365: Challenging the Career Fantasy of Having It All with Corinne Low

Julie Kratz (0:00)

I am so excited to have one of my favorite authors, Dr. Corinne Low, is with us. Corinne is an Assistant Professor of Business, Economics, and Public Policy at the Wharton School at University of Pennsylvania, where she teaches an award-winning course on economics of discrimination. Her research has been published in journals like American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy. She regularly speaks and advises and publishes for HBR, and other amazing publications. And she's got this new book that's coming out now in paperback, Having It All.

And it's about what data tells us about women's lives and getting the most out of yours. Welcome, Corinne.

Corinne Low (0:43)

Thanks, Julie. It's great to be here.

Julie Kratz (0:46)

Oh my gosh. Okay. So I read a lot of these books.

And your book literally like stopped me in my tracks. Several, I have like all these notes. And you can see sticky notes here and tabbed pages and just really love the super special blend of storytelling and research. So everything you say is backed up in the book.

And it all kind of, what I think is also really interesting is like all comes from your lived experience as well, Corinne. So I think we, let's start there. Let's start with your origin story for all of this. And you call it the squeeze story. Is that right?

Corinne Low (1:27)

Yeah. Well, thank you so much. And yes, I joke that the research question that started the book was, why am I so tired all the time? Because I was finding like hitting that midlife in my thirties that I just felt like things were stalled out career wise. I was struggling to keep up with my male colleagues at work. Well, we all were starting to have children, right? But it was like a fundamentally different experience for me as a child bearer.

And then I was finding that in my marriage, what I thought was kind of like a marriage of equals was becoming so much more gendered than either of us wanted. And I was just exhausted every minute of every day. And I remember thinking like, oh, I guess maybe this is it. Like maybe the fun part of my life is over and this is just what it's like to be a working mom.

And when I started digging into the data, what I found was that I was far from alone that there are structural forces that are making it harder than ever to have it all. And even when we look back to the past, and normally you think like progress is linear and things should be getting better. But when we look back to the past, we look back to the women from our mother's generations, it just seems like they were able to balance it more. Right. And that is actually true because parenting is much more intensive now than it was in our own childhoods. So we spent twice as much time with our kids than parents a generation ago, than our own parents spent with us. And it's so extreme that working moms today spend more time with their kids than stay-at-home moms did in previous generations.

Julie Kratz (3:11)

Oh my gosh, that is so wild. And so there is these societal systemic forces and several things I think we can probably relate to as a working mom myself, like the sports intensity, the necessity, all the communications from the schools, the texts, the emails, the phone calls, and just this expectation that you're really involved in every aspect of your parents' lives. And a lot of my generation is more helicopter parents. I don't know if I identify that way, but I know in reading the book, I was like, why am I so tired all the time? This is actually a thing. This isn't just happening to me, which I feel like is very validating for women in this position. If I thought I could have it all. I know for me, I was raised by a single mom, and that was something she showed me often. My generation solved this problem. The feminists took care of it too late. You're good.

You can have everything you want. And then to my dismay, the early 2000s entering the workforce, I was like, why would she lie to me about this?

Corinne Low (4:16)

Yeah, but things looked different for that generation. Like, you know, every parent listening, you know, knows the extended bedtime routine. You're reading a million books, you're processing highs and lows, right? And so like, I joke, my bedtime routine was go to bed. My mom was a single mom. She sent us upstairs, and then she did whatever she wanted to do. She wanted to catch up on work, if she even wanted to go out on a date, and like, we would like stay home. And she was like, oh, thank you. As long as the oldest kid is 12, you're old enough that you can stay home alone, right? And after school, we were out riding our bikes. Well, she was someplace else, having time to herself. So it absolutely has changed. And then the piece that feminists did not solve, right? And, you know, rest in peace, Gloria Steinem, read so much progress, but she recognized towards the end of her life that this was the remaining domain, is that we had a gender revolution for women, and we did not have a gender revolution for men. So it's true, we broke down those barriers in the workforce, and we are showing up as equals in the workforce, but men are not showing up as equals at home. And so that means we're essentially coming to the table with half a deck of cards, because every man who we're kind of competing against for jobs and promotions, he has the level of support at home that we are providing at home and not getting ourselves.