Having It All | Corinne Low

Can Women Have It All?

Dan Loney: The old line “having it all” is one that tends to be associated with women and their careers. Can they bring children in the world while still advancing a professional life? Corinne Low is an associate professor of business economics and public policy here at the Wharton School. She has authored a new book about the topic titled, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. And she joins us here in studio.

Corinne, let’s start with the title itself because that’s always the big question. Can women have it all?

Corinne Low: What I document in the book is that “having it all” has become harder than ever. Because women’s time, and especially the time of working moms, is being uniquely squeezed in this moment. Our careers are more demanding than ever. Men have not stepped up to perform household duties at home. We’ll get into that data more. And we do twice as much child care. We spend twice as much time with our kids as parents a generation ago. All of those things don’t add up to 24 hours in the day. I think if we try to have it all according to these old models, these old beliefs, without recognizing the way that these structural forces have changed, then we’re setting ourselves up for unhappiness.

Loney: Is having it all a reasonable expectation?

Low: What I say in the book is that it is possible for women to have what they need to have a happy and fulfilled life, but they’re going to have to choose what their “all” is. If you want to have that career where you’re going to be the equal to a man and equal to your male colleagues, and it’s going to move at the same pace — absolutely, you can have that. If you want to be the mom who never misses a soccer game and makes the homemade baby food and the hand-decorated birthday cupcakes — absolutely, you can be that. But those might be two separate full-time jobs. If you try to do both of those things to a level of excellence where there’s never going to be a dropped ball, there’s never going to be a tough day, you will end up feeling the way I was feeling at the beginning of the book. Which is exhausted, depleted, and wondering, like, is this it?

Loney: What does the data tell us about trying to have it all right now?

Low: When I looked at the data, it kind of was an a-ha moment for me. When I was at Wharton early in my career, I was commuting from New York City, and I had just had a baby. As I say in the book, in 2017, I gave birth to my son and also a midlife crisis. Because I was commuting two and a half hours. I was the primary breadwinner, became the sole breadwinner. And I just felt like it was so hard every single day for me to show up the way I wanted to show up, both at work and at home. I felt like my male colleagues seemed to be publishing papers faster than me, and my female friends seemed to be doing a better job with better kids, or being able to do more.

Then I started looking at the data, and I found that it was not just me at all, that we were being set up to fail. Because as women had been able to take on the same roles as men in the workplace, as gender roles had converged at work, they hadn’t converged at home. Women like me, who were primary breadwinners, did not have the same support at home as my male colleagues who were the breadwinners. In the data, you actually see that women who are the primary breadwinner still do twice as much cooking and cleaning as their lower-earning male partners. And that just doesn’t add up.

When you add to that the fact that — again, I didn’t know until I looked at the data — moms spend twice as much time with their kids as moms a generation ago because of our greater understanding of child development. Because we understand that holding our babies and breastfeeding and talking to our toddlers and doing homework with our grade schoolers, that these things are crucial. And they require our time.

Loney: The relationship also between husband and wife, partner and partner, to have a great relationship so that the mom, the wife, can have it all, becomes that much more important. Everybody doing their share, so that everybody can be successful along the way.

Low: I think that’s absolutely it. When I look in the data, I see that when a man has a high-paying career, it almost becomes like a joint project of the household. Right? It’s something that the whole household is organized to kind of support, because that is the income that is supporting the lifestyle for that household. I don’t see that reciprocity with women’s careers. When she has a really high-paying job and even much higher-paying than his job, I don’t see his time in the household change to actually support her.

Loney: Why do you think that is?

Low: I do think that gender roles have something to do with it. I think that’s one of the big things that we have to tackle to start making some change. Men have kind of been trained to say, “[My] ambition, [my] career, that’s what matters.” It’s hard to let go of that ideal and say, “Oh, maybe the way that I can really be a great provider and a great supporter is by leaning into my wife’s career and making sure that she’s able to get the work hours that she needs.” In the data, I see some couples where the wife is earning four times as much, and she still gets fewer hours to work than he does. So he’s earning a quarter of the amount, and he gets more hours to work and is doing much less of the home duties.

Busting Myths About Women at Work

Loney: What has the corporate world done? They have made some changes in terms of the availability of time off when you have a child, but there is still a ways to go. From the business perspective, they can do more to open the door for women, to make sure that they can try to have it all.

Low: I think not only can they do more, but I think the firms that manage to figure this out are going to have a major competitive advantage. Because that’s talent that you’re retaining, and talent is ideas. It’s innovation. It’s what’s going to push you ahead of your competitors in this race that we’re all in, right? I think that firms must figure this out. And I don’t think it’s as hard as they think.

Because another thing that’s true is when I look at the data, this period in life where our time is most constrained — I actually call it the squeeze —it’s temporary. It’s the time when our kids are young and we’re making career investments, but because those investments haven’t paid off yet, we can’t throw money at the problem. That period comes and it goes. If firms can figure out how to retain women through that period, then all the investments they made in recruiting and acquiring and training that talent, they’re going to get to hold on to through a very long, productive life of this worker.

So, what do firms need to do? I’d like to do some myth-busting. Because a lot of firms are talking about return to office, and they think that’s better for productivity. And I think they’re worried. They’re saying, “Well, we can’t give women the flexibility and the work from home that they want.” But that’s not what the research shows that women want. In research that has offered women different types of roles — either the standard kind of 9-to-5, 40 hours a week, or work from home flexible hours — they find that women are willing to give up very little pay for those flexible or work from home options. But instead, if they offer women a schedule where the employer sets it — it’s called employer discretion. You know, this time you’re working six to noon, but tomorrow you have to be here until 9 p.m. They’re willing to give up almost 40% of their pay to avoid that schedule.

What this tells me is that women don’t want flexibility. They want boundaries. And I think it’s actually possible for firms to offer them. Yes, you can get everybody back into the office if you’re able to say, “Hey, let’s use this remote technology that we really perfected during the pandemic to say in-person work ends at 5 p.m. Go home, pick up your kids from day care, have dinner as a family. And then after bedtime, that’s when we’re going to have our next call. That’s when we’re going to log back on.” Recognize what women are telling you about what hours are the most costly, and figure out a way to put those boundaries in place.

Loney: I guess that’s made easier because of the technology that we all have at our fingertips. None of us go too far from our smartphones to begin with, so we’re constantly in this kind of connection phase. That’s another component of work in general, about how people talk about we don’t get as much break in general.

Low: Yes, exactly. Firms are saying, “Hey, it’s costly for us to have everybody working from home all the time. We need some of that in-person interaction.” Great. Get it done between 9 to 5, and I promise you, you are going to retain not just more female employees, but more employees in general. Because that old trope of the employee that you built the system for, that’s a man with a stay-at-home wife, that’s fewer and fewer of your employees in general. It’s not just female employees who are responsible for care work and who have kids that they need to pick up from day care.

Loney: You have spent some time in the book talking about the decision-making process that women go through in terms of have the best of all worlds.

Low: Yeah, I encourage people to think about their happiness like an economist. Economists think about individuals as maximizing their utility function. What’s your utility function? Well, it’s not quite happiness because it’s this deeper meaning: contentment, joy, and fulfillment over a lifetime versus momentary happiness. When you use that as your north star, that’s going to enable you to respond to these impossible time constraints by radically prioritizing what actually contributes to your happiness. The thing that actually gives you a marginal benefit for that marginal time you’re putting in, versus the things that we’re doing from guilt, obligation, a sense that somebody on social media or my friend is doing it. Right? We’re going to figure out that if we want to be able to have the careers that we want to have, and if we want to be able to be the parents that we want to be, that’s enough. We have to say no to everything else. And we’ve got to declutter our time.

Loney: We talk about return on investment so much in the business landscape. It feels like we don’t talk about it enough in our personal lives. And are we truly getting the best ROI in our personal side as well as our professional?

Low: I think some people, women especially, don’t think about enough is when we go through this guilt of like, “Oh, should I outsource this? Really, I should be able to do it myself.” I want us to reframe that decision to say that not outsourcing a task is choosing to hire yourself to do it. Are you going to get a higher return on your time from doing this household task in-house versus the other uses of your time? That might be investing in your career, or it also might just be refilling your cup. Replenishing. Sleeping, which we also need to be productive, right?

I think with male-coded tasks, we don’t struggle with that same guilt-laden trade-off. We say, “Hey, of course, the plumber can fix this problem, or the roofer, or the car repairman can fix this problem faster than he can do it.” We recognize that a man’s time is valuable because it can be spent in the workforce. But with female-coded tasks, we almost go in with the assumption that she should be able to juggle both. And that’s unfair. It’s not the reality, and it’s inefficient.

How to Better Support Women

Loney: Can there be, or should there be, a middle ground where both the employee and the employer can meet? Where the employee is getting the benefit, but also the employer is getting the benefit?

Low: I absolutely think the win-win solution is there. Because as I said, women are bringing their innovation to the table. They’re bringing their talent to the table. If you figure out how to do this as a firm, retain a woman for the 25 years after her kids are in full-time school, where you don’t know where she’s going to be able to go to in the company. I think firms make a grave mistake by losing talent during this temporary period, during this squeeze, that they could hold on to. And again, I think it’s a little cheaper than they think to hold on to it, if we are evidence-driven.

Loney: How much has the pandemic changed these dynamics? I say that because it seemed like before the pandemic, from the financial perspective, the amount that women were getting for certain jobs was improving. And it felt like the pandemic knocked that back a few steps.

Low: I think the pandemic put a lot of child-care burden on women. Women were the ones who were the shock absorber for that, by and large. The thing that is interesting is that was true whether they were the breadwinner or not. It wasn’t based on their earning power. They were more likely to take that on. But I think if you zoom out a little bit, the gender wage gap has been plateauing since around the 1990s. That’s around the same time that we saw this explosion in child-care time.

I think if we zoom out, it goes up and down, it gets better or worse. We have some deeper structural issues that we need to work on, where we absolutely need more support for everybody, both moms and dads being parents. We need to recognize the fact that this has changed, that the inputs that we put into raising children is different. You know, every parent who’s listening can probably recognize the elaborate bedtime routine, and waiting for your kid to go to bed and processing the day’s highs and lows. I grew up in the 1980s. My bedtime routine was, “Go to bed.” And when you think about that, you actually recognize how much time use has changed. That the way we parent today is completely different. Knowing that data, it’s empowering. It’s empowering for workers and it’s empowering for firms to think about, well now, how do we make that work?

Loney: What do men need to do to help this process move forward for women?

Low: I’m gonna write another book, and I’m going to call it Lean In for Men. Because I think we focus so much on what women need to do to be competitive in the workplace, and we haven’t focused on how men need to evolve. As I said, we’ve seen that convergence in roles at work. Women can take on the same roles. They can be as productive as men at work. We haven’t seen that convergence at home. Men’s time doing housework hasn’t changed since 1975. It’s entirely constant. So, for men to be competitive as part of this changing world, in a broader sense — not just on the labor market, but for them to be good partners, for them to get married, for them to stay married, I think men need to be bringing more to the table than a paycheck.

Loney: What do you hope that people will take from reading your book?

Low: I hope that women will feel seen and validated. One of the things I say is, “It’s not in your head; it’s in the data.” I hope that they will see that they are not failing. They are facing a kind of impossible set of circumstances. I hope that will give them permission to navigate it however brings them the most happiness and fulfillment, and to find what they need and pursue that. Pursue their optimal, their utility function, not what success is that somebody else has defined for you. And I call that “having it almost.”