want kids are on a much more constrained timeline than men, amping up the pressure of dating just as they are supposed to be building up careers.
Because the girl boss era didn’t resonate with all women, Low worries that in defiance to the massive effort it takes to fight the headwinds, women have started to believe they would be happier not working at all. The so-called “tradwife” movement has taken hold of many spaces on social media, where couples romanticize traditional gender roles. Women become unburdened by careers, while men can focus on their work.
But Low said there may be a sense of “amnesia” about how bad the arrangement was for women.
Women were once warned by their mothers about the impact of divorce on women without an independent source of income. “That generation went to school at high rates. But the generation coming up under me did not get that message. The message they’re getting is: ‘Your moms are really stressed out. Wouldn’t it be nice to not be so stressed out?’” she said. “I don’t think they have the historical context to understand how risky that is. You are not protected, divorce laws have changed.”
So, where does this leave women? Low’s solutions are two-fold. First, there needs to be societal changes that address the ongoing gender gaps at work and at home. For example, the US does not have a federal mandate for employers to offer paid maternity leave. When a government does not require companies to offer paid maternity leave, it can actually disincentivize companies from hiring women.
But societal changes take time. Instead of happiness, the elusive goal of so many advice books, Low suggests women start thinking about their unique “personal utility function” – the sum total of what makes their life full and content that may look very different from what’s promoted on social media.
“You have 24 hours in a day, being the Instagrammable tradwife or being Sheryl Sandberg are two separate full-time jobs,” Low said. “You cannot do those two together, but you can have elements of both of those – it is not all or nothing,”
Low insists balance is possible, but it requires some forward thinking – and some tough conversations with partners.
After her time in “the squeeze”, which was exacerbated by Covid-19 shutdowns, Low divorced her husband and moved to Philadelphia, where the lower cost of living allowed her to hire an au pair. With more time to focus on her work, Low was eventually able to get tenure, which eventually led to a better work-life balance.
“I do have a career, but I also like spending time with my kids,” Low said. “I try to be a very involved mom.”
For some women, things may look different. In the book, she cites women who have made all sorts of choices that ended up working for them because they were intentional, grounded in their own unique set of values.
“You’re not failing and you’re not bad at this. This is that hard, it is difficult.” Low said. “Once you have the tools to make those decisions with data and information, then whatever you choose is okay. There’s no wrong way to navigate the life that you choose and that works for you.”
