Women Talking: There's a Cost to Supporting Someone Else’s Career

a conversation with economist Corinne Low, author of Having It All

“What would it look like if we stopped assuming the problems in women’s lives are caused by women’s choices and started looking instead at the structural, economic, and biological factors that are forcing and constraining these choices in the first place?”

Dr. Corinne Low, Having It All

Dr. Corinne Low is a Wharton professor and economist who writes the Substack Femonomics. She is also the author of the recently released book Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours. I had the chance to get an early copy, and let’s just say, I devoured it. This is a lengthy interview, and I want to get straight into the juicy stuff. The book covers all the things we talk about on The Mother Lode:

• how marriage and motherhood can impinge on women’s happiness and success,

• the power of divorce to reset the terms,

• strategies for prioritizing your time and outsourcing where necessary,

• whether we can get anything close to equal partnership without marrying a woman (which Dr. Low has now done).

None of these topics are theoretical to Dr. Low. She’s an economist, so she is all about the data. I found so much fascinating content in this book that I may do a follow up post with her just about how to choose a partner who will be a good home co-CEO. (You can see a snippet of this content on this Instagram reel).

Cindy DiTiberio: In the book, you write: “I want to look at the small print of every contract we enter into and consider why [women] so often make choices that feel right in the moment but don’t serve our longer-term goals.” This quote makes me think of what happens every time a woman downshifts her career in service to the needs of her family. It isn’t that this is never the right choice, but that we should make these choices considering all of the factors, including the long-term impact versus the shorter-term pain point. I stalled out looking for a nanny in the early days of motherhood because I just couldn’t tolerate my discomfort in thinking about a stranger watching my children, or the discomfort of my children, who were used to me being their caretaker. So, I just kept on with the status quo, thinking it wouldn’t be forever. But the toll it took being the primary caregiver and fitting my full-time work into part time hours was significant. Years suppressing who you are and what you really need has consequences. What advice would you give to women who feel stuck: unable to foresee how they will find someone to care for their children, and listening to all the patriarchal messaging that we should be the ones to provide that care?

Corinne Low: I 100% hear all of that, and I know how hard it is. The first thing I want to do is normalize that it isn’t just the societal pressure, it’s the internal biological pressure of millions of years of evolution saying: take care of this baby. Make it survive. Our genes did not evolve in an environment with careers. So our genes are naturally not going to be acquainted with the tradeoff between more time with baby now, and less career advancement which might mean less time with the kiddo later, and less money to pay for travel soccer. And in a better society, maybe that tradeoff wouldn’t be there. Maybe we’d have normalized leave-taking with babies and seamless return to office without sacrificing career advancement. So, it’s not you, it’s biology, it’s society, and it’s the system. But within those constraints, I don’t want you to entrap yourself more by neglecting the needs of your future self.

Your career is what I call your money machine—it’s something you can put time into and get money out of. And, when you invest in it, you upgrade it, so that eventually, you can put less time in, and get more money and fulfillment out. If you unplug it for a while, it might not work as well when you need it again. Especially if it stays unplugged for longer and you don’t maintain it. So

1. if you do want to spend some time working at a slower pace or outside the labor force, how can you invest in basic maintenance for your money machine, by keeping your skills and contacts up to date? And be sure this is something the entire family (i.e., your spouse) is investing in, while you’re investing in them.

2. In considering going back to work, can you view it as an investment in being able to give your kids more later, through not just money, but also the flexibility you might gain by making career investments, and the fulfillment you’ll gain that might funnel into you being a better parent? And now, leaving money aside, you also talked about neglecting your own needs and wants, which is something moms tend to do a lot in service of our families. But the thing is, ultimately, we do a disservice to our kids by doing this, which I’m going to address in your next question!

One of my favorite concepts from the book is this: “I’m writing because I want to help other women be as relentless in finding good deals for themselves as we are in trying to make everything work for everyone else all the time.” As you note, the men in our lives are often prioritizing their own needs, both career and personal. They have been conditioned to do so, while women have been conditioned to make sure their needs and priorities do not affect others negatively. We keep taking one for the team. But those individual decisions, made day by day, month by month, year by year, add up until one day, we can find ourselves, like I did during the pandemic, an inadvertent stay at home mom. How can women catch themselves in the act of sacrificing themselves? Is there a question you would have them ask themselves before they adjust their work schedule, offer to cover the sick day, volunteer for one more thing that benefits their family or school but not themselves?

Well, the book tells my own story of frog-in-boiling-water, which was me becoming a sole breadwinner and primary caregiver who also had an out-of-state commute. And every single decision we made, I had said yes to. But, in total, the situation was completely insane. So I do think there’s an element of needing to be really proactive in doing that life “metanalysis” that we sometimes only do after reaching the crisis / boiling point, of is this working for me? It might work for everyone else, but does it work for me? If something doesn’t work for you, it’s not working for the family, because you are a member of the family (something I lost sight of).

I think here too, in our tendency to say yes, we need to remember evolutionary instincts, and how caring and love are survival strategies for women, which means our brains are wired to want approval and thanks from others, but ultimately, that’s not the same thing as happiness. We need to connect the dots between the yes we say in the moment to the exhaustion and burnout we feel later on when we’ve taken on too much, and therefore turn down the “quick hit” of dopamine from saying yes, the same way we know staying up too late will make us tired later. Strategic meta-analysis of our lives.

I became a much better parent when I made big changes in my life (in my case, divorce) to put my own needs first, because I was so much happier and more present. So take care of yourself for them if that’s what it takes to get you there. And I’ll add one more layer: do it for gender equality. Because as I say in this post: “if we let ourselves become an empty shell in service of our children’s needs, we’re modeling for our sons that that’s what they can expect from their wives, and we’re modeling for our daughters that that’s what love looks like.”

You talk a lot about the original economic model of marriage where one person went out to make money and the other managed the home aka home production. And how if the breadwinner also had to manage the home production in some form or had to “share that work, he might be able to have a job but not a career. High paying jobs required …working nights and weekends …which just wouldn’t be possible without someone else investing in making everything work like clockwork at home.” This is why 70% of top male earners have a stay-at-home spouse at home. If a woman is investing more in the home, this is an investment in her husband’s career. Which is why, upon divorce, there are stipulations like alimony and why assets are split 50/50 (at least in nine states).¹

Now that more women continue to work, and yet also shoulder the lion’s share of home production, do you still consider all that extra work they are doing as investments in the man’s career? How would you suggest women broach this topic with the men in their lives, women who desire more support in home production so both partners can feel fully supported in their careers and not like one is always the one making the sacrifices?

YES! Women shouldering the lion’s share of home production while having two careers means that he’s going to invest more in his career at the margin, and it’s going to advance faster, and that’s then going to reverse-justify you doing more at home! I see it in the data! Women doing more at home is directly tied to them working fewer hours and men working more hours, even when the man actually earns less. So one thing is partner selection: you have to find someone who thinks the work of living is a priority and wants to do that with you. Period. If he’s grudgingly agreeing because you’re nagging him, it will end up going back to unequal sooner or later. He actually has to value it, have his own preferences, and want to make his own investments. It’s a million times better to have to negotiate the color of the couch than for one of you to think you need a couch, with pillows on it and for the other to think the college futon is still fine. Second, he has to understand that supporting your career is not theoretical. It is not philosophical. It is not spiritual. It is physical in terms of how he spends his time. The question is not “do you think my career is an equal priority?” it’s, if we have a sick kid and we both have an important meeting, how do we decide who cancels? Because there is an actual cost to supporting someone else’s career, and it’s one women have been expected to pay for ages.

Now if you’re already in the relationship, and you’ve done that supporting for a while, I think this is exactly the conversation you have. You say, we’re part of a team together, and the investments we’ve made at home have been…er…defense while you go out and be the star scorer? Assists? And now it’s time for me to get some points on the board (you’ll workshop the metaphor, lol!). I also think there’s some hidden gender burdens at work here, where men feel like the way to show up for their family is by being a provider, so we also can help cultivate the self-image that showing up at home to enable your wife’s career is also a way of providing.

You write: “89 percent of the world’s population lives in a place with falling marriage rates. When I see these falling birth and marriage rates, I see women pushing back on a system that isn’t working for them.”

Obviously this book is an attempt to help women reevaluate their lives and potentially reset the terms. Not just on a small scale but also on a large scale, aka take a look at whether your job is the right profession for you, whether you are living in the right place, whether you are married to the right person. What would be a good first step for women who identify that things aren’t working for them, but they aren’t quite sure where to start?

Start with what’s within your span of control at the moment. You can change partners, but you cannot change your partner, without them wanting to change. So if you’re not ready to change partners or jobs or cities yet, what you can do is realign your time with the things that give you the most value. So you can figure out the things in your home that you value having done the most and focus there, and figure out how to streamline the rest, or return some of that load to your partner or kids while you exercise or work! You can figure out how to cut down on “office volunteering” or how to invest in upskilling yourself so you’re ready for a new position rather than going the extra mile if your job isn’t loving you back. If you’re ready to do some of this, the free companion workbook on my site takes you through the exercises in the book. And if you’re only ready to do one thing, I’d choose what use of your time is most restorative or meaningful for you, and schedule that on your calendar three days a week, and let everything else claim the scraps, rather than always leaving the scraps for what you value most.

You have a great section in the book on the value of time, where you write: “Not hiring someone to do something that can be bought on the market is a choice to hire yourself for the job.” It makes me think of the Eve Rodsky quote: “Society views women’s time as infinite, like sand, and it views men’s time as finite, like diamonds.” You illuminate this point by saying: “Hiring a landscaper to cut the grass, or a handyman to clean the gutters, or painters to touch up the house is considered a norm, because we assume that men’s time can be valuably spent earning money on the market instead of insourcing home production. But when it comes to female-coded tasks like cooking, cleaning, and childcare, we suddenly feel like the budget required to hire someone is an unaffordable luxury rather than a basic requirement.” I loved this chapter (called Converting Time into Joy and Meaning) because I sometimes think the calculus involved in determining whether it makes sense to hire someone or not is complex. But you really try to break it down. Talk us through one area where you have seen immense improvement in women’s lives when they outsourced a task and the long-term ramifications of freeing up that space and time in their lives.

A big one is outsourcing organizing because it is something that almost always falls on women—setting up systems to organize things and keep the clutter cleared away and then doing it over and over again. And, if men aren’t willing to participate in this core work of living, then they can at least contribute financially to hiring a professional instead of assuming it’s another thing their wives should be masters of along with everything else. Paying for a home organizer doesn’t just give you back time, it flips a switch in your brain like, oh, there’s no reason why I should be good at doing this, and I don’t have to feel guilty that I’m not, because men absolutely never do, and it turns out it’s just really hard to have a full time job and an organized home!

This doesn’t have to be your area, but I would pick an area where you’re doing something that’s hard for you and feels frustrating, where men routinely don’t help, and there’s also no reason that you should be able to do it!

I recently wrote a post called The New Metrics of Success because so often what we have been conditioned to consider success is shaped by the patriarchal, capitalist society in which we live. In many ways, this book is about reframing what is important. You write: “Money on its own is meaningless. We care about money because money can be exchanged for utility.” I loved this sentence and I also can’t imagine a man writing it. Because as we see in our world today as men amass piles of money as some sort of dick measuring contest, for men, it is about money. It is about how much they make, how much is in the bank, how much that money is growing, whether they can retire. I think of what a matriarchal society might look like where we prioritize care, community, shared resources, enrichment, art, music, love, being witches in the woods. In fact, to shuck money as a value in itself is quite frankly revolutionary. But of course in our increasingly expensive times, money is a necessity. When do we transition from pursuing money because it allows us to live to pursuing money because our society tells us to? How can we catch ourselves when we are doing that and start to rethink our utility and what we truly value?

It is a constant conversation with myself. Like, I published my book. There are infinite things you can do to promote your book. But, I also had a baby in May. So I really value being home. And so every time an opportunity comes up, I literally have to map out, what do I think this opportunity will bring me that will actually make my life better, rather than it just serving my ego? The way I tell people to figure out their utility function is ironically by considering what your life would look like if money were no object. And, although I would like to be able to travel without searching for the cheapest flight, and order without looking at prices on the menu, the real thing I’d do if I were a gazillionaire is spend more time with my family and take care of myself so I could be around with them for longer. So then within the reality that I need to work, my goal is to still get to do that as much as possible. Because if I give all that up to get the money, then what’s the point?

So when we reach decision points, I do think we should literally be asking, how do I think this will increase my utility, compared to the time I have to give up to do it?

I have a series on The Mother Lode called The Math of Motherhood. One of those posts is The Math of Motherhood: Pregnancy Edition. You highlighted this math when you stated that gay male couples are less likely to have children because it is much more “difficult for a couple without an ‘in house’ uterus to create life… to replace a (cis) woman requires $20-50,000 or so for egg donation, and $70,000-250,000 for surrogacy, which is illegal in many countries and many states.” I sometimes think it is so important to put stark values on these services that women provide men for free. It is not for free! There is a cost to it!

I have been thinking about doing a post on The Math of Motherhood: Marriage Edition about how even just getting married can decrease women’s earnings as well as their happiness and wellbeing. You cite a study about the earnings of elite MBA graduates from the time they graduated to thirteen years after they earned their degrees. Men and women started with a slight wage gap but when you go to thirteen years later you write: “the women’s ninetieth percentile in earnings is identical to the men’s mean….The ninetieth percentile of women - the most intense, career oriented, leaning in, full-of-grit, spectacular women - are earning the same as the average man thirteen years after an MBA.” This isn’t just due to marriage. It is also kids. Discrimination. And sexual harassment. But also, what? This is an infuriating study. And yet it isn’t just those high-achieving women who find themselves suppressing their careers and earning capacity. You write: “So many women met their spouses in school, studying for the same career, and yet somehow when you check back in on them ten to twenty years later, only he has the thriving career they both prepared for, and she’s working for a nonprofit or reentering the workforce after a pause.”

I recognized this at my twenty-year high school reunion. Some of the women who were top of their class, aka honors classes, AP classes, weren’t working. It just didn’t make sense. Your book is an attempt to help women reframe their decisions so they stop making “bad deals” for themselves. But I also think back to a sentence in the book that stopped me in my tracks. You were talking about how difficult the transition to motherhood can be for women. Then you write: “Meanwhile our husbands continued to be the centers of their own universes.” So my question is: how can we get women to consider themselves the center of their own universes? Or is that the wrong question? Should the question be, how can we make parenthood just as disruptive to men as it is to women? How can we help men understand that they should be making sacrifices as well, or at least they should if they want to stay married?

Thank you, for reading and absorbing all of this, and for highlighting that, because it was one of the most meaningful sentences I wrote. It was just so overwhelming to witness the stark contrast of the gravity shift of motherhood compared to the continued linear path of the husbands and male colleagues. And I think you said it, that for men there’s a real benefit to learning to show up as more complete partners, because it means they get to stay married, or get married in the first place, and this is something they say they want! So for men, I would say whatever you have to give up to be an equal partner, you’ll give up more in divorce, or by not being able to have children in the first place, because as the math of motherhood shows, men are replaceable in reproduction, but women are not! To women, my advice is to understand that no matter how much you try to avoid it, motherhood will by evolutionary and societal design reposition your center of gravity, and so if you want a smaller chasm between you and your partner after that point, find someone who starts out being really into kids, parenting, and keeping a household. You want the guy who’s so excited about being a dad he’s already read the parenting books, because then you’ll be catching up to his speed when you’re transformed by motherhood, rather than him lagging way behind.

One of the most interesting sections of the book to me was your refuting the idea that women need flexible work arrangements. You point to all the women who work in fields like nursing where their jobs are not flexible at all. But you say: “nursing works for women because it is predictable and time-bound. Once you clock out from your shift, you know you can be 100% there for your family.” You say women don’t need flexible work, they need boundaries. I love this. How can women learn to set boundaries with their workplace? Do you think this needs to come from the top down or can women begin to advocate for a change now?

I think this is change that really can happen at every level. YES firms can experiment with taking a page from the healthcare industry and setting rigid “in office” shifts rather than “until we’re done” working hours along with rotating call schedules for after hours emergencies, but individuals and teams can push towards these changes also. Managers can create “core hours” for their teams where meetings are scheduled between 10am and 4pm. Individuals can block out time on their calendars, and make explicit that they will get the work done, but potentially on an alternate schedule. I mean literally saying, the same way I once said at McKinsey that I eat 3 meals a day and sleep 8 hours a night, I am offline between 5pm and 8pm, but I can log back in from 8pm-10pm. Often, we can say no without getting fired. We’ve just been conditioned not to. Doing this requires reframing the idea of “leaning in” to our jobs. As I discuss in the book, I think we should lean in when there’s a “level up” available—a chance to upgrade our money machine. Otherwise, we might be mistakenly seeking love and fulfillment from our jobs, instead of what they can actually give us—money, in exchange for ideally as little time as possible.

Thank you Corinne Low for this book and taking the time to thoughtfully engage with my questions. You can follow Corinne on Instagram here, subscribe to her Substack here, and order a copy of Having It All here.

What part of this conversation hit home for you? Let us know in the comments.

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