I received a lovely email from a reader thanking me that my book affirmed her feeling that she needed to move. …Back. You see, she had moved to what she hoped was a dream house further from the city, selling a small condo, only to find she hated her commute, the mortgage was a burden after her husband was laid off, she actually wanted a charming walkable city neighborhood not a car suburb, and, worst of all, her former neighborhood had become just that while the value of her former condo skyrocketed. Now she was looking at the mentally crushing possibility of paying hundreds of thousands of dollars more to get a place similar to the one she used to own. Naturally, the human tendency to regret everything kicked in. If only she hadn’t sold it! Her mortgage would be paid off right now and they’d be sitting on all that yummy equity, and wouldn’t have gone through the stressful last year and wouldn’t need to move again! And she was usually so responsible with money! Is there any way to let this go? She asked.

Well, I’ve got some economics to help. Let’s talk about stochastic processes.

Dear move-regretter,

You didn’t do anything wrong!!! You can’t see the future! Should we all have put our savings in Apple Stock in the early 2000s? Of course. When I was 22 should I have cobbled together money to buy the condo I was renting in Wicker Park which is now worth an easy million dollars? Definitely! And should I have NEVER signed up for an adjustable rate mortgage with a 5 year fixed rate in 2016, exactly 5 years before interest rates spiraled out of control post COVID? Duh! But the thing is, those outcomes are realizations of a stochastic process. Just because my decision looks wrong “ex post” (with the benefit of hindsight) does not mean that my decision was wrong “ex ante” (at the time it was made).

You were facing two kinds of uncertainty: 1) Actual uncertainty about the housing market in your old neighborhood, which if you could have predicted, you’re in the wrong field! 2) Uncertainty about your own preferences and needs, which you couldn’t know until you had tried the other thing.

Would it help if I told you that you never would have been able to let go of your suburban “forever home” dream without actually experiencing how much you hated the commute? You would have been stewing in your condo, scheming for how you could take the proceeds of your appreciated property and convert them into an even bigger house in an even nicer suburb. Because that was what you thought you wanted. Only by making this choice to follow what you thought were your desires and learning that it’s not for you do you have the knowledge to let go of that dream and find a new one. What are you supposed to be mad at yourself for? Not being able to see the future and know your husband would be laid off or that your old neighborhood would boom? You were armed with a set of information to predict a stochastic outcome, and you made a great, wise, and yes, responsible decision with that information. The realization turned out to be different. Gambling your life savings at the roulette table is still a dumb choice even if your number comes up and you win big. Making an informed decision with the information you had is still responsible even when it doesn’t work out the way you hoped.

Look, shit happens. I overpaid for a co-op in what I thought was an appreciating area with what I thought were two appreciating incomes that would allow us to upgrade in a few years. Instead, my ex-husband stopped working, COVID hit, house prices stalled out, and interest rates skyrocketed. I could have put that house money in the stock market and rented instead. I could have invested in Moderna and bought an island in the Caribbean right now. Do you understand that “if I had only selected a fixed rate mortgage” is just as wild a fantasy about being able to predict the future as that last one? But we can’t, and we’re not supposed to. Because we’re here to learn.

Life is not supposed to be linear. Life is a series of mishaps that teach us about ourselves and what we want. We swing from one mistake to the next, like a convergent series, if we’re lucky finally arriving at a life of complete wisdom just in time to die, and to realize that none of it was a mistake at all. It was all just beautiful, messy, exhilarating living, and then it’s done too soon.

Here’s what I think you do now: 1) You absolutely ban yourself from dwelling on this. Give yourself a mantra like ’s “I made the best decision I could with the information I had at the time.” You are still post-partum and I think this need to be able to control the uncontrollable is an unhelpful spiral that is so relatable to me as a fellow planner and optimizer. Let it go, just like you can let go of the million dollars you never made on Apple stock. Could it have been better? Maybe. But it also could have been worse. You could have lost everything in a fire, or accidentally bought a money pit and have no equity, or dealt with a health battle that ate up all your savings. You could have stayed in that apartment and fallen into a deep depression or gotten hit by a car or gotten bedbugs and spent the next two years itching and doing laundry. You just don’t know. None of us know. 2) You thank the universe and your choices for giving you so much more information about what you actually want and need to thrive, and then you and your husband go neighborhood and house shopping armed with that new info. Cast your net wide. I think it will end up being psychologically easier for you if you don’t repurchase a duplicate of your old condo for twice the price. Is there a row-home available in a walkable neighborhood that splits the difference on commute? Is there something still affordable just outside an appreciating area that you think will get caught up in the next wave? Your older kid is approaching school-aged--how does that factor in, and isn’t it better to be looking now that you know what your older one’s personality and needs are, and kindergarten is around the corner instead of years away (and by the way, this will make a significant dent in your budget--you’re almost through the squeeze!)? You have enough equity in your home to go shopping, two incomes, and a heart the size of Arizona. There are no limits. Make your next mistake. Learn. Grow. Change. Repeat. And try to love the moments in between.

With love,

A fellow over-thinker

Readers, are there any past mistakes that you’re trying to let go of? Any things that seemed like mistakes at the time and turned out to make your life better, richer, or stronger in retrospect?

What else?

• Congratulations on the release of Ambitious Mother! A wonderful read on reconciling ambition and motherhood, and how to rethink the meaning of ambition in a life with a whole lot more complexity post kids—forgiving ourselves for what’s not possible while never letting go of possibility.

• Cover reveal! The paperback for Having It All will be released on October 13th, and I’m so excited for the cover, which mirrors the data bars of the UK cover (where it’s called Femonomics). If you know someone who still needs a copy, preorder here! I’ll be doing some more speaking and podcasting this fall around the launch, so stay tuned!

  

What’s bringing me utility today?

It’s back to school season, and campus is buzzing again. My son just reached the grade where he’s allowed to leave school at the end of the day on his own, and so pickup and aftercare logistics just got the tiniest bit less complex, even though my heart is breaking that it feels like another one of those leaps toward being a grownup (with a stop at grumpy teen-dom?). Just before the end of summer, our family followed a whim and went away to “family camp” with some new friends, and my son spent a long weekend fishing and roaming around with a band of kids he’d never met before, having the Sandlot childhood that feels so hard to replicate these days, while our toddler observed frogs and spiders and salamanders and collected acorns. Grateful for those moments as we say goodbye to summer.

I’m Dr. Corinne Low, an author, economist, and professor. I teach at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. If you liked this post you might like my book: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Thanks for reading Femonomics, and I hope you find your “All.”

I have an article in TIME Ideas this week about how the cyclosporiasis outbreak is directly linked to the pullbacks in our food safety system that the Trump administration has made over the past 19 months (catalogued at the link). But my point is a more specific one, which is that the division of labor that American households depend on for where a parents’ duties end and the government's begin are being dismantled by this administration, to all of our detriment.

I’ve documented how American parents are more time-starved than ever before, spending countless hours doing everything from chauffeuring our kids to playing with them instead of casually observing them while putting away laundry. The older generation tsk-tsks what they see as parental neuroticism, neglecting the real incentives we’re responding to—not only a changed understanding of child development that means we recognize the way parental inputs of time and attention generate the output of human capital, but also the changes in our societal setup that make the “biking till sunset” summers of our youth impossible to replicate with our own children.

As I write in TIME:

Over the last year, much of the conversation about regulation has focused on its costs to the federal budget and firm productivity. But left outside the picture has been the cost to parents of having to monitor and mediate these issues on our own. The advice given to overwhelmed parents is often to do less, and be more “free-range,” letting kids play outdoors unsupervised.

But this advice relies on the safety of our lived environment. The more real dangers exist in our children’s surroundings, the more time parents must spend protecting our kids. We are tasked with choosing safer foods and cleaning products, endlessly reviewing labels and ingredients, following content creators to guide us through chemicals and their exact level of endocrine disruption, monitoring our children’s phone usage, researching smart watches instead of phones, keeping our children indoors when air quality is bad, washing lead dirt off tiny hands before they put them in their mouths, and keeping kids busy with structured activities because the street is too full of huge SUVs for unsupervised bike-riding.

I would love to be able to cut loose as a parent. To do that, I need to know the government has my back: That they’ll handle the air, water, pandemic, and diarrhea-causing parasites, while we do the parenting.

I’ve actually been wanting to write this piece for a while, and diarrhea lettuce provided the impetus. Because when I hear Jonathan Haidt and Lenore Skenazy tell me that I need to allow my kids to take more risks, I have a very specific picture in my head, and it’s this:

This image is from the movie City of God, about drug gangs in Brazil’s favelas (and if you haven’t seen it please, please do). In this film, children have the opportunity to be exposed to lots of risk in their environment. One would say it allows them to develop resourcefulness, and even their entrepreneurial skills. Most of them also end up dead, of course.

It’s easy to be a a free range parent in a place with robust public services, minimal gun violence, carefully enforced traffic laws, and strong environmental protection. It’s not so easy for the rest of us. And this isn’t just inconvenient, it’s inefficient.

I grew up in a libertarian household where individual responsibility was valorized over its opposite, government overreach. And, I came of age professionally in an (often) libertarian discipline where the same thing is thought to be true. But the reality of economic theory is different than the caricature. Some things are natural public goods, things that are more efficiently provided en masse by the government than individually by each household, and a system of food safety inspections and disease surveillance is one of them. So while we can all try to “Fair Play” our way to a better division of labor (and the attendant mental load) with our spouse, until the government starts doing their part, American parents are going to keep feeling the squeeze. Now back to menu-planning a summer meal of cooked vegetables.

What else?

With the news that AOC is freezing her eggs at 36 I’ve been getting lots of media contacts to discuss this decision. If you’re interested, I wrote about the economics of egg-freezing in the very first edition of Femonomics, including my personal journey and what my fertility doc called “the embryo hunger games.” In economics terms, I think about egg freezing as saving up “reproductive capital,” and like any financial instrument that provides inter-temporal flexibility, the option to do it makes you richer. But while many women (including me) freeze in their late thirties or early forties, the chance of success (and fewer cycles to get there) are higher earlier. So I always recommend that women who are considering egg freezing and can afford it pull the trigger if they hit 34 and aren’t actively planning to start trying to conceive—because after all, even if you’re successful with a first baby without technology, fertility drops off so steeply in our late thirties, you might want the “savings” for your second. But for some new research on Assisted Reproductive Technologies, I’ve been thinking a lot about the political economy of these technologies, and one thing that occurs to me is that there is a fundamental tension in a technology that increases the reproductive success of female-male households (widely considered good) while also increasing the reproductive autonomy of female-only households (more ambivalent) without significantly increasing the reproductive capabilities of male-only households (uh-oh). Fundamentally, I think there is a resentment that technology can make AOC fertile for longer, and even able to reproduce on her own, but can’t make her bear the child of the Fox News host criticizing her. There still isn’t enough reproductive technology that men do not need women to have children, and therein lies the fervent need to control it.

What’s bringing me utility today?

Cyclosporiasis has thankfully left stone-fruit season unscathed, and so I’ll be enjoying what late summer produce we can. A friend told me about her burrata and peach and balsamic drizzle lunch that I’ll be replicating shortly. This year, I finally put the little box of herbs in the backyard that I’ve been dreaming about (don’t worry, my houseplants are still dying—if anyone has advice, please comment below) so it will have the sprinkling of snipped basil on top that makes me feel like a real grownup. Where are you finding joy while you dodge DOGE-induced intestinal distress?

I’m Dr. Corinne Low, an author, economist, and professor. I teach at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. If you liked this post you might like my book: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Thanks for reading Femonomics, and I hope you find your “All.”

This week The Cut has an article (hat tip ) about women paying for their boyfriends’ lifestyles, and hesitating to take their relationships to the next level as a result. From one woman with two jobs, and a boyfriend with none:

It wasn’t a big deal that he couldn’t buy Naomi dinner at Le Veau d’Or. But she didn’t like how he used money as an excuse to shirk basic responsibilities. He never planned dates and didn’t even get her a birthday present. “If you can’t afford something, write me a love letter,” she said. “He could have literally made me Kraft mac and cheese.” They talked about moving in together, but Naomi couldn’t justify the cost. “If I wanted to finance a human being,” she says, “I’d have a kid.”

While these men defend their lack of earning power by saying it’s part of their anticapitalist politics you might not be surprised by the twist that this does not extend to rejecting traditional gender roles. Later in the story:

While their boyfriends struggled to chip in for groceries, they also seemed strangely reticent to contribute in other ways—like, you know, doing the dishes or handling the laundry.

I have a paper about this called “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too.” In it, we advance the idea that the cratering marriage and birth rates around the globe are linked to an increasing disconnect between the relative earning power of men and women and their contributions at home. Before you yell at me, I am not saying that men are lazy! There has been a lot of hay made recently over a study by right-leaning family think tank IFS that shows moms and dads do roughly the same amount of total work in a household on average (hat tip ). I have some small quibbles with this conclusion, like that moms get consistently less leisure time, and although time sleeping for women has been increasing, I’d argue with “back to sleep” and extended breastfeeding that quality of sleep is probably way down, but I basically think the graph below is a reasonable representation of the average.

So what are we taking issue with in “Winning the Bread and Baking it Too”? It’s that this work distribution does not always appear to be well-paired with relative capacity. That is, women do much, much more home production whether or not they make more money. We’re currently revising the paper, and here is the latest “wow” graph. When you restrict to joint earners, the distribution of housework by gender in the household is almost the same whether or not the male or female partner earns more. As my coauthor said, “It’s like we just recolored the bars.” Women’s housework time goes down slightly when she’s the higher earner, due to outsourcing, but men’s doesn’t go up. We compare to gay and lesbian couples, who divide things much more equally (An earlier version of this graph launched my infamous joke that being a lesbian is an “evidence-based decision.”)

What we argue is that when men are not the higher earner, they are not contributing to the same degree at home as women who are the lower earner, which makes these particular types of relationships lower value. Again, the argument is not that men are lazy. Check out the frankly disturbing pattern in the graph below, where when a woman’s wage is 4 times that of her male spouse, he still works substantially more hours than she does (shown in the right panel, while the left shows housework hours).

He’s working hard, just potentially at the wrong thing! If your wife earns 4 times as much as you, being at the office 45 hours a week is an own goal for the family! Doing the dishes so she could pick up an extra shift would make the whole household better off. (We show this is even true for couples who are both hourly workers, where this kind of schedule adjustment would be possible.)

We think this might be linked to both the “romance recession” and “baby bust.” For many women, those who can expect their potential husband to still earn more money than them, marriage might still be a “good deal” even if he doesn’t do all that much at home—he’s making up for it in his contribution to market work. But, for women in marriage markets where their potential husbands might earn less than them, it doesn’t add up as much. We show this directly in the paper by looking at different ethnic groups in the US, and showing that when women earn more and ethnic norms are that men don’t contribute to housework, marriage rates decline.

My econ hero Claudian Goldin has a working paper out this month that gives a great name to this phenomenon: mismatch. The issue isn’t men on average—the issue is the specific men who aren’t able to contribute sufficient earning power to have a more traditional division of labor, but also aren’t willing to violate gender roles and restock the sponges or meal plan. I’ll let Claudia put it more bluntly:

What else?

• Have you gotten your copy of ’s The Ambition Penalty yet? Packed with data and ways to change the old, tired conversation we have about women and work.

• I saw The Odyssey and loved it, and want to do a deep dive with anyone who wants to talk. But, my wife convinced me to see it with our 9yo in a 4DX theater. Have you tried one of these things yet? They are insane. We were stuck on the boat with Odysseus and crew. If you’ve seen the movie or tried a 4DX theater please share your thoughts! I was haunted by the message of how individual greed can break the very fabric of cooperative society, and enjoyed my friend ’s take about the Laestrygonians.

• If you’re going to be at the Academy of Management, I’m going to be participating in a panel on “What’s next?” in academic careers. Please say hi! There’s also going to be a great panel on writing a trade book with fellow academic authors , Dolly Chugh, Katina Sawyer and others!

  

What’s bringing me utility today?

My one-year-old lost her Aflac duck that was wearing an “Everyone Watches Women’s Sports” t-shirt. We’re big women’s sports fans in this household, so we told our friends at Stoop Pigeon PHL where we’d gotten the duck originally to see if they had any extras. They put out a call for help on instagram, and the next thing we knew THE DAWN STALEY recorded a video for my daughter promising her a new duckie. We DIED. Aflac and Togethxr sent us a package that, in addition to the “Everyone Watches” duck included this duck dressed up like Dawn Staley. Cutest conclusion ever to a missing stuffy!

I’m Dr. Corinne Low, an author, economist, and professor. I teach at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. If you liked this post you might like my book: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Thanks for reading Femonomics, and I hope you find your “All.”

That story is one I’ve seen play out in the data I study countless times as an economist researching women’s careers and families and how they intersect. Throughout a marriage, time use data reveals women spend substantially more time on housework and childcare. Accordingly, they invest less in their careers. His earning power grows while hers tends to stagnate. You can put a positive spin on it: Economists call it “specialization,” and economic theory dating back to Nobel prize winner Gary Becker posits this arrangement is one of the key benefits of forming a household in the first place. Both parties can benefit—they share the financial prosperity of his career, while enjoying the home-grown outputs of her time: made-from-scratch meals, clean and folded laundry (and clothes in the right size) and well-brought up children.

But what happens when the implicit terms of the agreement—lasting financial security that stems from a single career—don’t continue past a certain point? This is a lesson millions of women learned the hard way in the original “divorce revolution” when those classic stay-at-home moms of the 1950s found their husbands leaving them, sometimes for women a decade younger. The issue is that while her biggest investment—in children—continues to benefit both even if the marriage dissolves, the long-term earning potential of his career is something he walks out the door with, leaving her to start over with often a drastically lower income. Still today, in data from the US to Denmark, research shows women have a lower standard of living post-divorce. Court ordered child support and alimony fall far short of restoring the marital idea of equal sharing of both partners’ incomes, no matter who earns more. (Women also do far less housework following a divorce, but that might be cold comfort for those struggling to pay the bills.)

One thing that protects women from this risk is assets, which are typically shared more equally than income in divorce. In research with Jeanne Lafortune, I found that after the divorce revolution and legal changes that came with it blew up the long-term security of marriage, couples were more likely to specialize—have a traditional division of labor—if they owned a home. Homes being divided (and usage rights often granted to the mother), would help keep her financial situation from declining as much in the case of divorce. We described couples with a home or other post-marriage financial assets as having marriage collateral. The problem for Burden was the collateral on the line was her own: the homes were bought with her money, but placed in both their names. Their prenup, originally written to protect her inherited wealth, kept her from sharing in his substantial assets as his income grew, in part due to the investments she was making at home ensuring he never had to worry about dry cleaning, or a sandwich.

What can women without a trust fund take away from the book of the season on how to protect themselves? Whether or not they actually leave their careers to “stay at home,” my research shows women invest more in the home or family. They should consider how this gap will affect their finances in any scenario in a marriage. To soften the blow of thinking through divorce while currently far from it, and hoping to avoid it, it helps to think about a range of possible outcomes. Your husband could lose his job. He could die (ok, also hard to think about), or become disabled at work. Are you making sufficient investments in your earning power to step in if needed, for any reason? Do you know enough about your finances to manage them on your own if you need to, or talk your lawyer through the nuts and bolts in the case you ever become adversarial? This was the scenario that recently lit a fire under a friend to get her husband to write down the names, addresses, and values of properties he was investing in.

Women in queer relationships are not exempt—a friend is currently navigating a divorce with a substantial earnings gap. In the case where one party is a substantially higher earner or sole earner, it’s worth thinking through the collateral of it all: is the higher earner’s paycheck being invested in transparent, shared assets, like a home or joint mutual fund? Or does it go entirely towards covering that month’s bills, in which case the only asset being accumulated is human capital (future earning potential) which courts have more trouble dividing? Are household funds equally invested in the lower-earner’s wellbeing, such as equal access to leisure activities and personal care? Is there a willingness to invest in job market skills or opportunities to level the scales career-wise, if there comes a time where the children need less care, and “leaning in” becomes more of a priority?

When a woman in a heterosexual relationship is the higher earner, the symmetry of the law can be frustrating in the face of the asymmetry of reality—women may end up paying child support or even alimony even if their husband’s lower earning was not the result of time spent caring for the family. It’s therefore worth asking, as these patterns develop, whether one’s investments in joint capital—be it in the child or household kind—are being reciprocated. Would your husband (better yet, ask while he’s still your boyfriend) move for your job? Stay home with a sick kid so you could give an important presentation, or even more, step out of the labor market if it meant enabling you to succeed in a critical moment in your career, or filling a gap in childcare? I learned the hard way in my first marriage that the answer was no, during COVID.

I understand that such planning can feel transactional—ugly even—in the context of romance, which everyone hopes a marriage is and stays. But just as “but my parent makes sound decisions” is clearly not a reason to forego end of life medical planning, so “but he loves me” a weak assurance against the possible twists and turns of the future: “shocks” as economists call them. To prepare for these shocks, I find it’s helpful to envision them as external, just as economists do. There’s a random draw to your “love shock” and suddenly someone’s feelings change. He gets a brain transplant. Or has a stroke. Or, you never knew him at all.

What else?

• A good friend of mine who careful readers of Having It All will recognize just launched her first Substack, about navigating chronic illness and motherhood in a society that pushes us to constantly do and be more, even when it’s way beyond our limits. Folks navigating chronic illness and other health challenges will find her honesty revelatory.

• One of the most delightful parts of book launch has been meeting and befriending fellow authors, and so it was great fun to gossip with personal finance guru Heather for this piece in “The Joint Account.” if you want more tips on managing joint money check them out!

  

• If you’re interested in raising boys to care about the work of keeping a home, I highly recommend ’s beautiful book “Our Home.”

What’s bringing me utility today?

None of my links are sponsored, and I generally do not promote products because I think we mostly all need less stuff (and you know how wary I am of consumer debt). BUT, if you, like me, have little time for an actual skincare routine and so sometimes go to bed with a full face of makeup, I have to tell you about this product which is literally the only thing that has gotten me consistently cleansing my face at night. (At which point I can slap some serum on! But for some reason putting water on my face feels like a huge barrier when I’m exhausted at the end of the day.) These little, lightly scented, effortlessly cleansing pads are THE BUSINESS. If this is a need you have, I hope they bring you joy.

I’m Dr. Corinne Low, an author, economist, and professor. I teach at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. If you liked this post you might like my book: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Thanks for reading Femonomics, and I hope you find your “All.”

We spent $5.58 billion on Botox in 2023. The overall medical aesthetics market is over $20 billion, and growing quickly. Unsurprisingly, half of that is North America, and 80% of North American spend is the United States. We’re a real life Panem, a society that becomes rich enough that instead of spending money on nutrients and essentials, there’s a class of people who can spend it on endlessly tweaking their appearance to look, if not exactly ageless, than like the AI version of ageless: uncannily smooth, eerily perfect, endlessly similar.

This post isn’t to judge you if you’ve contributed dollars to that rapidly growing medical aesthetics market. We all live in the same society, subject to the same pressures, and same insecurities, and so while we might critique female beauty standards, most of us still chase it.1 Something being profitable creates that favorite word of economists: an incentive. Our discomfort with our appearance is a golden thread to be pulled by marketers—cultivated, nurtured. Groomed with instagram ads promising quick fixes and models whose actual time commitment to appearance is completely infeasible for people whose attractiveness isn’t their livelihood. Our withering self esteem is a seam of ore to be mined by cosmetics manufacturers, plastic surgeons, and pharmaceutical companies. So the ads keep coming. The products keep getting developed. The Botox economy marches on.

And my rage at all of it, at one more way women are made to feel inadequate, continues to grow.

I’m in the core demo, at 41. With a robust skincare regimen—a nightstand full of potions when in reality I only reach for two or three—and the occasional dermatologist visit to laser off a spot, I’m teetering on the edge of the Botox abyss. When I go on Instagram, I can’t help watching how smooth everyone’s faces are. I meet fellow authors or friends or moms and catch myself examining their faces for signs of either age-appropriate lines or uncanny, shiny taughtness. I feel like I can accept my face as it is, but don’t feel ready to watch it change further. To become foreign to me, and to what’s always greeted me in the mirror. I haven’t even always loved my face, but now that it’s changing, I can’t help feeling a manic attachment to it looking exactly as it does right now, which of course is already different than it looked ten years ago (but I can live with this! I say). When I see older women, 60, 70, with a lifetime of beautiful wrinkles, I say to myself—she did it. She watched her face change. I can do it, too. And I survive another day without injecting something into my skin in a futile attempt to freeze time.

But I want to talk about what these standards are doing to us economically. Author Emma Rosenblum wrote a piece in the Wall Street Journal about her over-40 friends’ obsession with obliterating wrinkles. I responded jokingly on Instagram that I didn’t want to hear about people’s cosmetic procedures unless their 401K match was maxed out and their high interest debt was paid off. People spend around $500 a visit for Botox—4 times a year. My favorite evidence-based wellness podcaster did an episode with dermatologist Sam Ellis, and I googled her, always hoping for the topical fountain of youth. What I found was a YouTube video where she described exactly what she injected into her skin and where, marking each product until her face was a child’s art project of criss-crossing hashmarks and lines. How much does all this cost I wonder? And it’s not just women of my cohort being seduced into expensive medicalized skin treatments. Use is also booming among young women, encouraged to use it “preventatively”—to prevent the facial movements that cause wrinkles by paralyzing our expressiveness from the beginning of adulthood. In Ellis’s refreshingly frank video, she noted that she had started using many of these treatments in her twenties, not for aging, but for “beautification”—to change how her face looked.

There are so many temptations in our society to lure us away from our financial goals. Most of us, those not lucky enough to be independently wealthy, feel some degree of stress about money. We’d like to have more of it. We’d like to stress less when we buy plane tickets and see the price has gone up, when we think about ordering something extra at a restaurant, when we get an unexpected bill or make a costly mistake (hello, red light camera). And I’m pretty confident in saying that all of us stress about time. Those two stressors are intertwined. We can give ourselves more time with money: outsourcing, paying for services, doing things the fast, expensive way instead of the slow, frugal way. We can give ourselves more money with time (working!). Spending our money making ourselves look better is literally more time we will eventually have to spend working in order to achieve the same level of financial ease. Longtime readers know one of my favorite quotes (from Your Money or Your Life) is “how much of your life force are you willing to trade for material possessions?” How much are you willing to trade for fewer wrinkles? Again, no shame and no shade, because I’m right there, fighting the siren song of Botox along with you. But I want us to really look at our lives and think about how we expect Botox to increase our utility.2

What does looking slightly—better? No, smoother—really get us? Will that feeling of being more comfortable in our own skin last? Will it mean more to us than being able to pay for a few hours of an organizer to declutter our kids toys? Or recklessly order whatever we want on a menu—appetizer, main, and the drink we actually want—without looking at the prices? Revisiting my earlier questions about your 401K match and credit card debt: if you’re not caught up on those things, your opportunity cost of spending is high. Are you willing to pay double for those aesthetic procedures, because you’re missing out on your 100% employer match of funds saved for retirement? If you’re putting it on a credit card with a revolving balance, are you willing to pay the cost of extra interest on this purchase and your existing balance because it takes you longer to pay it off?3

I propose we start our own anti-Botox support club. Do a little research on the cost of the cosmetic procedures you’re considering, and how frequently you’d need to do them. (Include the time cost of getting to the darn dermatologist, and any other transaction costs.) Then take this money and spend it deliberately, joyfully, on whatever will increase your utility the most. Buy a friend a plane ticket to come visit. Order the tasting menu. Get the handyman to come spend two hours fixing all the little things that are driving you nuts. Give it out $5 at a time to people in need or kids selling cookies. Get the good version of something.

Every day you hold out, every dollar you don’t spend, is a victory against those who make money off of us hating ourselves. Think of how radical it is to spend that money loving yourself instead.

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

I’m Dr. Corinne Low, an author, economist, and professor. I teach at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. If you liked this post you might like my book: Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.

You see, I don’t think that your career necessarily needs to be your calling. Those who’ve read my book or taken my class know that I have a very unsentimental way to describe work: Your job is a technology to convert your time into money. What this means is that in the world of economics, we think of employment as people making a fundamental decision: trading off leisure (stuff they like) for work (stuff they don’t) in exchange for money (to buy things they also like). So when I give people career advice, I don’t focus on leaning in and being ambitious and climbing the corporate ladder. I focus on: how does your job work for your life? What are you getting from it, and what are you giving?

Don’t get me wrong, it’s amazing if you find a job that not only converts your time into money, but also gives you direct “utility” whether that’s because the mission is compelling, the colleagues are great, or you just like the work that you do. But if the money is good and the hours are right? Fulfillment might be a “nice to have.” It might be something you get from your personal life with the luxury of time instead of from your job. On the other hand, as a different friend told me, it might be that hours are the thing you’re willing to give on: “I don’t want to be this busy and stressed out, but I like what I do and I feel like I’m well compensated for it,” she told me, displaying her trademark practicality that I’ve always admired. “And besides, I don’t like to cook anyway.” In other words, as long as she could see her kids—another major source of utility—she was happy converting a lot of her time into a commensurately large amount of money, and then using that money to pay for all the things she didn’t have time for.

When thinking about a career path, we should consider ourselves lucky if we get to pick two out of three: time, money, or passion. If you’re only getting one? It better be the one that you need most in that moment in life. And if you’re getting none? Like the friend I started with, time to shape up that resume and start browsing LinkedIn.

What are your two out of three? Tell me in the comments! For me I keep realizing that being over-committed makes me enjoy everything I do less, so it’s trying to refocus on doing good work a little more slowly, even if it means accomplishing fewer things. So I’m over-correcting a bit from the busy book launch period and have been focused on my core research and projects, with some occasional public writing like this (read: I’ve dropped Instagram and LinkedIn for the moment, as well as a lot of other “promotional” work). It absolutely means slower career growth, but hopefully more utility, and I’d be a hypocrite if I didn’t take my own medicine there!

Etc.

There’s some new book releases I’m excited about!

The Ambition Penalty by is finally here! Stefanie is a long-time journalist who does an absolutely amazing job of covering women’s economic issues on her instagram and substack. This book is absolute powerhouse of research and will make you feel angry, galvanized, and seen all at once. But I especially love how Stefanie offers scripts to change the conversation that recites the same tired tropes blaming women for their lack of success, and focus instead on what women need from their partners, bosses, and policymakers!

And, if you’re a fan of the work-life balance real talk featured above, you probably already know Simone Stolzoff from his hit debut, The Good Enough Job. He’s out with a new book I can’t wait to read, How To Not Know which is definitely a skill I need to cultivate in these maddening, unpredictable times.

In addition to all the non-fiction I accumulate, I’ve been reading a lot of fiction these days. Just finished Atmosphere and am now starting on John of John with the millions of Oprah bookclub followers. What are you reading these days?

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

On a recent flight I had the almost-one-year old in the carrier asleep, so felt zero guilt about not trying to be productive, and decided to catch up on some trashy “plane fare” movies instead. Enter The Housemaid, a based-on-the-book sudsy thriller directed by Bridesmaid’s Paul Feig, and starring Sydney Sweeney as a recent parolee desperate for work who ends up as a housemaid for a wealthy couple. Amanda Seyfried stars as her increasingly erratic boss (which, the sexism that the wife is always the maid’s boss…) whose husband is the apparently saintly beefcake pictured below:

About halfway through the movie, Sydney Sweeney, who had been living out of her car prior to landing this job and could really use a break ends up starting a romantic relationship with the husband after being incessantly bullied by the wife. When they get home and tell the wife, after she freaks out and fires Sydney, the husband asks his wife to leave instead! And then as Sydney tearfully says she’ll look for a new job, he says, no, I’ve never felt this way about anyone before, I want you to stay. Cue the heart eyes!! And the next part is really well done. Because what we see is Sydney frolicking through the couple’s life exactly like someone who has been rescued. A pauper mistaken for a princess. This big bed? Mine. This big kitchen? Mine. All of this ease, all of the leisure, finally mine. Now I can hire someone to clean for me instead of having to do it. He goes to work and I make aesthetically pleasing breakfast in bed on his mother’s China.

But, speaking of that china, it turns out what seems like a dream is actually a frickin’ nightmare. And then we flash back to Amanda Seyfried, and find out that she was trapped in this nightmare, too. She was a law student who got pregnant, dropped out, worked as a legal assistant to support herself as a single mom, and then was seemingly rescued by a charming knight-in-shining-armor who was going to solve all her problems in one fell swoop: a beautiful house, a co-parent for her daughter, a steady income with no need for her to work.

It’s the fantasy Ali Wong articulated so well at the very beginning of the trad wife movement, saying housewives could spend their time “Unscheduled, unsupervised, and most importantly, sponsored.” But just as a princess (or more recently, Bridgerton) fantasy ignores the complexity of the feudal system that supports the coveted luxurious lifestyle, so do our housewife fantasies ignore the absolute horror that Housemaid (a b-movie with a sharp point) captures so well: Depending on a man can be a horror show.

Because, sometimes there are plot twists. I call them the three Ds: divorce, death, and disability (but I guess I left out “torture attic”). Amanda’s story, told in flashbacks, shows the problem so well. If he’s providing all the resources, he’s the one with, well, resources. If you’re relying on him for the house, the car, you don’t have very much control over those things. And, in the real world, if you give up your career because he’s supporting you, you have that much less human capital to start over with if one of those plot twists happens.

The fantasy of someone else providing for us, lifting the burden of breadwinning and bread-baking that so many successful women are trapped in, giving us time to take care of ourselves, or take a nap in a big fluffy bed, or “stay at home all day and eat snacks and watch Ellen” (Wong again) is so, so understandable. But I hope we can peel back the veneer of that fantasy to see the reality that placing your future in someone else’s hands is a terrifying proposition.

If you’re wondering what to do about it, this doesn’t mean I’m against taking time off to invest in kids, or against marriage more generally! In my book Having It All I discuss practical strategies to protect your finances and human capital in the case of unequal earning power or work time!

Did you see The Housemaid? What did you think?

It’s taken me forever to write this Substack because... hoo boy am I in it these days! I’ve hosted an au pair for the last four years (two for two years each), because it was actually the most affordable way to have the amount of childcare I needed as a single mom. When my wife and I got married, we decided that when our current au pair’s term was finished, we wouldn’t host another one, because we thought we could handle things on our own. The idea was, our babysitter was going to take on some things, my wife was going to take on some things, and I was going to take on some things. But, then, my babysitter broke her foot, my wife’s job was insane, and because I had the most flexibility, I ended up trying to pick up all the balls. Until I was drowning in balls. It got rough. We forgot a soccer game. I thought my son had a playdate and failed to pick him up until the school called. Our house started to resemble the remnants of a yard sale, with more Amazon boxes. My wife and I fought. We didn’t get enough time with the kids (or at least enough unhurried quality time, instead of frantically trying to get out of the house time). We didn’t get enough time with each other. And I felt ridiculous telling people on podcasts how to survive the structural constraints of modern life when here I was being crushed by them right alongside everyone else.

How did we get through it? A few things:

• We were both trying to do what we felt like the other person needed, and running ourselves ragged. We realized we needed to talk to each other about what we actually needed from the other person, and focus on that. It turned out, when my wife’s work was insane, it was more important for me that she got a full night’s sleep and thus was able to spend quality time with everyone (including me!) rather than try to finish things around the house.

• That trusty refrain, a little more outsourcing, but even things I actually liked doing myself. I like cooking, but with only having baby childcare until 5pm and my wife not getting home most nights until 6:30 or 7, I was not exactly living my Barefoot Contessa dreams—instead cooking meant desperately trying to finish a meal while a baby yells to be picked up, when I’d much rather be cuddling her, too. All that work we were both doing was for something—converting our time into money!—so we decided to use more of our income for help we needed to get through this period, and started ordering a local meal service most weeks, instead of just in emergencies. (Home Appetit in Philly is amazing—I hope there’s something equally good near you!) It is really hard for me to spend money (growing up poor stays with you), so I always need mental math justifying it, and here it was that the weekly cost (of a whole week of nourishing food!) was about the same as the weekly date nights we hadn’t had time for since the baby was born!

• That said, the other thing we did is try desperately to carve out time for joy. A little bit of joy can get you through a lot of mess and business and burnout, more effectively than if you’d never taken the break in the first place.

• In order to do this, we both had to get our priorities straight. We had to say no to a lot of things at work, and to friends we would have loved to hang out with, and even skip a couple soccer practices. I had to re-learn the lesson in my book that every opportunity for something—money? success? “exposure”?—does not necessarily increase your utility function. I turned down speaking at SouthXSouthwest and watched jealously as all my friends took amazing pictures with each other, but also knew that if I had traveled that week in March when my wife had two huge events at work, the cost would have been way greater than the benefit of “being there.” And I can trust that for my utility function, I made the right choice, and quiet the voice of FOMO telling me that more is always better.

• And finally… the sun came out. Not metaphorically. Literally winter ending and us getting a few days of false spring before finally getting a real spring (this time, I hope?) completely changed how I felt about things. Like, somehow I could survive feeling way too busy and like the house was too messy and like I was behind on everything if I could also… go outside? And feel the sunshine? And let my kid run around and show the baby dogs and flowers?

Things are still a struggle. We still have too much work and not quite enough childcare. We went to Disneyworld for spring break last week, and the baby got norovirus. And then we all got norovirus. The pictures, as usual, look way more glamorous than then puke-filled reality. But I can see the light on the other side. This too shall pass. The squeeze doesn’t last. And while we’re here, it’s ok that the house is a mess. It’s ok that we ate McDonald’s yesterday (we wanted to try the Huntrix meal—don’t judge!) because I forgot to order the meal service while we were on spring break, and a fuse blew in our kitchen. It’s ok if it feels like I’ll never get it all done. I won’t. And the things left undone are probably less important than the things I did do: cuddled the baby. Stayed up late joking with the almost 9 year old. Caught the latest episode of The Pitt with my wife. And stopping to smell the flowers, before winter, or the squeeze, or both, are back again.

How’re you coping with The Squeeze this week?

New Media

• I spoke with Bloomberg about how being a trad wife influencer is a better gig than being an actual tradwife, and Fortune about how men’s incompetence at home is an existential crisis for our species.

• Also was fun to chat with Times of India about Having It All for International Women’s Day.

• Did you catch my op-ed in the LA Times with and Eve Rodsky of on how shocking it is that so many of our debates about gender are completely fact-free, and our challenge to do better in 2026?

• I was so tickled that my 21-year-old step-kid came across my book being reviewed by their favorite podcast! This is a great episode to share with men in your life who you hope will pick up my book!

• Other podcasts:

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an economist at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania and author of Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

Since my book came out, I’ve had some unforgettable moments—but getting to sit down with my childhood hero, Gloria Steinem, is at the very top of the list! Gloria’s house has long served as a gathering place for thinkers and change makers, and she’s continuing that tradition now. One of her fellows, podcast host Danielle Robay, and my book-blurber-turned-friend Eve Rodsky of convened an A-list crowd of therapists, divorce attorneys, actors, academics, and comedians to talk about what feminism has to say about masculinity.

Eve kicked off by sharing her own experience with masculinity that didn’t make space for caregiving, that didn’t understand that buying groceries and picking out gifts was living and that care was essential to our humanity. She asked me to share my research saying that this imbalance at home is not just because women earned less—in fact women who were primary breadwinners still carried the lion’s share of the home load. That got things crackling, as a group that included many high-powered women—Amy Schumer, Kandi Burress, Emmy Rossum, and Dany Garcia (formerly married to The Rock)—jumped in to talk about their experiences “winning the bread and baking it, too.” About how no amount of professional success insulated a woman from being expected to be the mastermind of the home, the creator of magic, the CEO of lunchboxes.

The men pushed back. Wasn’t this event supposed to be a love letter to men? Where was the understanding? Where was the acknowledgment that sometimes men try to help, but they’re just not doing it right? Shouldn’t we be listening to men more about how hard this all is?

But this is where I take issue with the Scott Galloways of the world. I acknowledge that men are hurting. I acknowledge that it feels impossible to raise boys in the world right now. I acknowledge that we need better male role models, and that we shouldn’t demonize masculinity, but rather find positive approaches to it.

But I think that any conversation about a new masculinity that actually works for the world has to start where this one did—with listening to women. Men are hurting because of loneliness. They’re angry because the things they say they want—marriage and family—increasingly feel out of reach. And if that is what they need to be happy, then the truth is, they need women. They need to understand how to be good partners. How “providing” for the household can mean supporting your wife who earns more money, and protecting her time to invest in her career. How masculinity can mean finding joy in teaching your children things, in playing monster, and that dads aren’t just “pretending to like it” as Scott Galloway said (ugh).

Some of the researchers at the breakfast studying masculinity shared how caring for babies brings out incredible tenderness, even in gang-affiliated youth and other boys and men we label as “tough” and “hardened.”

To find a better way forward for boys and men, I think recentering the discussion on them is in many ways counterproductive. Because the reality is, we’re in this together. And the men who want to find new ways to show up as partners and dads will always be welcome at any table, even Gloria’s.

Updates

• If you haven’t yet gotten your copy of Having It All, now’s a great time, because it’s been selected for a special e-book sale, this week only! You can get it for just $2.99 from any e-book retailer, through March 8!

• I’m in Seattle tomorrow! 6pm at University of Washington. It’s a Wharton alumni club event, but open to all. Tell your friends!

• New podcasts:

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

Interestingly, I am not 100% a “gender is a social construct” person. While indeed gender is a set of social norms and learned behaviors, I also think it’s possible that some gender differences stem from biological and evolutionary forces—differences in testosterone levels, or differing evolutionary survival strategies based on having large or small gametes (eggs are high investment, sperm are cheap… more in my book). People like Darby Saxbe have written about the nuance here beautifully, so I will not rehash it, but will simply say that along most dimensions, human males and females are not that different (compared to other, less monogamous apes), but along some dimensions they are.

For example, a now-canonical study in economics by Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund finds that men are more competitive than women (on average!). They do this by paying people to do a task, and letting them either get paid for exactly what they did (piece rate), or enter their score into a “tournament” where only the highest performer gets a big payout. If you win the tournament, it’s a lot more money, but if you lose, obviously the piece rate is better. Here are rates of men and women entering the tournament by quartile of performance:

Although men and women perform equally well on the task, men are far more likely to opt into competition. Nearly three-quarters of men choose the tournament, compared with just over one-third of women. The fact that women enter the tournament less is true at every level of performance. Which might lead a manager to say: SEE! Women aren’t competitive enough!

And, of course, competition is one of those things that could be an innate gender difference (because of evolutionary success strategies), so I see how it feels a little scary to just…let this be different. And thus we rush to tell young women to “Lean In” and that “Nice Girls Don’t Get the Corner Office” (which by the way has a revised version coming out).

But, I want to crunch this data a different way. Note above that among the worst-performing men, the bottom quartile, almost 60% still enter a competition they’re certain to lose. A lot of women are making a mistake by “under-competing.” But the same amount of men are making a mistake by over-competing. And if I’m a manager worried about the bottom line, personally I’m a lot more worried about the men rushing in to take a chance on something thinking “I’ve got this” without the goods to back it up than I am about the women taking an overly cautious approach. But I never hear any handwringing about how we need to get men to “lean out” sometimes!

I saw a similar result in my own research on negotiation. I had heard over and over that men were better negotiators than women, so I assumed there must be evidence to support that! But what I found was that while women negotiated less and were sometimes rated worse, there were no studies showing they got less at the negotiating table. So I ran my own study. What I found was that women negotiating against men got basically equivalent payouts. But, in this study, women did better overall. Why? Because while women also did just fine against other women, men negotiating against other men got much worse payoffs.

The culprit there? Male-male pairs were more than twice as likely to fail to reach an agreement at all and therefore walk away with nothing. Men negotiating against other men had a tendency to engage in counterproductive headbutting: overusing aggressive tactics like ultimatums, failing to build rapport, and ultimately missing out on the possibility of any payoff even if it wasn’t their preferred one.

When I look at this data, I find the possibility of gender differences—learned or innate—a lot less scary. I see that it could be that words like feminine and masculine carry real weight on average in the population (with of course many men and women crossing those boundaries) and it could still be… totally fine? When I look at what the data actually says about gender differences, I’m less inclined to advise young women to try to mimic their male colleagues, and more inclined to try to tear down the systems that reward toxic competitiveness and aggression where teamwork and collaboration could earn everyone more money! So, who’s ready to throw out the old-school messages that tell us feminine traits are a liability, and turn over a new leaf in how we mentor the female leaders of tomorrow?

Odds and ends

• If you want me to tell your boss or male colleagues all about the above, I’m available for speaking.

• My friend has a new book out called Unhinged Habits that is about getting more in your life while saving your energy for what matters. He hooked me with the tagline “consistency is overrated,” making me see that most GREAT things I’d accomplished in my life I’d done through some, yes, unhinged intensity rather than necessarily sustained constant effort. Read about Jon taking his family out of the country for half the year every winter here.

  

• So excited that Having It All is on Behavioral Scientist’s best books of 2025!

• New podcasts:

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

I don’t have easy answers of how to optimize for a life you love when so many people are being harmed and when so many things are out of our control. I do want to name that I’ve seen women tend to hold more of this work, when it’s not their individual professional purview, in addition to all of the other things already on their plate. In the American Time Use Survey, women spend about 50% more time volunteering than men, the best proxy I have in my data for civic engagement. But all of us out there are carrying the additional load of existential angst right now. The invisible weight of our own powerlessness. We are trying to get promoted, to make sure our kids get good grades, to eat high fiber meals, to clear out the hallway again. And then, in the back of our minds, lurks the crisis. The feeling that if we could just check the news one more time, maybe we could… stop it? The devastation that we cannot; that others are hurting, that more systems are crumbling, and that our own voice is small.

So what can we do? Well, we can pick something that is within our control. We can feed a neighbor. We can empower a student. We can even donate some funds. And, we can use our voice in whatever area we have expertise and credibility. Is that with our family? Is that with our colleagues? Is that publicly, but in the area we’re an expert or have an audience? This means, I’ve got to stay off twitter (really bluesky these days) talking about camera angles—no one is listening to me, and I have nothing new to offer. It’s busy work—it’s the illusion of activity; the mirage of agency. And, it can take the place of more effective actions, because our brains register that we’ve done something, while meanwhile we’ve drained our scarce resources to accomplish nothing. So let’s agree together to take a single, meaningful, offline action that measurably makes someone else’s life better, in a domain in which we actually do have power. If we have more capacity, let’s take another one. We have so much on our plates. Let’s not take on the work of keeping social media profitable by generating content to alleviate our own existential angst and feelings of impotence. And maybe, through each of us taking those small, brave steps to affect the things that are within our control, together we can build a less scary tomorrow.

Updates

• I have two upcoming virtual events! I’m excited to be joining Auggie for a live conversation about something I think we don’t talk about clearly enough: why motherhood feels so hard — even when you’re doing everything “right.”

  The event is called:

  Designing a Life That Works: Systems, Sanity & Self-Care in Motherhood
  📅 January 29, 2026
  🕐 1:00 PM ET | 10:00 AM PT
  📍 Live + virtual (free)

  We’ll be exploring motherhood through a systems lens — looking at how work, caregiving, and the invisible planning we all carry interact in ways that often lead to burnout. This isn’t about fixing yourself. It’s about understanding what’s broken — and what actually helps.

  We’ll cover:

  • Why burnout is structural, not personal

  • Where today’s systems fail parents most

  • How parents can redesign support without adding more to their plate

  • What a “life that works” can look like in different seasons

  What is Auggie?
  Auggie is a trusted platform for parents to find stage-specific support, expert-led guidance, and real connection — without the noise or overwhelm. Auggie brings together vetted experts, thoughtful events, and curated community spaces so parents can feel supported in the moments that matter most.

  ✨ RSVP here:
  https://www.auggie.com/events/o9c?utm_content=corinnelow

  

  • I’ll also be speaking at the 2026 HERizon Virtual Practicum Series, which is focused on empowering women in legal professions, on January 27 at 2 PM ET. Pass on to your lawyer friends!

    

• New podcasts to share:

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

Review Having It All

When I talk about The Squeeze, the period in life when time and money feel tight at the same time, I often reflect on how it’s so easy to slip into our needs coming last. There’s also times when our careers make big asks of us, and we focus on that, to the detriment of our physical health or our friendships. Trying to Have It All is all too much sometimes. Right around the time I got tenure, I stumbled across an exercise called “The Wheel of Life” where you draw pie wedges for different areas of your life, and see how filled in each of them are. Things were finally starting to feel easier financially after my time in The Squeeze, but I lamented how you couldn’t plan for finding a great partner the same way I had pursued publishing papers to meet my career milestones. More effort didn’t necessarily equal more results. I filled in my wedges, and found that while I had found a great community after moving to Philly, had been able to make my physical space my own, and had met my career milestones, I was craving partnership, and desperately wanted a second baby. My wheel was lopsided. This didn’t make me depressed—it was actually relieving. To see that while some things were hard, it was because I had been putting tremendous effort other places. I looked at my lopsided wheel and vowed to return to it later to see if it had gotten any better.

Pretty soon after that, I met my wife, but forgot to ever go back and re-do the Wheel exercise, until I stumbled across it in a pile of papers I was tidying up. It was an early representation of the concept of living life according to our own utility function that would become core to my teaching and writing. As we close out the year, I’m taking stock again. I created my own wheel (because I wanted slightly different categories), and here’s mine for 2025:

This year, I met some huge milestones. I had a baby! I published my first book. I went on TV. I met so many people who said my work had impacted them which filled my “meaning” bucket. I got to share ideas that mattered in the NY Times and got new ideas for research. We bought a house! But, on the other hand, I completely lost my three-day-a-week minimum workout routine. I stopped cooking regularly so we ate less healthy food. We got married at the end of 2024, but threw a wedding this year. And yet, we haven’t had very much time for each other. At all. We went on our first post-baby date two weeks ago! I haven’t been as good of a friend as I want. And I’m craving more chill time with both my kids after too much travel this fall.

And you know what? That’s okay. Life has seasons. Filling out the wheel isn’t a judgment. It’s a moment to reflect. To experience satisfaction at what I did accomplish, and just gently nudge myself in the areas I want more. To set some boundaries: less travel in 2026. Saying no to “great” opportunities because I know they come with an opportunity cost—giving up some healthy, sanity, or snuggles. What does your wheel look like for 2025? And what do you want more of for 2026?

Template below, or, if you want to change the categories, download the powerpoint and make your own.

Book launch rewind!

A book launch is full of highs and lows, but the most meaningful thing to me has been connecting with all of you, hearing what the book meant to you, and hearing that you recommended it to a friend, or your book club, or bought it for your niece.

But I’ll also take a moment to celebrate getting to talk about Having It All with Gayle King, it becoming a USA Today Bestseller, and being named an Amazon Best Book of the Year!

Some highlights of a whirlwind year!

Thank you so much for supporting Having It All and the Femonomics Newsletter in 2025—we’ll see you in 2026!

Updates

• If you’d like to gift a copy of Having It All, you can order signed copies from the Penn bookstore! Or, you can order from Amazon, where it’s on sale for $18.79!

  

• Here’s the piece I wrote for Emily Oster’s Parent Data, exploring how parenting time has exploded! There’s a graph in there you don’t want to miss, showing that working moms today spend more time with our kids than non-working moms in the 70s!

  

• Josie Cox interviewed me for The Persistent, and I loved seeing a different perspective on Having It All in this review from the right-leaning Institute for Family Studies.

• So excited to be on Dr. Todd Kashdan’s list of the best books of 2025!

  Provoked with Dr. Todd Kashdan

  The Best of 64 Books Read in 2025: A Psychologist's Obsessions

  I am unsure of whether it is a compliment or not, but my most widely read article every year is my annual list of book recommendations. Please tell me you digested last year’s batch? If not, get on it…

  Read more

  9 months ago · 9 likes · 2 comments

• New podcasts—I was super excited to talk to Farnoosh, whose book When She Makes More I read back during my time winning the bread and baking it too:

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

Review Having It All

This week I wrote a piece for Emily Oster’s Parent Data, which will be live Monday, and she asked me to dig into the increase in time spent with kids. I had never tried looking at which categories had increased over time, and found the exercise super illuminating. See below!

Time in Childcare Activities, 1975 vs. 2018

This graph reveals that not all of our time has increased equally. Surprisingly, time reading to and talking to our kids is pretty constant, although dads have increased there, which is probably a good thing. What’s exploded is infant care, travel, homework help, and playing with our kids. Infant care is the area that’s probably the most evidence-based. If you’ve been reading my work you know that we used to think babies didn’t need much, and we now know it’s an important period for later development. We talk to and hold our babies more than we used to. Many of us like that! (As evidence of that, more privileged women do it more. Time with our babies is a luxury good.) Another huge area of infant care that’s changed is breastfeeding, as the data below from the Ross Labs Mothers Survey shows. Until the 1990s, less than 20% of women were breastfeeding at 6 months (and thus pumping, if they were back to work). Today, 60% of mothers do!

Change in Breastfeeding Rates, 1965—2001

Next up, is homework and travel time (chauffeuring to activities). This fits with the “Rug Rat Race” theory that part of this is about aiming for competitive educational outcomes (admission to college) for our kids. And, the pressures of everyone else’s parents doing it. I also wonder whether some of this comes from a change in how we live—are we further away from our kids’ activities, with less safe walking / biking access? Personally, and I know I’m not the only one, driving to soccer practice does not spark joy. And yet, my kid loves soccer. I resisted joining the organized and across town league as long as I could, but then my kid asked. My advice here is absolutely wait to join any activities requiring driving until your kid is 6 or 7 (ha! groan), and some other time squeezes have started to abate. But what then? If someone has managed to square this circle, please come write a guest post! (Or, parents, let’s ride at dawn to take down the travel leagues).

And finally, the one that really shocked me, is the time playing with our kids. We’ve replaced sibling and peer playtime with parental playtime. had a great recent post on how absurd this trend is in the scope of human history. And again, like with caring for our infants, if this is something that you consider a privilege, that you want to do, that feeds your soul, by all means do it. But if it’s one of the things making you feel drained, I think it’s completely valid to ask how your time could be replaced with a suitable playmate instead!

Updates

• Shopping for holiday gifts? I partnered with the Penn bookstore to allow online ordering of signed copies of Having It All! I have gotten a few requests for signed copies for friends and family, which up to now has been logistically challenging, but is now simple! Just place an order online and you will receive a signed copy!

  

• Another great way to gift Having It All is to order on Amazon, where it’s an editor’s pick for best nonfiction of the year, and thus on promotion for only $16.91! If you order there and leave a customer rating it doubles as a holiday gift for ME. 😊

• I spoke with the Washington Post about weaponized incompetence along with some great experts on sharing the load at home.

  

• I’ve been a huge fan of since old-school Twitter, so I was so excited to chat with him for his latest newsletter.

• If you missed it last week, you can watch the recording of my conversation with Brian Page, Dr. David Smith, and Paul Sullivan about how men can suppor their partners’ careers!

• Femonomics was featured in Dutch magazine the FD!

• New podcasts!

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

The Purse

“When you’re in the squeeze, you can feel like you’re drowning with no way out.”

This month, Division of Labor is getting a little meta. We’re featuring Corinne Low, a professor at the Wharton School of Business, who has extensively researched and written about heterosexual household and gender dynamics. She has a new book out that aims to help couples develop a framework for “creating a better, happier life…

Read more

9 months ago · 73 likes · 20 comments · Alicia Adamczyk and Corinne Low

Can you share one “parenting hack” that’s worked for your family?

Setting and holding the limits that you need to be OK. I always found holding the bedtime limit to be a struggle (with a then-four-year-old), until I got separated, at which point, as a single mom on the tenure track, I desperately needed that post-bedtime time to get a little work done. What I found was that when it was a necessity, I just held the boundary with a fortitude I had been lacking prior to that. It’s the difference between how we were often late for things I wanted to do on weekends, but never late for school. Somehow, my son intuited there was just a little bit of a harder boundary when I say, “We have to go” on school days versus the weekend.

What I want is for parents to give themselves permission to hold a hard limit when it’s our own needs on the other side, rather than external constraints.

Do you feel like you have a fair division of labor?

I think the goal should be a nourishing, sustainable, and evidence-based division of labor, which I think we have!

What I mean by evidence-based is that skills, preferences, and time availability—not gender roles—should determine who does what. Sustainable means no one is getting resentful or feeling like their needs are getting short-changed. Both people are getting equal leisure time just for them. Nourishing means that the whole is more than the sum of its parts—you’re each feeling grateful for the other person, because they’re doing things that you don’t want to do, taking things off your plate that you think are hard, and freeing up your time.

Car stuff stresses me the eff out. So, knowing someone else is taking my car in for an oil change or an inspection, it’s the best—it feels like love. The nice thing about a same-sex relationship is that when I’m doing stereotypically female home production, I don’t resent it. I’m able to embrace the utility I get from cooking for and feeding my family, without feeling like it has an asterisk because I’m getting stuck in a gendered role. When women carry too much of the home production, it takes all the joy out of caring for someone else. You don’t get the reward from cooking a meal or steaming a shirt with love, because you’re not getting that love-through-labor in return.

Other reading I’d recommend this week:

• You’ve heard me discuss how parenting has intensified since the ’90s—read Motherhood Until Yesterday going even further back to show that parenting is more intensive than ever:

MOTHERHOOD UNTIL YESTERDAY

Mothers Did Not Play With Their Children For 99% of Human History

Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and (two or three) gentlemen, because we are about to dive into the my absolute favorite topic of all time: the importance of multi-age playgroups in hunter-gatherer societies. Honestly, I get more excited about this stuff than a dog whose owner just said the word “walk.” Back when I first started reading about motherhood in hunter-gatherer societies there were two things that made me go, “ohhhhhhhh…

Read more

9 months ago · 172 likes · 31 comments · Elena Bridgers

• And check out this piece from , whom I spoke with a few weeks ago about Having It All on her podcast Over The Influence, exploring the twin demands of girlboss feminism and tradwife culture:

  Over the Influence

  We've Reached Peak Tradwife

  Speaking of tradwives our TRADWIFE TEARS candle is selling out. Get your orders in now for Christmas presents. They will come with signed bookplates from me …

  Read more

  9 months ago · 141 likes · 4 comments · Jo Piazza

Updates

• I went to Canada! Had a great time speaking about Having It All on The Social CTV,

• and at the Rotman School of the University of Toronto this week!

  

• Read Workomics’ feature of Having It All:

  Workomics

  November Squeeze

  They call it the sandwich generation, but the metaphor is all wrong. You’re not squished as much as stretched, tugged in too many different directions simultaneously. Some days, you are pulled so thin you feel you might just tear apart. And then other days, you manage to write a newsletter after all…

  Read more

  9 months ago · 8 likes · Susan Bartlett

• And my five key tips for working moms featured by Fast Company and why we’re losing trust in female leaders in Bloomberg Business Week.

• Having It All is on sale on Audible! Audible is currently running a sitewide sale for its members through December 8.

  

• If you enjoyed Having It All, I would so appreciate a review on Amazon! Reviews are incredibly helpful for a first-time author! Even if you just click over and rate it, that helps boost the review count!

Review Having It All

Thanks for reading Femonomics!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

As an economist, I get yelled at a lot for turning normal things into mathematical equations. You know how we are—chores are “home production,” childcare is “human capital investments,” and pregnancy and breastfeeding are “reproductive labor.” I even write about in my book about how “love is the epsilon”—it’s the error term that leads us away from the predictable patterns in the data (marrying based on similar height, age, and income, for example) and into a scattered cloud of messy, beautiful human experience. So I laughed out loud when the brilliant wrote:

If I wrote for The Onion, I would pitch the headline “Totally Normal Thing is Actually Form of Oppressive Labor, Study Says.

— Allison Daminger, “Don’t Yuck my Yay”

Her post, which is very funny and worth reading in its entirety, also refers to this other substack saying “Sex with your husband isn’t labor.” And here’s the thing—it isn’t. Unless it is.

If we’re getting our needs met, if we’re in a situation that is mutually beneficial, if we want to have sex, if sex is fun, then no, sex is not labor. Sex is…shared leisure time (go ahead, roll your eyes). But if we don’t really want to have sex? If we’re doing it because we know it might be a way to head off a fight, or get some of our other needs met? Then yes, sex absolutely is labor. I’m doing a study with Zambian college students who write in surveys about the need to engage in sex with older boyfriends to meet their material needs. This clearly is labor. And of course sex work is labor. So whether sex in the household is labor or not completely depends on whether one is doing it for the intrinsic reward of doing it, and taking pleasure in it, or whether one is doing it as a means to some other end or out of fear of the consequences of not doing it. Households are complicated. Marriage is messy.

And sometimes, domestic work is work, and sometimes it’s love. I love Allison’s post because she points out that things that are fun sometimes can still be work. I still tell people to classify “baking cookies with kids” as parenting time when they track their time, even if that’s exactly the type of time that fills their cup. Because it still isn’t the same as yoga or a nap. It’s not a substitute for meeting our own individual needs, not just our desire to love and care for others.

And with that said, when your basic needs are getting met, and when you’re getting love and care in return for all the love and care you give others, it’s a lot easier for domestic labor to feel like love. For folding someone’s clothes to feel like giving them a hug, and for them cleaning out your suitcase after a trip to feel like a gift. I wrote in The Purse this week about my division of labor with my spouse, sharing that car things are incredibly stressful to me, so her taking the car in for a tune-up and an oil change feels way more rewarding to me than costly to her. It feels like love.

Economists have long questioned the idea of gift exchange, wondering why we don’t just give cash instead, given that it’s so much more efficient (the linked paper is called “The Deadweight Loss of Christmas.” I know, we’re insufferable). But those of us with normal human relationships know that someone picking something out for you with love is not the same as $50 in cash. When gifts are done right, you value the giving and the receiving. You take pleasure both in picking out something “just right” for someone you love, and in receiving something. But if a holiday rolled around where you had put tons of love and time into selecting gifts for everyone, only to get nothing in return, gift giving might start to seem a lot more like work. And if your finances were tight and you weren’t able to afford the basic things you needed, it might feel like a burdensome budget line. And then you might find yourself turning into an economist Scrooge.

So in home production, to get out of the trap of everything feeling like work, the first key is finding reciprocity—we cannot give our labor as love if we never receive. The second key is the hierarchy of needs—our needs for rest, health, and connection must be met first before we can give our time to others with generosity instead of scarcity. And finally, it’s finding the scope for profitable exchange (the crowd groans at another economist-ism)—the things that it’s cheaper for you to do than the benefit the other person receives. This is related to my colleague and fellow economist ’s concept of envy-freeness in home production—the allocation is right if you wouldn’t trade your tasks for someone else’s. But it goes a little further—the goal is to find things that they love receiving more than the work of you giving. The magic of gift giving is that if we each spend $50 on each other, we might both get more utility than if we had spent the same money on ourselves. And, similarly, it might feel less costly to fold someone else’s clothes than the benefit they experience, and vice versa for them taking your car to change the oil.

So this holiday season, to find more expansiveness in our home production, see what needs to shift to meet the three principles of being able to love through our labor: reciprocity, meeting our basic needs first, and profitable exchange. And who said economics was cold-hearted? Happy Thanksgiving!

Updates

• I’m coming to Canada on Tuesday! Event at the Rotman School at 5:30PM, and I’ll be on the show The Social around 1:30!

  Register (UToronto)

• If you’ve been wanting to introduce these concepts to the men in your life, or if you’re a man reading (thank you!), you might enjoy my live event with Brian Page (Modern Husbands), David Smith (author of Good Guys), and Paul Sullivan (The Company of Dads) on how men can support their partner’s career, December 5, from 12-1 PM ET on Zoom and YouTube Live!

  Register (Virtual Event)

  Plus, there will be a drawing for a giveaway of Having It All and David Smith’s Good Guys!

  

• Always fun to see press in other languages (and start getting angry emails from men… in Dutch this time!)—I was interviewed for Belgian news outlet De Morgan, ahead of the Dutch release of the book.

• And I finally made my (new) hometown paper, with this great, hilariously headlined article by Zoe Greenberg.

• If you’re looking for something to share with firms about my work, this new podcast, Lavin voices, is aimed at a corporate audience:

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  Thanks for reading Femonomics!

  

  Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

“If you were having trouble balancing career and family responsibilities, why didn’t you just leave your job?” the male journalist asked me, while interviewing me about the turbulent time that opens my book. I was shocked. I was shocked because as much as I root for and encourage women to find other sources of meaning besides their careers, as much as I’d positioned my book as an anti-Lean In, this was never anywhere on the table. Not just because my job was meaningful to me, and not just because I believed I had something to contribute—after all, said journalist was interviewing me because of my job—but because at the time I was experiencing the struggles I describe, I was the sole breadwinner. My job was not a demanding hobby or extracurricular pursuit. It was our livelihood.

Lost in the conversation on whether women are ruining the workplace (I’m not even linking it) or whether we’re being too mean to men is the fact that most of us aren’t there for our own self-fulfillment, or out of a latent desire to torture men with our presence. We’re there because money buys things our families need to live.

45 percent of married (heterosexual) American households have a woman who contributes more than a 40% of the household income, in addition to the 15 million female-headed households.

Women earn a total of 5 trillion dollars in income, which means additionally contributing over 700 billion in taxes.1

What’s more, men rely on women’s income. On TikTok you can hear young women lament about going on dates with men who claim they want a “traditional” female partner—someone who cooks and cleans, they mean. But the women speaking are quick to point out that he still wants to split the check, or have her pay her share of the rent, or use her car. And far from a new phenomenon, this has actually always been the case. In the rural economy, women worked on farms side-by-side with men, which is part of the origin of our “joint property” divorce laws—how can the courts individually assign the spoils of a joint enterprise? As households urbanized, with men owning local businesses, their wives were often their accountants and business managers.

And although women’s labor supply dipped at midcentury, when the post-war economy boomed, laws were passed to keep women out of some industries, and household specialization became more common, women’s labor often still played a critical role in men’s earning power. You see, during the midcentury there was a phenomenon known as “Putting the Husband Through,” whereby women worked early in marriage—before kids—so that husbands could finish their degrees, increasing their earning power. It was an early “student loan” model—resolving credit constraints that held back education through, drumroll, women’s earning power. My own grandmother, who I had always seen as the classic 1950s housewife, actually worked as a secretary when my grandfather was in law school!

If we start from the premise that women need to work, and we, as a society, need them to in almost all cases, then we must by necessity have a very different conversation about what the workplace must look like. Only by spinning a fantasy that women’s work is or ever has been optional can we then sell the story that we don’t actually need workplaces that work for everyone. But guess what? I’m here to spoil that fantasy… and then get back to ruining the workplace. By making it safe, fair, and hopefully a little less “greedy.”

Updates

• Check out the reader response column to my guest essay for the New York Times!

• Read about Kris Ann Valdez’s experience with my Time Use Challenge in The Everymom—she and her husband spent a week using my partner time tracker to study their household time allocation.

  “Trying the Time Use Challenge definitely helped my husband and me find ways we can improve our quality of life. It made us both realize that there are ways he can get more involved in caretaking responsibilities, like bedtime routines, watching the kids while I work, and letting me get more downtime.

  I’ve encouraged all my friends to give it a try, too. You never know what the data might reveal—and what conversation it might spark.”

  

• Podcasts this week:

• My work was also featured on Deep Questions with Cal Newport!

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  Thanks for reading the Femonomics Newsletter!

  

  Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

1. Utility function - Economists’ way of representing what people care about—what they’re maximizing in life. Firms are maximizing profit, and individuals are maximizing utility, which represents the sum total of your joy, happiness, meaning, and fulfillment over a lifetime. You can think of it as your running life video game score, where you earn points for different actions and outcomes. But only you know what gives you points and how many!

2. Constrained optimization - The process of maximizing your personal utility function within the limitations that you face—constraints. Constraints are immovable realities, rather than our reaction to those realities. Things like, I only have 24 hours in a day, my job is an hour away from my house, and it pays me $X a year. For women, the reproductive time horizon is also one of these constraints. And, what you can expect from other people is as well. But, some things that seem like constraints (“I need my daughter to go to this school that’s 45 minutes away”) are actually preferences in disguise.

3. Local vs. global maximization - Local maximization means getting the best outcome over a given set of possibilities. This is like climbing the foothill, with a mountain summit in the background—you’re at the highest point “nearby,” but not the overall highest. Global maximization is finding the best outcome over the entire range of possibilities. In terms of utility, I think of locally maximizing as getting the best deal possible given the details of your current situation—your current constraints—such as job, city, and familial structure. On the other hand, globally maximizing might mean taking a step back and asking what bigger changes to those core structures will expand that range of possibilities, allowing you to achieve greater overall utility than you could under your current setup.

4. Level up - My term for a change in your life that moves you from feeling stuck making small changes to find more utility points while still facing the same constraints, to actually removing or restructuring constraints (i.e., a shift to global maximization).

5. Home production - Work in the home that creates value but is not paid. This contrasts with market work, where labor is exchanged for money. Home production includes housework (cooking, cleaning), caregiving (for children and other adults), household management (like bill-paying, shopping, and inventory).

6. Human capital - The sum of knowledge, skills, and experience that we build over time. This is a source of value for workplaces and employers, consisting of your education, training, and ability that make you a more productive worker and create value in your workplace. Like physical capital, human capital can be invested in so as to increase future productivity. When we read to our children or sit at the table doing homework with them, we’re investing in their human capital.

7. Reproductive capital - The economic value of the ability to produce children—fertility. Reproductive capital depreciates over time, and so can sometimes be a concern when making time-intensive human capital investments.

8. Opportunity cost - What you give up when you choose one thing over another. Every choice we make carries a hidden cost—the value of the next-best thing you could have done instead of what you actually chose.

9. Best Alternative to a Negotiated Agreement (BATNA) - What you’ll do if the deal you’re negotiating doesn’t work out—your back up plan in case the deal falls through. A BATNA tells you when you should walk away from a bad deal and when to stay at the negotiating table. And by investing in your BATNA, you give yourself more bargaining power in a negotiation, for example by pricing yourself on the market or applying to other jobs before asking for a raise.

10. Job - A technology to convert your time into money. Sometimes it spits out other things, like fulfillment at the same time. But, importantly, your job is not your purpose in life—it’s a tool to maximize your utility by converting your time into money, which in turn you can use to buy things that bring you utility. Investments in your career should be to upgrade your “money machine,” for example making it so you can put less time in and get more money out.

11. Convex returns to hours - A property of some workplaces that makes long hours give additional returns because of relationships or knowledge that only one worker has. Under these conditions, one worker being constantly available and working extra hours late into the night is more valuable than two workers who split the same amount of time. “Greedy” workplaces—originally defined by Claudia Goldin—are the result. Jobs that demand long hours in order to make career progress, and therefore interfere with parenting responsibilities, especially during…

12. The squeeze – My term for the period in women’s lives when childcare and home responsibilities peak before income, so career investments are still valuable (and not making them will slow down earnings growth), but because those investments haven’t paid off yet, we don’t have money to “throw at the problem.” To get around this period you need to claw back some time through saying no to…

13. Non-promotable tasks - Defined and studied in detail by the authors of The No Club, these include “office housework” activities that do not contribute to your ability to be promoted and do not develop your skills and human capital, such as taking notes during the meeting or planning the office retreat. These tasks should be distributed fairly, made promotable, or eliminated.

14. Houseplants – Metaphorical reference to unnecessary and voluntary activities that are initially perceived as a source of value or utility and eventually morph into resource-draining responsibilities. Throw them out when they drain your time and energy more than they bring you joy! (Whether it’s a literal houseplant or a commitment you regret making.)

15. Leisure – Time spent outside of work and home production roles, resting, taking care of ourselves, developing hobbies, socializing, or doing nothing at all. Importantly, leisure time is productive because it creates utility points! It’s no more productive to spend an hour working to get money to buy something we value than it is to take an hour of leisure, which directly converts our time into joy and meaning—utility.

What houseplants can you throw out, and how are you taking productive leisure time today? Are there any other terms I should add?

Updates

• Thrilled that Having It All is one of Amazon’s best nonfiction books of 2025!

  

• Had a great time at the Marlene Meyerson JCC Manhattan this week. Catch me next in Toronto, live on Dec. 2, or virtually with David Smith (Johns Hopkins), Paul Sullivan (Company of Dads), and Brian Page (Modern Husbands) on Dec. 5!

  Register for Rotman (U Toronto) Talk

  Register for Virtual Event

• The Wall Street Journal reviewed Having It All this week.

• Two of my favorite social scientists talking about what we value:

  Thinking in Bets

  What We Value in Our Decisions

  Q&A with Emily Falk, neuroscientist and author of What We Value: The Neuroscience of Choice and Change…

  Read more

  10 months ago · 23 likes · Annie Duke

Thanks for reading the Femonomics Newsletter!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

This week I wrote in The NY Times about what women really want at work, based on the evidence. I point to this 2017 study that I love which showed that when you offered women a standard 9-to-5 job, they weren’t willing to give up very much to have a flexible schedule, or to work from home. But, if you instead offered them a job where hours were set at the employer’s discretion, women were willing to give up nearly 40% of their pay to avoid that. This tells me that women don’t want flexibility, they want boundaries. And boundaries should be something that employers are capable of offering, if they want to.

Hourly Pay Workers Would Give Up To…

Because I speak to and advise firms, I have a lot of conversations with them about how I think they can retain women through “The Squeeze,” the period in life when women’s time is most costly. When I suggest a rotating on-call schedule, I get pushback. “Oh no,” said one law firm, “our clients are paying us a lot of money, and they want to talk to who they want to talk to.” But I point to a field once thought to be a no-go for women, where work has transformed over the past 50 years: OB-GYN. It shifted from an always-on-call to deliver your patients’ babies model to a model of group practices, with a rotating call schedule. If women, in their most intimate and vulnerable moment, can learn to accept another doctor delivering their baby, because that’s what’s necessary for their doctor to have that job, for female doctors to even participate in that field, then guess what? Our clients can learn to deal. But we just have to set that boundary with them!

What are my recommendations to firms to help women through the squeeze?

• Don’t assume return-to-office is a no-go for women. Talk to your employees about what challenges they anticipate with return-to-office. If it’s that someone joined under the promise of remote work and is two hours from the nearest office, that’s not a gender issue, that’s a structural problem you need to solve! On the other hand, if it’s childcare demands, it’s very possible that a role with good structure and boundaries could work—nursing is fundamentally in person, and almost 90% female, because shifts are predictable.

• Take advantage of technology to separate synchronous and asynchronous work. If you need in-office synergies, can you have core hours of 10am-4pm, while your early risers get in at 8 and get out early, and younger employees stay ‘til 6 then head to the gym and home, while parents can pick kids up, have family time, and then log back in after bedtime? Lots of comments on my piece were outraged at this suggestion, but the reality is many firms do require longer than 40-hour work weeks, and for me as a parent, 8pm is actually a less costly time than 6pm.

• Implement rotating on-call schedules! This means introducing some redundancy, in that multiple people need to know each area of work and be able to respond to team or client concerns. But that is great for institutional resilience because guess what? Employees get sick! They go on vacation! They go on parental leave, and with better processes, maybe they won’t be discriminated against for doing so. Prepare clients for this reality and let them know the way it serves the business and lets you deliver overall better service at more competitive rates.

And while we wait for firms to implement these boundaries for us, we can all set and hold our own. What are your work-life no-gos?

Updates

• One last in-person tour stop, at the storied JCC of Manhattan! Register to join us on November 11, from 6:30-7:30 PM ET!

  Register

  

• Virtual event with Brian Page (Modern Husbands), David Smith (author of Good Guys), and Paul Sullivan (The Company of Dads). Sign up to join us live on December 5, from 12-1 PM ET on Zoom and YouTube Live! (And there will be book giveaways for live participants!)

  Register

  

• From Good Housekeeping, five takeaways from Having It All to help with burnout.

  

• I was featured in Haaretz magazine!

  

• Thrilled that the team has selected my book as a monthly must-read! Check out their Having It All book bite.

• Having It All goes to Canada with the Globe and Mail, and I’ll be there in person in December at the Rotman School (University of Toronto)!

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• I was on THE Dr. Becky’s podcast, talking about why parents are getting so squeezed, and how we can put on our own oxygen masks first.

• And appeared on the Straight Up podcast too!

• Had a great time with and talking about our books here at Wharton on Monday! If you haven’t, be sure to check out Lucky by Design!

Thanks for reading the Femonomics Newsletter!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

It’s a short one today because I was busy transforming my little nugget into a bookworm!

I love Halloween. I love seeing all your kids’ cute costumes! I love letting my 8-year-old eat unlimited candy. I DON’T love that so much of the night’s magic is made by moms who are already stretched so thin. Whether it’s hot-gluing the costume together or shopping for the candy to give out, moms are the invisible labor behind so much of the night’s joy. It’s what Eve Rodsky calls: us “sneaking around in the middle of the night, elfin-like, silently and magically making stuff happen.”

We want to make memories for our kids. Often, we want those memories to look like our childhoods, or the childhoods we jealously peered at if our moms were not the elfin types. What we forget is that those magical childhood moments—whether homemade meals, holiday decorations, or handmade costumes—were partly possible because our mothers’ generation was not reading us bedtime stories, supervising playtime, sitting on the floor, or helping us with homework. The amount of investment we make in our kids today—real, crucial human capital investments plus some societally-induced helicopter parenting—has to come at the expense of something else.

I vote that we let it be the “effortless” magic instead of our sanity and well-being. Let your kids glue their own costumes or order them on Amazon, make holiday decorating a team sport, and forgive yourself if everything isn’t as perfect as what you see on Instagram where, perennial reminder, the cuteness and the magic are someone’s livelihood so aren’t competing with that for scarce time. Now I’m off to take my little bookworm trick-or-treating—maybe next year I’ll take my own advice.

Updates

• New event on the calendar! Join me on November 11 at the Marlene Meyerson JCC in Manhattan to talk about Having It All with Stephanie Butnick!

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• Join me, Brian Page (Modern Husbands), David Smith (Workplace Allies), and Paul Sullivan (The Company of Dads) on December 5, from 12-1 PM ET for a virtual discussion of how men can support their partners’ careers!

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• I spoke about the girlboss-tradwife dichotomy this week in The Guardian.

  

• M.M. LaFleur NYC from Wednesday!

• New podcasts this week: My So-Called Midlife, What Fresh Hell, Totally Booked, More or Less, and The Last Show.

Thanks for reading the Femonomics Newsletter!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.

My mom is many things, but I wouldn’t describe her as “child-centric.” She went back to school after divorce, and always seemed very busy with many things: dating, club meetups and dance classes, errands that back then had to be done outside the house. My two siblings and I were toted along in the back of the car, told to stay inside with the doors locked and wait, or playing cards to keep busy in the lobby of her school. We played outdoors at all hours, terrorizing the neighborhood on our bikes, digging in the mud. There’s a lot to be said for the “free range” childhoods of our youth, but there were things that also teetered on neglect. We played by a creek taking unnecessary risks, and honestly could have drowned. We spent hours unsupervised during which I, the youngest, was often locked in closets or hurt by my older siblings. I was abused by one of my mom’s boyfriends.

When I became a parent myself, I resolved to do things differently, and to put my kids’ needs before my own. And as much as I’d like to think this was an individual choice, the data tells me that, in this case as in so many others, our individual decisions are shaped by societal patterns and trends. Mothers today spend double the amount of time with our kids as the 1980s, when I grew up. There’s a lot that’s good about this change. There are so many moments listening to and sharing with my kids, entering into their world, partaking in their joy, letting them have their feelings, that I wouldn’t trade for the world. AND there are the times where I let my sense of proportion get warped and did things for my kids that left me not getting some basic needs met. Like living in New York City while my tenure-track job was in Philadelphia, 2.5 hours away. For almost 8 years. I think often of a The Onion headline: “Mom Hasn’t Ordered Favorite Pizza Topping in Over a Decade.”

My research has documented just how much more housework women do than men, and how little men’s roles have changed over time. And when people ask me how we can start to change this, I often talk about parenting—raising our boys to do more, to do better. But, I think just as important as those active choices is a more passive one: doing less. Not rushing to do everything for them, and make everything ok for them, but letting our children be active participants in the work of living. Clean up the house together to K-Pop Demon Hunters, tell them if they want to spend quality time together they can help you chop vegetables for dinner, and let them find the missing item or decide they don’t really need it.

Taking care of your own needs and demonstrating to them that mom is a full person outside of the household—that she deserves to have her favorite pizza topping, dammit—is just as important in resetting expectations around gendered roles as teaching our boys not to wash bright colors on hot. It doesn’t have to look like the free range but sometimes neglectful “hands off” parenting of our childhoods. But it does have to look like you getting to experience your own life as a person with needs and wants separate from your family. It means that you get to exercise, you get to see your friends, you get to watch what you want on TV sometimes, or cook the meal that you like and your family doesn’t. We can invest in our kids—and keep them safe—without sublimating our own needs. Because if we let ourselves become an empty shell in service of our children’s needs, we’re modeling for our sons that that’s what they can expect from their wives, and we’re modeling for our daughters that that’s what love looks like.

So be a warrior for gender equality and go out and take care of yourself. See you at yoga.

Updates

• I finally got a week at home after being on the road for a month straight to tell you about Having It All! Amazon has a cool deal on the book this week where if you buy two books (either two copies or a different one from the promotion), you get one 50% off! Next week I’ll hit the road again for M.M. LaFleur in New York (Oct. 29), and then for Philly locals, I’ll be talking about the book at Penn November 3.

• My Guilty Feminist episode is out! You can now listen to my conversation with Deborah Frances-White from London. Find out what my “I’m a feminist, but” moment is, and so much more!

• Read more right here in Substack, on Here’s the Thing with Reshma Saujani (stay tuned for our episode of My So-Called Midlife next week!).

  Here's the Thing with Reshma Saujani

  Having It All with Corinne Low

  The other day, I sat down with economist Corinne Low (hey, Femonomics !) for My So-Called Midlife. I’d just finished her new book, Having It All, and found myself underlining almost every page. It’s smart, funny, and unflinchingly honest about what so many of us feel in midlife…that the math of modern life just doesn’t add up…

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  10 months ago · 7 likes · 2 comments · Reshma Saujani

• Interview with the wonderful Kate Manne!

  More to Hate

  This Conversation May Change Your Life—and Your Marriage

  Today, I have something special for you: my first ever author interview! And what an author interview. Corinne Low, a top-flight Wharton economist, has penned a spectacular new book about how to have more—and give up on getting it all—as a woman navigating men’s apathy at home and an often sexist workplace too…

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  a year ago · 87 likes · 11 comments · Kate Manne and Corinne Low

• And with Annie Duke, for Thinking in Bets!

  Thinking in Bets

  THE ECONOMICS OF HAPPINESS, IN THE WORKPLACE AND AT HOME

  Corinne Low is an associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School, and author of the new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.Thanks for reading Thinking in Bets! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work…

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  10 months ago · Annie Duke

Thanks for reading the Femonomics Newsletter!

Corinne Low is an author, economist, and professor. She teaches at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her first book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, is out now from Flatiron! Visit Corinne’s website, book a talk, or write to us.