Economist Corrine Low shares how we can use economic principles to discover our utility function and increase our happiness.
Raise your hand if you feel like your work-life balance is nonexistent. If you’re running on empty, trying to juggle work, home, and relationships, and almost always coming up short. So many of us have been there, done that, and got the t-shirt. Unfortunately, the pressure to “have it all” is somehow still alive and well in 2025. (We still haven’t learned to “lean out,” it seems!) But we know that it’s impossible to find perfection with even ONE of the above, let alone all three.
Dr. Corinne Low, Wharton economist and author of: “Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours,” joined Jean Chatzky on the HerMoney podcast to deconstruct the work-life balance myth. Through personal stories, economic insight, and hard-earned wisdom, she offers a way to rethink success and reclaim time, energy, and identity on your own terms.
Why Work-Life Balance Isn’t Just a Buzzword, It’s an Economic Issue
Jean Chatzky: One of the ideas that you introduce is that women should be acknowledged as economic agents. What does that mean, and how are we getting it wrong at this point?
Corinne Low: A lot of women have been told by feminism and by the popular business books that are out there that their goal in life is to have as good a career as possible, right? That’s how you’re going to win – not only for yourself, but for all women everywhere.
And when you think like an economist, then you think, no. My goal in life is to maximize my utility. Again, deep joy, meaning, and value over the course of my life, and my job is just a tool for me to do that. It’s not the source of that. It’s not an end in itself. My job is a tool that turns my time into money.
Therefore, I should decide how important things are that I can buy with money in my utility function, and how important other things are that I can only get through my time and my investments in my job, should be proportional to that role in my utility function. And so if we take women seriously as economic agents, it’s empowering to make some of these decisions differently.
Work-Life Balance Is a Design Problem. Here’s How to Start Solving It.
- Pay Yourself First With Time
Corinne Low: I’m sure that your listeners have heard the personal finance adage of ‘paying yourself first,’ which is essentially setting aside money for your savings before you take care of everything else. And so I encourage women to do it with time, which is to find the uses of your time that give you the most utility, the things that you value most deeply. And literally block them out on your calendar the way that you would a meeting with your boss or an immovable obligation. Put that on your calendar first and let other things fill in around that.
- Make Hard Choices (and Throw Out the Houseplants)
Corinne Low: This is the piece I call ‘throwing out your houseplants’ because there are some ‘shoulds’ that I have to have a beautifully cared-for garden or houseplants, right? And again, that might be something I have space for in some period of my life, but I realized that with how much I travel and having young kids, my houseplants with their browning, decaying leaves were just making me feel tremendously guilty. And the question is, do I actually need to have them?
- Challenge the “Must-Haves”
Corinne Low: You really want to think about what the constraints are, and then you want to separate that from which pieces are my preference. For example, I often hear from moms who are struggling to make it all add up, and then they’ll tell me something is a must. They’ll say, ‘Oh my gosh, it’s so hard to drive my daughter every day to the school that’s 45 minutes away. But she has to go to that school.’
However, the fact that she has to go there and that you have to live where you live are actually preferences. Sometimes people say, ‘My kid needs this thing.’ But does your kid need that thing more than they need you to be relaxed, present, and connected, because you’ve put on your own oxygen mask first?
Final Thoughts: Balance Doesn’t Mean Doing Everything, It Means Choosing What Matters
Jean Chatzky: Sometimes you get to the point where you have to make hard choices. Talk about that.
Corinne Low: I talk about outsourcing as choosing not to hire yourself for a task. And so I ask people to say, ‘Should I hire myself for this job?’ and make that decision that way. For your time, you have to decide what is a really meaningful use of your time and what’s clutter.
And so the question is, is this something you value, such as volunteering or caring for others? Is this the time in your life where you actually have time to do it, or is this something that right now, for the moment, you need to say no to?
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MORE ON HERMONEY:
- An Economist Weighs In On Being A Woman
- 13 Women On Where They Keep Their Emergency Funds (and Why They Love HYSAs)
- The Ideal Work-Life Balance: Companies That Are Getting It Right
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