Economist Corinne Low wants women to pay themselves first with leisure time

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Corinne Low was pumping breast milk in an Amtrak bathroom when she realized her life wasn’t making sense.

Her train commute was monstrous: two hours, each way, from New York to her job at the University of Pennsylvania. At home, life had grown chaotic, her marriage faltering. At work, rejections were mounting. Observing her male colleagues, it was clear they had more time in their days to think and focus without the frantic juggle.

The economist decided her life needed an overhaul. She divorced, relocated a seven-minute bike ride from work and hired an au pair. Eventually, she came out as queer and remarried. As her life stabilized, she felt her time expanding.

“What took an economist like me so long to negotiate a good deal for myself at work and at home?” asks Prof. Low, an associate professor in business economics and public policy at the Wharton School.

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The question lies at the heart of her new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, in which she urges women to use their time in ways they won’t regret – to question unequal partnerships, unfulfilling jobs and the myriad ways they improve other people’s lives while neglecting their own.

Mining a deep well of time-use findings, she paints a dismal portrait: While women have made sizable gains in their professional lives, little has shifted on the domestic front.

In Canada, mothers spent 7.5 hours a day caring for their children, compared with 4.9 hours spent by fathers, according to Statistics Canada’s 2022 Time Use Survey. Women who worked onsite at their jobs did 87 minutes of housework a day, men 49 minutes. On leisure, everything flips: Men afforded themselves 3.2 hours a day, women 2.7 hours.

The Globe spoke with Prof. Low about women reclaiming more time for their own “personal utility function” – their own benefit – and for what she calls the “jollies,” or the joy, meaning and fulfilment over a lifetime.

You see women at a breaking point, with time at work and parenting intensifying, even as housework remains this immovable weight. Women’s earning power hasn’t landed them more personal time. How should we feel about this?

Those of us trying to have careers at the same time as having kids, we feel it’s an impossible grind. We’re constantly behind and don’t have any time for ourselves. We think, “This is so hard. Is it just me?” Part of me sharing the data is to show women that no, it is not in your head. It is in the data.

You don’t want to turn back the clock on progress for women. But understand that in some ways, it didn’t get us what we wanted: Changes that give you freedom and opportunity should also bring happiness.

You describe a woman who hadn’t taken a run for four years, while her husband swam every day. Another puts on her running clothes but ends up folding laundry instead. Is this self-sabotage, or women caving to what’s tacitly expected of them?

I’m not blaming women for making these choices. We’re responding to pressures that make us feel like we’re the ones responsible for everything. If we don’t do it, somebody else isn’t going to do it.

So maybe it doesn’t get done. We’re going to be okay with that because the option of not getting any of our needs met, it’s not an option.

When women are in the squeeze of career, raising small children, maybe elder care too, their hours get so filled tending to others’ needs, they sometimes can’t articulate their own any more. How did we land here?

We’ve lost touch with ourselves as the protagonists of our own lives. Women, when we make decisions, our north star is, “What makes things work for our family?” There’s a real risk there of losing sight of yourself. I often say, “You are also a member of the family.” If something’s not working for you, it’s also not working for the household.

I was working so hard to make everyone else’s lives work, I became this depleted, angry shell. I’d come home after commuting, the place would be a mess and I’d be like, “Argh!”

On housework, you write, “This is so often the challenge I see driving relationships with two reasonable people, that were once filled with love, into the ground.” How is housework this huge?

It displaces the time women could be spending on leisure, on taking care of themselves, on their careers. In the data, I see couples where no matter how much she earns, he’s still doing the same amount of housework. And then she’s working fewer paid hours than him, and I can’t help but wonder what her career advancement looks like if she’s not spending that extra time at work.

You want wives to confront housework disparities head-on with minute-by-minute spreadsheets showing who does what. And you urge younger women to quiz dating prospects on what chores they did growing up. Is it asking a lot, in a dating market where no one even wants to commit?

I’ve definitely heard that feedback. Women are like, “It’s already hard enough out there. Now you want me to ask him about laundry?!” I have empathy for that. But we need to turn up the volume on what might matter more for our happiness long term. It might mean breaking up earlier with people who don’t meet a standard. If you’re dating and picking up after him at his own house – it’s not going to get better once you have kids.

On kids, you write about the intensive parenting model eating up ever more hours. Why is this mode of parenting particularly cruel to mothers’ time?

It collides with our sanity, our well-being, our ability to be fully healthy people ourselves.

Understanding how much parenting time has skyrocketed, the key thing is to make choices about what’s a good investment of our time. Maybe it means outsourcing cleaning and not doing the kids’ laundry and folding it really nicely. Instead, you’re spending time on their human capital, helping with homework.

You write about women “burning out on altruism.” How should women parse the non-stop asks from everyone in their orbit?

Ask yourself what you’re hoping to accomplish with this. Is it something you directly enjoy? Does it have enough of an impact that it’s worth the tradeoff of your time? If you’re in the thick of it and everything’s falling apart, you can’t afford to donate your time right now.

And guess what? In periods when I needed to stop doing all those things for everybody, there were people who had my back. I could be the recipient of some of those gifts of time.

Your advice is to “pay yourself first” with leisure time. Do you do this?

I decided to have a baby and a book baby at the same time. I was doing four book events a week in three different cities. We got home and I told my wife, “We are going to the woods!” In the midst of the craziness, we spent a day camping with friends. I definitely didn’t have time but I knew this was something I needed to do. I felt like being in the woods with just my brain. I felt my brain work. I got to breathe in.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.