For Corinne Low, her breaking point came in an Amtrak bathroom. The train she commuted on from Pennsylvania to New York City was late. Overwhelmed, she found herself crying in a public restroom while pumping for her newborn son.
As an economist, she recognized she was in the middle of what’s called “the squeeze.” It’s the pressure point in life when there’s less time and less money, usually as women are building their families. Low was in deep, and it felt unfair and depleting. And it became the start of her mission to help women create more equitable relationships.
Now a tenured associate professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Corinne Low combined her personal experience and professional expertise into “Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours,” a USA Today bestseller.
Why Parenting Feels So Hard Right Now
If it seems like it wasn’t always this tough on parents, Corinne Low would agree. Research shows that in the span of a generation, the time parents spend with children has doubled. And this particularly impacts women.
One reason is the greater understanding of child development. “So we’re just jamming more hours into our kids. And it’s the soccer lessons and the music lessons and the tutoring,” says Low. And women are shouldering much of this load.
Even when women bring home the bigger paycheck, the data says they still do twice as much cooking and cleaning as their lower-earning male partners. And Low pushes back hard on the still-pervasive idea that cooking and cleaning are gendered tasks.
As she puts it: “I understood having an infant and pumping and that there were certain things that biologically went along with that as mom, but I don’t sweep the floor with my uterus.”
An Economist’s Change of Plans
In Corinne Low’s situation, her then-husband stopped working full-time to start a business, which is why the couple remained in New York, and she continued to commute.
“We were four years in, and I was earning all the money,” Low recalls. “But I was still doing the lion’s share of the parenting and the home production.”
The couple divorced, Low moved to Pennsylvania, and made the decision (which she acknowledges works for her, but not everyone) to date women exclusively. She is now remarried, and she and her wife have an infant daughter.
“When we date, we go for who’s cute. But nobody is cute when you’re cleaning their toothpaste off the bathroom sink,” Low remarked. “Because it’s not … that everybody needs to divorce their husband and marry a woman, but I do think that everybody needs to marry someone who does the laundry.”
Making “Home” Work More Fair
No matter who you are married to, Corinne Low has some practical strategies for evening out the workload at home.
First, stop thinking of your partner as someone to assign chores to. You need “a co-CEO of the household,” not “a low-level junior employee to delegate tasks to.”
Low recognizes these conversations can be uncomfortable. So, like any good economist, she suggests bringing data to the table. Literally start tracking your time. Low says that will highlight much of the invisible work women do, like time spent “shopping for clothes and making doctor’s appointments, planning lunches and setting up playdates and aftercare.”
It’s not about creating an exact 50/50 split, but rather something that feels more equitable. And here’s the hard part: let go of perfection. When your partner takes over a task, agree on what that job “done” looks like.
For example, candy for the kids’ lunches doesn’t cut it. But if your partner is giving the kids a nutritious meal, that’s great. And then (here’s the hard part) don’t get involved. Low says, “If he’s not cutting the shapes out of the sandwiches,” Low says, let it be.
It’s OK To Love Your Time At Home, But…
Not surprisingly, Corinne Low is extremely wary of the current Tradwife trend, where online influencers are encouraging women to focus exclusively on the home and childcare.
“There is nothing wrong with wanting to invest in your home, with wanting to invest in your children. There’s nothing wrong with wanting or needing to step away from the labor force,” to do so, Low says. But it comes with a caveat.
Low notes many of the women of her mother’s generation who stayed home “ended up divorced and starting over in their forties with minimum wage jobs,” because they had no job experience.
But it’s not just the breakup of a marriage that puts women at risk. Low talks about “the three Ds: divorce, death, disability”—plus layoffs. The reality: no matter how much you love your partner, one income might not be enough for a family to rely on. And your partner may not always be available to provide that support.
Her advice? Invest in yourself first. Get some work skills under your belt. Low encourages young women to “think of their careers as a machine that converts your time into money.” Want to step back from work to focus on kids? Fine. But build that career foundation first.
Her ultimate vision? It’s not perfection, but rather “having it almost.”
She believes that’s possible by “prioritizing the things that you need to be happy and fulfilled and learning to let go of the rest.”
MORE ON HERMONEY:
- Work-Life Balance for Women: Why “Having It All” Is the Wrong Goal
- What It’s Really Like To Be A Full-Time Working Mom
- How To Find Balance As A Working Mom
