Can you spreadsheet your way to equal parenting? With Corinne Low

The Economics Show

Host Soumaya Keynes interviews economist Corinne Lowe about the economic implications of how parents divide childcare and housework. They di

Key takeaways

• Dads are performing more childcare than previous generations, but the gender gap remains because mothers' time spent with children has also significantly increased.
• Household labor functions like an iceberg, where visible tasks like daycare drop-offs hide 'invisible labor' such as managing doctor appointments.

Main topics

• Parenting spreadsheets
• The gender gap in childcare

Notable quotes

I don't sweep the floor with my uterus.

Conclusion

The episode suggests that through intentionality and structural change

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) Last month, I wrote about my parenting spreadsheet. Roughly once a week, I note which mornings, afternoons and evenings I spent looking after my two wonderful toddlers. My husband does the same. The data feeds into a chart showing which of us has done more. Readers responded with this. Speaker 5 (0:21) Every single second I have spent with my children has been a pleasure and a privilege. My wife and I don't use a spreadsheet to record those precious moments. We see them every day in each other's eyes. Speaker 2 (0:37) The maternal role is the most wonderful and rewarding contribution that a woman can make to a family. It stems from the heart. In the early years, the children connect to the parents via the mother. No spreadsheet can control or express this. Speaker 1 (0:51) Crazy obsessiveness with 50-50 and everything and anything is like a form of communism, totally unachievable due to major inherent differences between men and women. Speaker 2 (1:03) Wonderfully amusing to see that economists can't give up on numbers, even in private life. The question I'd ask the author is, what ranking does spontaneity have in her married life? And how is it measured? Speaker 5 (1:17) Is looking after children a chore? Why does it need to be tracked in a spreadsheet? If you need Excel rows in your marriage to tell that someone should do more, you should not have married in the first place. Speaker 4 (1:31) I get it. The parenting spreadsheet is highly unusual. But the point is to get me and my husband closer to our shared objective, to split childcare as equally as we can. And yes, it was my idea. I'm an economist. I like data. So much that in today's episode, I'm asking another economist what the data tells us about the job of raising children. Speaker 4 (2:00) This is The Economics Show with Zemea Keynes. I'm joined this week by Corinne Lowe. Corinne is an Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where she focuses on the economics of gender and discrimination. Corinne has looked extensively at the economic choices parents make and what they get wrong. She is the author of a book, which is called Feminomics in the UK and Having It All in the US. Corinne, hello. Hi, great to be here. Okay, so on this show, we always start with a question where the answer is on a scale of one to 10. Speaker 3 (2:39) So Speaker 4 (2:40) on that scale, how insane do you think my parenting spreadsheet is? One? I love a spreadsheet. Okay, so you think it's a good idea, but have you got your own spreadsheet? Well, on my website, Speaker 3 (2:54) I have a spreadsheet that everybody can download for tracking your time with your partner, because I'm like, how can you try to divide things the way you want to divide things without data? And I know because I've been studying the American Time Use Survey, that whenever I present the data about how unequal the division of household labor still is between men and women, that everybody is shocked by it. And every man is convinced that they're the exception. And they're like, yes, but that's not true for me because I do so much, right? So, okay, well, let's look at the data then, right? And I think one of the problems is household labor is kind of like an iceberg. There's the big obvious tasks that are like the tip of the iceberg. That's dropping the kid off at... daycare, right, or doing bedtime. But then there's all of this invisible labor beneath the surface, which is making the doctor's appointments. Speaker 4 (3:45) And Speaker 3 (3:45) it's being the one who gets called in to cuddle in those last 45 minutes where you think it's after bedtime and you hope that you could open your laptop and then you get called back into the room, right? And so if we can't see that iceberg, we can't divide it. And your spreadsheet made that visible. Speaker 4 (4:00) Okay, well, I should probably clarify that the spreadsheet doesn't record all of that stuff, right? The spreadsheet is, were you present physically for a bedtime? And were you parenting for the whole morning? But that kind of invisible labor. So you're advocating measuring that as well, all the time? Not all the time. I'm Speaker 3 (4:19) advocating in your household as an experiment, track your time. Because as you said, this is about you and your husband. reaching your shared objective, your shared value. And so if you have a conversation that says, we want to equally share parenting duties, right? And if your husband says, yes, that's how I see myself as a dad. I see myself as an equal partner. Speaker 4 (4:41) Okay, well, let's get curious about how is the reality Speaker 3 (4:44) aligning with that shared objective? And so invisible work, you can also surface. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm even more insane than you. Speaker 4 (4:54) I love it. Well, let's move on beyond my personal situation and talk about the broader data, right? And so what we see in the aggregate data about time use and trends there. So most people know, I think, that women tend to do more childcare than men on average. But you've looked at the data in more detail. What do you think is really surprising to people looking at the overall distribution of work? Well, let's start with childcare, Speaker 3 (5:21) because I think that one of the... things that's going on there is that dads are doing a ton more childcare compared to their own fathers. And so I think a lot of dads feel like they're killing it because they're like, I read my kid a bedtime story. My dad never did that. Okay. And they're missing a broader trend, which is that parenting time has just massively exploded since the 1990s. So even though dads are doing so much more. than their own dad's dead, the gender gap has not narrowed in the household because women are doing so much more too. Moms are doing so much more too. Working moms today spend more time with their kids than stay-at-home moms did a generation ago, right? Yeah, Speaker 4 (6:07) I mean, I was looking at the data on this too, and I was really struck. If women had not... increase the amount of childcare time that they have done over the past few decades. And basically the men would have caught up by now, right? But because the women have been doing so much more, that inequality has persisted. It has grown smaller, right? The gap is decreasing very, very slowly, but it's still pretty big. I would say the ratio has gotten Speaker 3 (6:32) better. But, you know, if you measure the gap in absolute hours, we're both doing so much more. The gap in hours isn't smaller. And the hours are what impact, like how much you sleep. It's how many hours are you putting in, right? But the ratio has gotten better. Yeah. And I think that's exactly right that it's so interesting because I think that's the perspective of a lot of dads is they're kind of thinking, where am I relative to, you know? historical dads and you don't notice that like the ground has shifted beneath everybody to such an extent. It's literally doubled, right? The time that we spend with our kids and you see it in every category and in categories that we didn't even used to do. So like doing homework with our kids was not a category that parents spent time on if you go back 30 years. Speaker 4 (7:14) Are there any trends in sort of when that intensification has happened? So is it parents are now spending more time with slightly older