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.
You might be asking yourself, “What can an economist teach me about happiness?”
It turns out, quite a lot.
Corinne Low offers a guide to how women can approach maximizing their happiness with intention. (But this book is not just for women. Anyone taking a good, hard look at what makes them happy and how to maximize that can benefit from this perspective.)
The elevator pitch
Annie: Let’s start with your elevator pitch for the book.
Corinne Low: This book comes from 15 years of my research as an economist as well as my personal story and the lives of so many women who were at similar points in their life. We felt like it all wasn’t adding up. We felt like we were juggling too many balls, dropping them all, and wondering, “Is this just me?” When I looked at the data, I saw that there were structural reasons that we were feeling that way and I wanted to share that with people. I wrote this book to say, “This just doesn’t add up in a 24-hour day.”
On the one hand, gender roles have converged in the workplace, which allows us to think of our career the same way that men do and have that same aspiration for our careers. But on the other, gender roles have not converged at home. Because of that, we just have fewer hours in our day because men do the same amount of housework as they did in the 1970s. Then you add in, starting in the 1990s, an explosion of parenting time that came from out of nowhere, we now spend twice as much time with our kids as our parents’ generation did. It literally doesn’t add up in a 24-hour day. That means we should be very empowered in seeking whatever solution works for us.
The book is full of strategies to do that, to have a life that is maybe not “having it all,” but is sustainable and rich and rewarding.
Women are running out of time: The widening “hours gap”
Annie: Just so that I understand, there’s some proportion of male-to-female housework and females are doing way more of the housework.
Corinne Low: That ratio got a little better because women are doing less. Women are doing less, but men are not doing more.
Annie: We all have dishwashers and microwaves now?
Corrine Low: Essentially.
Annie: Then, there’s always been some proportion of childcare, women-to-men. It’s not like men didn’t coach little league or play catch with their kids or something like that back in the 1950s. They’ve always done some amount of that. And you’re saying that ratio hasn’t really changed either.
Corinne Low: Right. But for women, on a 24-hour basis, this means (a) more hours at work; (b) almost the same hours at housework; and (c) due to the explosion of parenting time, women’s share of all the additional hours now devoted to parenting.
Annie: That explosion of parenting time immediately makes intuitive sense as something that’s eating up a lot more hours in the day. I remember, when I was young – I mean, like six – I would come home, drop off my stuff, and then I would be out with my friends for the whole afternoon, with no adult supervision until the sun went down. I thought maybe that was just my family’s home life, but I’ve talked with a lot of contemporaries over the years and their experience was the same. Does that explosion disproportionately affect women, or does it affect men in the same proportion?
Corinne Low: Parenting time has gone up for both genders because the changes that are driving this are very deep. One, our greater understanding of child development. We literally understand the importance of spending time holding your infant or sitting on the floor with your toddler. The other thing is the inequality in our economy. It basically says that you’re going to get high returns to that extra little margin that you put into your kid to get them into a top school because then their career is going to be so much higher earning over their lifetime. Those forces act on men too. But what’s super interesting is that, therefore, I think a lot of men are patting themselves on the back because they’re like, I’m doing so much more than my dad. But women’s time has gone up substantially more than men’s time.
The gender gap in the household has actually gotten worse instead of better. If you do it as a ratio, because men’s time was pretty small before, the ratio will look better, but if you do it as an hours gap, the hours gap is worse.
The economist’s perspective here
Annie: Okay, got it. In a 24-hour day, that’s a lot. Women are pinched. But here I think is the interesting thing: You’re an economist. Obviously, this is a book about things like how you juggle it and how you figure out how to have work-life balance. What does that have to do with an economist?
Corinne Low: First of all, I study this data as an economist because being an economist is about how you maximize what we call utility. Utility is your sum total of your happiness, meaning fulfillment over a lifetime.
Maximizing your utility is subject to constraints. The constraints are things like the 24 hours in a day. How people spend their time, how they allocate it between work and home, and what we call “human capital investments,” which is time with your children, which is the domain of economists as well. I think that framework, which I examine in detail in the book, is actually an empowering framework for women and for anybody who’s trying to make decisions in their life that work for them.
What I’ve noticed is that the books that are written for women focus on the idea of success as being about career success. You should be leaning in and negotiating harder and trying to get a better deal and trying to land the corner office. When you think about it from the perspective of maximizing utility, subject to constraints, that just makes no sense.
In economics, we think about labor as having disutility. Why do you do labor? You do it because you get money from it and the money lets you buy things that you value. So, when I ask people to think about their utility function, one of the ways I get them to figure out what it is for them is, I say, “Imagine a world without constraints. Imagine you’re independently wealthy. You don’t have to worry about money. What would your life look like and how would you spend your time?”
Obviously, it’s very rare for people to answer, “I would put in way more hours of labor to get that promotion.” Posing the question that way clarifies that. Oh, work is a means to an end. It’s not a source of utility in and of itself. I think that framework is really helpful because, as I said, once you realize all these things we’re trying to be don’t add up, you can take a step back and say, “Okay, but this is my utility function and now I have a world with constraints. How do I get as close to maximizing it as possible?”
Annie: Because of their importance here, can you just define, for the people who don’t know, terms like “utility,” “utility function,” and “disutility”?
Corinne Low: Absolutely. “Utility” is the economics word for happiness. The reason we need a different word is that sometimes you have to do something that doesn’t feel great in the moment, but it ultimately serves your deeper values. That’s making a choice based on utility, based on you saying, “When I take a long view over my lifetime, this serves my values, even if it doesn’t feel like happiness right at this moment.” That’s utility – this deeper, richer form of happiness over the long term.
Annie: Just to understand, so “disutility” would be losing ground from the things that you value? Then, “utility function” is how you’re allocating resources across the things that you value?
Corinne Low: Yeah. In my class I have students go through an exercise about writing down their utility function. Of course, you can’t actually write it down in a mathematical equation, but I get them to think about it and to write down things like, “Am I putting a 50% weight on material goods and a 50% weight on spending time the way I like?” Or, “For me, is it more like 80% on material goods and 20% on how I spend my time?” Or, for people who say they don’t want kids, that’s a different utility function than somebody who says, “I know that I want three kids, and I want to make sure that I have time to spend with them.” It’s exactly that. It’s your bundle of the things that matter to you.
Annie: When people think about economists, they know that they study markets and things like that. They think that it’s objective. Two-plus-two-equals-four is objective. What you’re saying about utility is that utility for one person might be different than for another because it’s mapping on to your specific values.
Corinne Low: Exactly.
Annie: What is good for one person might be different for another person. I think that’s a place where people get confused because they think, oh, you’re an economist and you’re studying this thing and it’s more in the objective science, and they think that you’re trying to impose things on them. Can you just speak to that a little bit?
Corinne Low: I’m so glad you brought that up because that’s exactly why the concept of a utility function is empowering. It’s the analogy of a firm’s profit function. The firm is maximizing profit, but everybody looking at the firm’s financials would be able to agree pretty much on what the profit was. But only you as an individual can define utility for you. Somebody cannot do it from the outside looking in. It’s about where you place value and how much.
When I do that exercise of asking about if money were no object, some people say, “I would be riding on my yacht and flying on my private plane. I’d be wearing designer clothes.” That tells me that things that they can purchase with money are actually important for that person and bringing them utility. Other people would say, “I would just be someplace quiet with a book,” or “I would have all the time I wanted to be on vacation with my kids and running around with them.” That’s a different source of utility. The reason I think this is freeing is because, once you know that this is unique to you, you realize you can’t compare yourself or your outcomes to other people. You’re maximizing other things.
Sometimes, people are surprised when my book talks about things like deriving pleasure from parenting or leisure, just taking time to do things that you enjoy. If you understand the economics, though, not as it’s characterized, but the real economic science behind it, human beings define for themselves what their utility functions are, and it comes from all these different sources.
The importance of reexamining your utility function
Annie: Can you explain the importance of checking in periodically to reexamine your utility function? It seems like it’s not set in stone. First, it can change over time. Second, we might guess wrong at what our utility function is, and we can only know that sometimes through doing.
Corinne Low: That’s exactly right. I talk in the book about making choices that plan for some of those changes. For example, when you’re in your twenties and you don’t have kids, time is not nearly as scarce as it’s going to be later if you do decide to have kids. You have to think, how am I planning and setting up for my career for a life that’s shifting beneath me? The same is the case with choosing a partner. I often say, “We often interview for the wrong position.” We’re interviewing for the position of boyfriend when, over the entire arc of our lives, it’s going to matter less whether we like the same movies and it’s going to matter more whether he likes to cook dinner. We should be looking for a co-CEO of the household.
When we’re thinking about maximizing our utility function, we cannot just be thinking in the moment. We have to think about uncertainty. One of the examples I talk about a lot in the book is the possibility of divorce. In a world where things seem good and you feel the exact same way about each other, you can make a decision like, I’m going to invest in home production and I’m going to let my partner take care of all the bills.
But that’s a pretty risky position to put yourself in because your partner is building up human capital that, in that worst case scenario, they take with them. You are investing in something that’s shared, that both people benefit from, potentially at the expense of your human capital, your future earnings.
Reproductive capital – An overlooked asset
Annie: My understanding is that’s true even if you don’t decide they’re going to pay the bills and I’m going to do all the other stuff. The fact that women get pregnant, for example, causes them to have more time away from work, which then puts them behind on the promotion track. You’re already in a risky position a little bit just because of your gender. So you have to make a choice and think about the future in terms of, do you want to pile risk on top of that?
Corinne Low: That’s exactly right. I try to, in terms of overall economic value, reframe some of that because, isn’t it amazing that women are the ones who can make children? I talk about this concept called reproductive capital, which is the financial economic value of our ability to reproduce. Two gay men are reproductively impoverished because if they’re going to reproduce, they would have to spend a lot of money to replace the reproductive capacity that comes naturally to women. We bring this reproductive capacity to the table.
Similarly, some of the stuff you talked about with how it impacts our careers, it’s been written about as “child penalties.” Your career takes this hit, but what you’re doing is choosing to make a different investment. You’re choosing to make an investment in something enormously valuable, children’s human capital, and in fact it’s more privileged women who we see be more able to make that investment. Because, if you absolutely need your paycheck to buy food, you’re not going to step away for as long and you’re not going to be able to make those investments in children.
I want to highlight that because I don’t want people to feel like this is all a negative. But it does make these decisions complex because it has these effects later in life. That’s what happened to a lot of women when the divorce revolution first came in the 1970s. There were women who had signed one type of contract: I’m doing this and you’re doing that and we’re going to stay together and it’s going to benefit each other. Then, it turned out that the other party in that contract could walk away and terminate that contract. Those women were left starting over in their forties or fifties.
What’s love got to do with it? (Plenty)
Annie: I want to ask you about something, just to hear your personal answer. You’re talking about asking, “What’s your utility function?” In particular, you’re talking about marriage in a very different way than people think about it because you have to consider long-term utility. We can think about it as happiness writ large, which then means, what’s maximizing your utility? When I talk about that, what I get all the time is, “that doesn’t apply to marriage,” or “it doesn’t apply to having kids.” I think that people naturally get it if it comes to career or investing.
But then there’s this whole category of things: love, children, all this stuff. “No, economics doesn’t apply.” They’re very vehement about it, as if you’re ruining it for them because you’re taking it out of a category that’s somehow magical or “meant to be.” “Don’t start thinking like an economist when it comes to how I relate to my kids or how I choose a husband.” This is something that I’m getting all the time as pushback. I would love to hear how you address that.
Corinne Low: Yeah, 100%. This is what I hear all the time. I tell a story in the book where I was presenting my job market paper, which was about reproductive capital, and about how people marry and sometimes there’s a tradeoff between income and reproductive capital. Somebody raised their hand and asked, “Do people really believe this? Do you really believe people go around maximizing utility functions? What about love?”
I’m still going to say it right now: Love is here. Love is the epsilon. That’s the title of a chapter in my book. Economists use the Greek letter epsilon to represent the error term in an equation. When I show you this graph that shows, on average, a person who earns this much is going to be married to a person who earns this much, that’s the line on the graph. Then, there are all these points distributed around that line, because “Wait, why did you marry this person instead?” There are factors that I, as the economist, can’t observe. That you liked them, of course, contributes to your utility. How much they earn also contributes to your utility. Whether or not they do their share of home production also contributes to your utility.
What I talk about in the book is that love is a necessary condition, but it’s not a sufficient condition, for long-term happiness. I share my own story of post-divorce thinking: “Well, I made mistakes in how I chose a partner the first time. I was young, I just met somebody I fell in love with, and I didn’t game it out. This time around, I’m going to be completely rational and look for somebody who checks all these boxes.” Then, I would go on a date with somebody who checked all the boxes, and I would be very disappointed that I did not want to make out with them. This was so annoying because I just wanted to be rational. But yet, it helped me make that decision the second time around because I met somebody who I did have feelings for and who we aligned on some of these deep things in terms of our values about raising children, how we wanted to share work in the household, and what we wanted a household and a family to look like.
Yet we were on these two different paths. I was going through IVF to have a second child, and she wanted to live in a van and travel the country. But seeing how important that long-term deep compatibility was, we were like, okay, we can solve this. Let’s figure this out. I don’t want to take away the magic.
I want people to understand that I’m not so heartless and, more important, this whole process isn’t so heartless.
Annie: I think what you’re saying is actually very romantic. It’s like, I chose to marry you. You maximize my utility, relative to all the people that I’ve dated, and taking into account all the people that I might meet in the future. You beat all those people on my utility function, which I think is super romantic.
Corinne Low: I think so too.
The long shadow of Lean In
Annie: We had talked a little bit about this before, but I want to lean into this conversation a little more.
Corinne Low: Ha.
Annie: I do feel like there’s this whole generation of women who have been on the lean-in train. That book was so popular. I’d love for you to talk a little bit about Lean In and how that message different than what the message you’re presenting?
Corinne Low: We already myth-busted the idea that everybody has the same utility function. The issue I have with the message of Lean In is that implies that, for everybody, maximizing career success is the goal in life and this is a formula for doing it. I think that can be really damaging because I hear from women who ask, “Am I a failure if I want to do this or that?” Or, if I want to have my kids now or if I want to whatever. I say, “No. You are maximizing your utility function.”
I think that Lean In presented one vision of success. It was a vision of success that said, what is important is career achievement. I just don’t think it’s fair for individual women to view themselves as representing the entire female gender, to the point where they have the burden of breaking down these barriers. My book tries to acknowledge that there are real structural barriers and constraints and, therefore, however we solve this convoluted problem is your prerogative. I want you to do it in a way that maximizes your utility, whatever the mixture is that’s right for you.
I think a lot of women have been encouraged to think of children as an inconvenience on the path to their real objective, which is supposed to be career success. I try to do a drastic reframing by saying that your objective is actually utility or happiness. If this is something that brings you fulfillment and happiness, then that is your objective, and that is the goal. A way that I frame is by saying, “Did you know you can be really productive by taking leisure time?” You’re producing economic value. You’re producing utility. It’s equally productive as working and taking that money and buying something that you value. Whether that’s just reading a book or gardening or spending time with your kids, that is productive.
Annie: I think people struggle with this idea because they map economic value onto money so tightly. What you’re saying about this is very important and deserves to be emphasized. One of the reasons why we work is that we would like to get money and that money is meant to buy other things. Sometimes, that money is meant to buy leisure time. It could be that you’re working and the money’s going to buy you a vacation, which is leisure time. It could be that you’re working and, as you move up and you get more money, or you get a more senior role that gives you more flexibility in scheduling your time to do things you couldn’t do at entry level. That’s what that’s buying you.
The whole point is the money is buying you these leisure activities. It could be buying you workout classes. It could be buying you time to go off in the middle of the day to hike or play tennis. It could buy you a vacation where you get to sit on the beach and read all day. It could buy you all of those things.
Or, you could just do those things. And if you do, that’s okay and you might be getting less money. But that doesn’t mean you’re a failure. It means you recognize that sometimes you can directly get the things that the money would be buying you and it doesn’t actually cost money.
Corinne Low: I think your readers will be familiar with this. We measure economic value not in money but in utility points. A place that you could see this from in the Thinking in Bets world is that you don’t feel the same about $50 for sure, as you do about a random amount between $0 and $100. The utility points between those things are different even though financially they’re equivalent. I’m talking about economic value. I’m talking about utility points. A job that you love pays you in direct utility points and some money, that you can then convert to utility points by buying things. Whereas a job that you hate takes away utility points in exchange for giving you money that you can use to buy utility points. Our goal is getting you as many utility points as possible. That’s why you can create economic value just by spending your time on things that you value.
Annie: It feels to me like Lean In is making this very big assumption: everybody is going to get positive utility from the work itself. Of course, you should lean in because you’re going to get a lot of money and you’re going to get a lot of utility from the work itself. That doesn’t take into account that all that time spent might be time you’re taking away from other things that could be making you very happy, especially if you’re not somebody who gets positive utility from the work itself. I think that feels like it gets to the heart of the mistake.
Corinne Low: If I may, I want to bust one more myth, which I think is part of the message of Lean In and so many books like that, which is that women need to act more like men to get ahead. From carefully studying the research on this, I think that is counter to the evidence into important ways. The first is that while there is evidence that women on average display some different traits, there’s no evidence that male traits are more productive. Secondly, in fact, there’s evidence against the idea that if women copy male traits, they’re going to be rewarded for that. People actually react badly to women doing something like being a more aggressive negotiator.
I want to break this down. There’s no evidence that male traits are more productive. I’m going to talk about one study by Muriel Niederle and Lise Vesterlund and one of my studies.
Niederle-Vesterlund is a famous study about the idea that men are more competitive than women. They confirmed that, but the important thing they found was that different didn’t necessarily mean better. The authors paid groups of two women and two men to add sets of two-digit numbers for five minutes. The first time, they were paid at a fixed rate. The second time, they were paid at a tournament rate, where they got a bigger payout if they were best in their group, but no payment otherwise. They learned their absolute performance each time but received no feedback on relative performance. They then chose which of the two forms of compensation they wanted for doing the next task.
Despite there being no gender difference in performance under either compensation scheme, twice as many men as women, 73% versus 35%, chose the tournament rate for the next task. Women shied away from tournament compensation even when they were at the top of the distribution and it would be economically beneficial.
But the title of the paper is, “Do Women Shy Away from Competition? Do Men Compete Too Much?” People tend to forget the second part of the title. Among the men in the lowest performing group, 60% still wanted to get into the competition, even though they didn’t have the goods to back it up.
The other example, which I studied, is about negotiation. I have heard over and over again that men are better negotiators than women. It turns out there was no empirical evidence on this. I ran my own experiment, where pairs of people were negotiating over a $20 bill. The catch was that the split could be $15 for one person and $5 for the other, or vice versa. But if the two people couldn’t agree, they both got zero. When men negotiated against women, they were equally likely to get the $15. But overall, men performed worse. The reason was that male-male pairs were more than twice as likely to mismatch, failing to reach an agreement and walking away with zero. Yet, I never hear the advice that maybe we need to take from some of these female styles. That’s the other place I want to gently critique that whole genre of business books and ask if we can replace it with something else.
Can the next generation get an earlier start figuring out their utility function?
Annie: There’s one last thing that I want to talk to you about, which is about the importance of thinking about this stuff early. I’m just thinking about my own life, and I was trying to manage everything. For most of my adult life, I thought if I was offered work, I had to take it, or I was going to get in trouble. Also, it would be money, and I shouldn’t be saying no to earning that. I should be trying to be as successful as possible. I was also carving out a lot of time to spend with my kids. I managed to do both things, but frankly, I was freaking exhausted.
Corinne Low: At the expense of yourself?
Annie: Oh, for sure. Completely. It was horrible. But I made the assumption, and I think this is a very common assumption, that if this is what I was doing, then this must be what I want to be doing. I didn’t come to realize all these things you discussed in the book that I should have been thinking about until just a few years ago.
Corinne Low: And what led to you discovering this?
Annie: I was getting on a plane to go to Ohio to give a talk. I had been traveling a lot, and I called my business manager and burst into tears. I was like, it was too much. That finally got me to start thinking about, “What’s really making me happy? What do I want to spend my time on?” I had a whole bunch of talks scheduled for the next few months, and then the pandemic happened. My business manager called me and asked, “Do you want me to cancel the talks?” I said, “No, don’t cancel. They’re going to cancel. But offer for me to do them as virtual.”
They all cancelled, but then I went to virtual for talks I accepted during the pandemic, and I was so much happier. It took me crying on the way to Ohio – along with the changes I had to make for work during the pandemic – to feel this incredible, overwhelming sense of relief that I didn’t have to do that anymore. No, I don’t want to be working all the time.
I want to say just to close it out is I wish I had read this book when I was young because I think that I took on a lot of other people’s values about what success meant and what you had to do. I hope people who are older read it so that they can rethink. And I hope people who are starting out read it so that they can break out of what they think they’re being told. We all have to remember that, when people are telling you stuff, they’re usually imposing their own utility function on you.
Corinne Low: Or defending choices that they’ve made.
Annie: Yes!
I think about what you’re saying, which is, figure out what’s going to make you happy and what’s going to make it so that you’re there for your kids and for yourself and your partner and whoever else is important in your life and ignore everybody else trying to impose their own values on you.
Corinne Low: I think that’s the radical thesis statement here, because as you said, it’s so hard to tell, am I doing it right? Am I making the right choices? Am I optimizing? The book says, you know that you’re doing it right if you’re happy, not every moment of the day and not every day, because there are always going to be hard things. But in general, if you look at your life and you say, this makes me happy, this doesn’t make me feel constantly anxious and stressed and overwhelmed and bursting into tears. You need to listen to that inner feedback instead of listening to all of those external messages that we’re so inundated with. We respond to those messages because we think oh, this is what I should be doing, or I need to do this, or my kids need this, or whatever. Your kids need to know that you love them, and you also need to be someone that you love and take care of in that way. We take care of everything and everybody else in our lives and often our own needs don’t get met.
Annie: Thank you. This was a great conversation. I would love it if someone graduating from college were thinking this way. It would be so much better if we could get this message out. I actually don’t think it’s just for women because men should be thinking exactly the same way. Men should also be thinking about what makes them happy, because they’re trapped in a lot of messaging about what it means to be successful as a man as well. I wish you luck with the book. I’m sure it’s going to be a huge hit.
Corinne Low: Thank you so much, Annie. It was really nice to talk about all this with you.