365: Challenging the Career Fantasy of Having It All with Corinne Low
Allyship in Action
In this episode, Dr. Corinne Low discusses her book Having It All, unpacking why high-achieving working parents feel chronically exhausted despite societal progress. She reveals that while women have achieved a gender revolution in the
Key takeaways
- Working mothers today spend more time with their children than stay-at-home mothers did a generation ago due to intensive parenting standards.
- Dr. Corinne Low notes that while women broke workplace barriers, men have not achieved an equivalent domestic revolution, creating a structural imbalance.
Main topics
- Working parent exhaustion and intensive parenting
- Workplace flexibility versus structure and predictability
Notable quotes
"we had a gender revolution for women and we did not have a gender revolution for men."
Conclusion
The episode provides actionable frameworks for both individuals and organi
Transcript preview
Speaker 1 (0:00) I am so excited to have one of my favorite authors, Dr. Corinne Lowe 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 Speaker 2 (0:20) Review, Speaker 1 (0:21) 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. Thanks, Julie. It's great to be here. 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, sticky notes here and tabs 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. But I think it's also really interesting. It's 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? Speaker 2 (1:26) 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 30s 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 I thought. 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, when 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 spend 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. Speaker 1 (3:10) Oh my gosh, that is so wild. And so there's these societal systemic forces and, you know, several things I think we can probably relate to as a working mom myself, like the sports intensity, the necessity, like 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 kind of, 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 of, I thought I could have it all. I know for me. I was raised by a single mom and that was something she told 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 was like. Why would she lie to me about this? Yeah, Speaker 2 (4:17) but things look 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, you know, 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. 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 made 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. 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. Speaker 1 (5:28) Mm-hmm. Oh, and I love that you have Eve Rodsky of Fair Play endorse the book. I love Eve. I love her work. She's been a great supporter of the years. That is absolutely out of her playbook and her documentary. Like there's so much data to support what you just said is we left men out. And that was an aha moment for me, 2016, 2017. I wrote a book about men as allies. And then we had the Me Too movement. We had all sorts that happened. I had no line of sight to at the time. But yeah, it's just, we spent so much time empowering women, but we didn't spend time thinking about what that looks like for masculinity and what that looks like for male identities. We're still struggling with the aftermath of that. So the workplace was built by men for men that stay at home partners, usually Mad Men era, 50s and 60s. So as a workplace researcher, you know, I guess one, what are the unique? gendered issues in the workplace today. And then let's kind of unpack like what we can do about it. Speaker 2 (6:32) Yeah, well, I think what's interesting about the workplace is that old model is actually like out of date for everybody because. the vast majority of American families are now dual earner families, right? Dual earner households. And so this fantasy of like, oh, the work can take everything because there's a male worker with a stay-at-home wife is not the reality for most American workers, right? And then you have also the rise of Gen Z that has these stronger work-life boundaries and is, you know, like pushing back harder on like work bleeding into all aspects of life. And so I think my message to employers would be not that you need