3 hours ago
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In 2017, I gave birth to my son, and also a midlife crisis. Suddenly, my two-hour commute from our home in New York City to my job as an economist at the University of Pennsylvania went from inconvenient but sustainable to the bane of my existence. And my marriage, which had seemed flawed but in a cute, work-in-progress kind of way, suddenly seemed to be falling apart at the seams. At the same time, in my academic career, rejections were stacking up, and I couldn’t shake the feeling that my male colleagues, some of whom were going up for tenure years before I was, simply had more time in their days. Nor did I feel as if I was at the top of my game in other domains, constantly observing how much nicer other people’s houses looked, how much better dressed their little bundles of joy were, how much more time they seemed to have to juggle motherhood, work, and coordinate everything therein.
Perhaps the nadir of this period was when track repairs were taking place on my train line, and I spent a total of six hours commuting, only to work in my office for four. I pumped breast milk in the Amtrak bathroom, crying, because I wouldn’t make it home in time to put my son to bed. I not only felt as though I didn’t “have it all”; I felt as if I didn’t have anything. Not the successful career I wanted, not the thriving family and home life I wanted, and I wasn’t even the fun person I used to be, who travelled and laughed and enjoyed things. Most of all, I was So. Darn. Tired. All the time.
It’s a refrain I’ve heard time and again from working women, who feel as if they’re constantly juggling and constantly dropping each ball, one by one. And it is not surprising. Gender roles have converged in the workplace, but not at home, leaving women playing both offence and defence. Women still do the majority of housework, regardless of whether they earn more or less than their male partners – in fact, a man who earns only 20% of the household income does about the same amount of housework as a man who earns 80%. Women in heterosexual marriages who are the primary breadwinners do almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as their male spouses. Added to that is an explosion of parenting time since the early 90s: mothers today spend twice as much time with their children as mothers a generation ago. Amid those pressures, women’s wages have plateaued and our percentage in the upper echelons of management and paygrades has stalled.
For too long, women have been expected to accept unfairly labour-intensive, functionally unsustainable deals in all areas of work and life, and to somehow just make up the difference by working harder, optimising better, and, when that fails, “self-care”. But it’s not working for us – women’s happiness is measurably lower than it was 20 years ago – a figure that is even larger when considered relative to men, whose happiness has been improving. We cannot keep going in this direction. Something has to change.
After my moment in the Amtrak train, I made some drastic changes. I ended my marriage, moved to Philadelphia, and traded a two-and-a-half-hour train ride for a seven-minute commute by bike. In Philly, I was able to afford enough space to have a live-in au pair, which meant having real help with my son for the first time.
As an economist whose research focuses on the decisions that shape women’s lives and the economic and societal constraints they face when making them, I think the rationale for a lot of our decisions can be boiled down to a simple question: Am I getting a good deal? I don’t want to gaslight you, suggesting the problems in our lives can be solved by one simple trick or lifehack. These problems are hard. But I want to help you ask for more – from your partner, from your boss and from the system itself.
How to get a good – or at least better – deal
Work out your personal utility function
In the same way for-profit companies are assumed to be making choices to maximise their bottom line, economists view human beings as agents who maximise their own personal “profit” function: utility. But unlike dollars and cents that can be counted, utility is a much more amorphous concept. One way to think of utility is as your personal video game score at the end of your life. Except you decide what gives you points, because only you know your values and priorities.
Importantly, you cannot compare yourself with people who don’t have the same utility function as you do. We fall into this trap all the time: you might find the greatest utility in volunteer work or travel, activities that don’t leave you with a lot of time at home. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. But – and this is the trap – suddenly when you visit a friend who finds great utility in homemaking, or from-scratch cooking, you start to feel as if you are failing. This is not a failure – it is a difference in utility function.
Maximise subject to constraints
When I was one semester away from graduation, I shared with a female professor that I was hoping to pursue an economics PhD, but first, I had taken a job with McKinsey & Company. Her aghast expression surprised me. “No,” she said, “you can’t do that. Two years at McKinsey, six-year PhD, two-year postdoc, seven-year tenure track …” Then, with great urgency: “You’re never going to have kids!” At the time, I felt taken aback, and maybe even a little offended, but I also knew she was right. If I wanted to have kids, I had to think about how it all added up, in a way that men just didn’t need to consider.
Most people face constraints, from financial to social to time, but women – even if they never have kids – have more. Just as we can’t compare ourselves to people who don’t have the same utility function, you must not compare yourself to people who don’t face the same constraints. We may all be in the same game, but some of us have more protective equipment.
Work like a girl
Sure, there are tips I give my students. Say, “Thank you for helping”, instead of apologising for a problem beyond your control. Learn to take up space – look at men who ask questions in class, and see how comfortable they are taking up other people’s time to get their own needs met. We can all fine-tune our communication skills. But I want you to separate this from a need to change who you are.
There is a canonical paper written by two experimental economists, Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund, titled “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?” and the authors have told me people always forget about that second part (the answer is yes; 60% of low-performing men choose a competition they’re destined to lose over a certain payout). Why don’t we spend as much time speculating that male over-competitiveness might be destroying corporate value as we do asking women to change, to be more cut-throat, to lean in? I think about Christine Lagarde’s suggestion, that if it was “Lehman Sisters instead of Lehman Brothers”, perhaps there wouldn’t have been so much over-indexing on high-risk mortgage securities, and the financial crisis wouldn’t have been as bad.
Women are often also described as bad negotiators, but my own research has found that men are more than twice as likely to fail to reach an agreement, and therefore walk away from a negotiation with nothing. What holds women back is lacking assurance they won’t be penalised for it, not the skill or the will. So let’s get out of the mindset of telling women they need to change the way they approach work and start talking about the unique value they bring to the table.
Get more than you give at work
At every stage I want you to think about the balance of trade between you and your employer: how much are you giving, and how much are you getting? In a world where harassment, discrimination and microaggressions often stop women from earning as much as men, what can you do to ensure you are getting more than you give? Even if you love your job, or at least some people there, remember that your employer will never love you back. Their objective is to maximise profit. Yours is to maximise your own utility. Your interests may overlap at times, but, fundamentally, they are not shared.
And, very importantly, understand the difference between a job and a passion project.
Invest in the right partner
Trust me, I know that “the heart wants what it wants.” But having feelings for someone is what economists call a “necessary but not sufficient condition”. As in – it’s necessary for a relationship to be successful. But it isn’t enough.
I want you to go into the process of choosing a significant other armed not just with your innate sense of who you’re attracted to, but also the savviness to think about who is going to make a good partner in the enterprise of running a household and the other things you need to weather.
Wearing my economist’s hat, I often think about dating as a job interview. So even in those heady early days when all you want to do is talk about your favourite bands and movies, or moral philosophy, or whatever your jam is, I urge women to also ask tactical questions such as: “Who does your laundry?”, “What do you like to cook for dinner?” After all, when interviewing someone for a job, you wouldn’t just ask about their opinions – you would ask about their experience, preparation and demonstrated track record.
Make a relationship performance-improvement plan
Just like we shouldn’t settle for a partner, we shouldn’t settle for a “deal” with the partner we’ve already chosen that leaves us exhausted and depleted. In that spirit, if you’re finding that the joint load is falling on your shoulders, and love is fizzling, you need to have tough conversations and reset the terms of your relationship. I’m going to focus here mostly on an unequal division of home production, because this is so often the challenge that I see driving relationships with two reasonable people, that were once filled with love, into the ground.
Get two sheets of graph paper, or open up a Google spreadsheet, and write out seven days with 15-minute intervals from the earliest time you could possibly wake up to the latest you go to bed. If you have a baby who wakes up at night, you’ll need slots for the overnight, too. Then, for one week, fill out what you do in each of those 15-minute slots. You both have to do it for this to work! If you’re multitasking and taking care of someone else and yourself, write that, too – “Did my hair while getting kiddo dressed.” And remember, for these purposes, even if you enjoy packing your child’s lunch every day, it’s childcare.
Household management is a big one – use that category any time you’re thinking or emailing or calling or researching online about something household-related. Your partner might be shocked – and you might be, too – at how little time you actually have for work, for personal care, for social connection, for exercise. For enjoying all the other things that make up parts of your utility function.
Create specialisation in your relationship
Then it’s time to look at the data. Who is actually spending more time on which tasks? Are there any areas that surprise you? You might find that some of the places you’re overburdened are those where both people agree something needs to be done but don’t agree on how much work it should require. Others might be tasks that your partner didn’t even realise existed – like the fact that the kids’ summer camp schedule doesn’t magically materialise but rather takes hours of researching, calling and paperwork.
Now it’s time to begin reallocating the workload. But where to start? I’m partial to Eve Rodsky’s Fair Play method of divvying up tasks wholesale – like dealing out a deck of cards (you can actually buy the cards to do it online). The reason I think it works is that if you assign someone part of a task, you still end up with the “household management” piece of it – conceptualising what needs to be done, managing it, monitoring progress. The women I know who are happiest in their marriages are those who say: “Oh, I don’t cook at all.” Men have been weaponising incompetence for decades, and it’s high time we got hip to it.
Will this need readjustment and renegotiation? Definitely. But is it better than you trying to do everything, being exhausted, and resenting your family instead of spending quality time with them? Also yes.
Pay yourself first, with time
“Pay yourself first” is a personal finance adage that refers to putting money into savings or investments before you do the rest of your budgeting. The idea is that by taking the liquid cash out immediately, and putting it toward long-term goals, you reel in some of the behavioural forces that sometimes cause us to make “mistakes” that run counter to our long-term interests.
Leisure time must be accounted for in advance and treated as a sacred obligation, just like a meeting with your boss, instead of the “treat” you’re allowed to have if you get through your entire to-do list. Because the to-do list will always be there, but time will not. Surprisingly, planning for this time can make you feel as if you have more time, instead of less.
Outsource
I’d like to note how much more comfortable society is in outsourcing male-coded tasks than female-coded tasks. Hiring a handyman to clean the gutters, or painters to touch up the house is considered a norm, because we assume that men’s time can be valuably spent earning money on the market instead of insourcing home production. But when it comes to female-coded tasks such as cooking, cleaning, and childcare, we suddenly feel as if the budget to hire someone is an unaffordable luxury rather than a basic requirement.
So take a truly comprehensive view of the cost of insourcing a task – of hiring yourself for it – which includes the time, the cost of materials, the stress of doing it, and take a hard look at whether investing that time in your career or just in your sanity would have payoffs beyond the cost of something that feels a little out of reach.
If paying to outsource labour isn’t an option for you, can you trade tasks with friends, create car pools, or just invest in simplifying your life so certain things don’t need to happen?
You need to be ruthless. I think of it as Marie Kondo, but for time.
Convert time into joy and meaning
In choosing how we want to spend our time, we have to get used to listening to a different part of ourselves – the constant, omnipresent part who will be with us through our entire lives – rather than the temporary flares of chemicals and emotions (guilt, flattery, unhelpful social norms, algorithms) that create internal chatter. I want you to practise turning up the volume on your inner truths about what you are seeking in life and turning down the volume on the other forces pulling you away from that.
With so many demands on us, it is all too easy for women to forget that we are the protagonists of our own lives. We cannot keep meeting everyone else’s needs and putting ourselves last. It’s time to start writing our own stories.
This is an edited extract from Femonomics: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours, which is published by Hodder & Stoughton (£22) on 25 September in hardback, ebook and audio. To support the Guardian and the Observer, order your copy at guardianbookshop.com.
