← HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
HerMoney with Jean Chatzky
EP 494: Why Women Are Still Doing Too Much — And How To Push Back
00:38:24
Why Women Are Still Doing Too Much — And How To Push Back
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A
Race the rudders. Raise the sails. Raise the sails. Captain, an unidentified ship is approaching. Over.
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Roger, wait.
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Is that an enterprise sales solution? Reach sales professionals, not professional sailors. With LinkedIn ads, you can target the right people by industry, job title and more. Start converting your B2B audience today. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a free $250 credit for the next one. Get started today@LinkedIn.com campaign terms and conditions apply. The Jack Welch Management Institute at Strayer University helps you go from I know the way to I've arrived with our top 10 ranked online MBA. Gain skills you can learn today and apply tomorrow. Get ready to go from make it happen to made it happen and keep striving. Visit strayer.edu Jack Welchmba to learn more. Strayer University is certified to operate in Virginia by Chev and has many campuses, including at 2121 15th Street north in Arlington, Virginia. When you think like an economist, then you think, no. My goal in life is to maximize my utility. Again, deep joy, meaning, value over the course of my life. And my job is just a tool for me to do that. It's not the source of that. It's not an end in itself. My job is a tool that turns my time into money.
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Hey everyone. Thanks so much for joining us today on HerMoney. I'm Jean Chatsky. So I want you to raise your hand not if you're driving, but if you're anywhere else. I want you to raise your hand if you feel like you're running on empty, if you're trying to juggle work and home and relationships, and if you feel like you're almost always coming up short because we have all been there, unfortunately, the pressure to have it all, yeah, it is still alive and well in 2025. But and I want to be really clear on this, it is impossible to find perfection with all of the above. It is impossible to find perfection with one of the above. I am so excited so to have Dr. Carinlo on the show today. She is an economist, a Wharton professor, and the author of a new book called Having it what Data Tells Us about Women's Lives and Getting the Most out of yours. And let me just say, this is not going to be your typical work life balance conversation. Corrine brings research, lived experience and economic insight to help us unpack exactly why women still carry these invisible burdens of success and what we can do to push back and truly thrive. We're going to take a quick break. I've had term life insurance since my kids were little. It was one of those decisions I made early on. Not because I wanted to think about those worst case scenarios, but I wanted to know they'd be protected no matter what. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you, it's all online, on your own schedule and can be done right from your couch. You could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. Fabric's policies are flexible, high quality and affordable. We're talking a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. Join the thousands of parents who trust Fabric to help protect their families. Apply today in just minutes@meetfabric.com hermoney that's meetfabric.com hermoney m e-eetfabric.com hermoney Policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. You know what doesn't belong in your summer plans? Getting burned by your old wireless bill. While you're planning beach trips, barbecues or long weekends with your girlfriends, your phone plan shouldn't be the thing that's draining your wallet. That's where Mint Mobile comes in. For a limited time, Mint mobile is offering three months of unlimited premium wireless service for just 15 bucks a month. That means you get the coverage and speed you're used to on the nation's largest 5G network. But for way less this year. Skip breaking a sweat and breaking the bank. Get this new customer offer and your three month unlimited wireless plan for just 15 bucks a month at mintmobile.com hermoney that's mintmobile.com hermoney upfront payment of $45 required, equivalent to $15 a month limited time new customer offer for first three months only. Speeds may slow above 35 gigabytes on the unlimited plan. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. We are back with Corinne Lowe, economist and author of Having It All Corrine. Such a pleasure to have you here. Thank you for writing this book and thank you for doing this.
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Well, thanks so much for having me. I loved your intro and you hit the nail on the head.
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Well, I gotta say, I mean, I consider this book me Search right. I feel all of these things. I'm 60 years old. I've felt them for years. I have yet to get over them. And so if, you know, we can put me and everybody else on the couch today and do a little work, I think this is going to be a public service. You open the book by saying that in 2017, you gave birth to your son, and you also gave birth to a midlife crisis. Take me back to that moment. What was happening in your life and what led you to start questioning your path?
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Yeah, so I had kind of followed the rules and gone to grad school, and I had gotten what I thought was my dream job at Wharton as an assistant professor, so on the tenure track, and I was commuting from New York to Philadelphia, and that's maybe familiar to a lot of people who are juggling two careers or other family constraints. And. And it worked. It added up. And then I had my son, and suddenly it didn't anymore. And so I was trying to get back and forth to Wharton every day in as few hours as I could so that I could get there to, you know, put my son to bed, at least. Right. At least have that moment with him. And then the train would be delayed or something would go wrong. And so that day, you know, there's track work. I was stuck on the train for three and a half hours, and I have to go pump in the bathroom because, you know, it's time. It would be that time, feed my son if I were home. And I was crying because I'm gonna miss bedtime. And I'm like, this does not feel like having it all. This feels impossible. And it feels like the fun part of my life, the part of my life where, like, I got to be me, where I got to be a person. Like, that part is over. And now it is just trying to juggle all of these balls and dropping them one by one.
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Your marriage at the time was on a bit of a rocky ground as well.
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Yeah. So again, that was something where it kind of worked, even though it wasn't perfect before my son was born. And then when I added that new ball to the equation, then the inequalities that were already there, they suddenly started to become, like, a lot more salient to me. And so the fact that we weren't really sharing parenting equal, you know, I had this feminist ideal that, like, we could actually be 50. 50. And then I just saw that, wait a minute. Having a child is not a gender neutral event. I'm the one who's pregnant and throwing up. I'm the one who's recovering from giving birth. I'm the one who's breastfeeding and is ridden with guilt about returning back to work. And then we weren't sharing the parenting or home production load equally. But then things got even worse because he actually left his job to start a business. And so I then became not just the primary breadwinner, but the sole breadwinner. And. And that was, you know, it's something that I talk about in my book. It's a phenomenon a lot of women are living with that I call winning the bread and baking it too, because that feels then even more unfair because you're not only, you know, carrying, I think, as women do, as my data shows, that women do this majority of the load at home. But then if you are also the one who's responsible for breadwinning and all the mental load that comes along with that, it was all too much. And I think it really went against every kind of feminist fiber in my body, but it also just left me depleted and exhausted and miserable.
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Yeah, I mean, one of the things. First of all, I'm sorry that you went through all of that, but I relate on a lot of different levels, and I think so many of the listeners do as well, because we've all had days and weeks and months and years and that feel as if we're being asked to give and give and give and maybe not getting as much from the other people or institutions in our lives. I want to dig into it from a data perspective. One of the ideas that you introduce is that women should be acknowledged as economic agents. What does that mean, and how are we getting it wrong at this point?
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Well, I think that, you know, economists have studied firms and they've studied how people make personal financial decisions. But somehow when I started doing this research and I would present about women kind of making decisions in their lives about marriage, about fertility, about their kids, as economic agents, people would kind of push back and they would say, like, oh, wait, you really think this is how people make those decisions? Like that? You feel so cold and calculating. I'm like, well, yes, because these decisions, the same way what we buy at the grocery store affects the foundational goal of our lives, which economists refer to as utility. And I'll get a little bit more into that. Of course, who we marry and when we have kids are those same foundational decisions. And even more important in terms of determining our overall utility, our kind of deep joy and happiness and meaning over the course of our life. And so I think this is already how women are making decisions, but I think kind of calling it out and surfacing it empowers women to see these trade offs in a different light. And I'll give you an example of that. So I think a lot of women have been told kind of by feminism and by the popular business books that are out there that their goal in life is to have as good a career as possible. Right? That's how you're going to win, is you're just going to maximize everything along this career dimension. And that's how you not only win for you, but for all women everywhere. And when you think like an economist, then you think, no. My goal in life is to maximize my utility. Again, deep joy, meaning value, over the course of my life. And my job is just a tool for me to do that. It's not the source of that. It's not an end in itself. My job is a tool that turns my time into money. And therefore I should decide how important are things that I can buy with money in my utility function and how important are other things that I can only get through my time. And my investments in my job should be proportional to that role in my utility function. And so I think if we really take women seriously as economic agents, like I said, it's kind of empowering to make some of these decisions in a different way.
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B
Is the goal to maximize lifetime happiness? Is it to smooth the curve of lifetime happiness and make sure that we have a consistent amount of it through the generations or through the decades? And do you also think that this is changing? I mean, my mother used to tell me and my brothers all the time that if she and my father had waited until they could afford to have kids, they never would have had us. My husband and I, my first husband, the one that I had kids with, we thought about it a little bit. My children are really thinking about it. And the generation today, I think, is really thinking about whether we can afford to have careers, have kids, buy homes, do all the things in a way that I didn't, and I know my parents generation did not.
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Well, that's all such a good question. I'll start with the first point, which is, what is the goal? What does this utility thing mean? And the answer is it really depends on you, because a utility function is unique to each individual. And so the way I explain it is it's not quite happiness, because sometimes we have to do something that, like, doesn't feel happy or joyful in the moment, like set a limit with our child and they're kicking and screaming. But we know it serves our deeper values, it serves our interests over the lifetime, Right? So the way I think about it is kind of like your video game score at the end of your life, if you add up everything that matters to you, how much of that did you get? Or another way is when you're sitting in the retirement home in a rocking chair when you're 85 and you're looking back, right. How much would you say that was a life well lived? Right. And that is unique to each individual person. And so for one individual, they might say, you know, no, for me, it's important that I do feel some kind of minimum standard of happiness throughout my entire lifetime, whereas somebody else might say, no, for me, I can see that I'm making an investment right now, and things are going to be a little painful right now, but there's a payoff to me that's worth it. Then in terms of. Then once you think of utilities, your goal, how do you plan things and how do you stage them? I do think the timing of when to have children is something that, as you said, if you're waiting until it feels like this is going to be easy, this is going to add up, like, I've got the money and I've got. It's never going to happen. And the reason for that is because there are constraints when we're maximizing our utility function. And one of those constraints for women is what I call our reproductive capital. And that depreciates over time because we cannot have children in our 50s and 60s. Right. And so, you know, more women are kind of pushing it to late 30s, early 40s, but you cannot push it indefinitely. And so I refer in the book to this period called the squeeze, which is, you know, when housework and childcare tends to peak at the same time as you're making career investments. And I just have to be honest that I think that is to some extent unavoidable because that of that reproductive time horizon that we can't move and then because of what careers ask for us and the fact that the timeline for careers has been built for men. Right. So what do we do then to plan around that? If it's not. I'm not recommending to just remove having children from the equation or delay it forever. Well, there are things that you can do. You can make choices to say, okay, in that moment, to make this easier for me in this period of the squeeze, it turns out I actually need to live in a smaller house closer to my job so that I don't have a commute, even though later in life, I don't want that later in life I'm going to value having my space or I'm going to need to move closer to my parents, even though there's actually a different city, I would prefer to be in or I'm going to change to a job that I actually enjoy a little bit less, but that has a better time to money conversion rate. And I'm going to recognize that my career is a book with many chapters. And in a later chapter I can pursue that work that I really love because I won't be in that period of the squeeze. Right. So there's ways to kind of relieve some of those constraints by being thoughtful about our choices as economic agents. Even though my advice is not that to like wait until everything feels like it adds up. Because part of the data in the book is saying it fundamentally doesn't.
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It's never going to add up. But I am thinking back to when I did decide to have children and I made a conscious choice. I had a sort of a dream of becoming the editor in chief of a magazine. You know, I wanted to be, I didn't want to just be a writer at Money magazine, I wanted to run Money magazine. And, and when I had kids, I decided I wasn't going to edit, I was actually going to write. Because writers could be anywhere. Didn't matter. I worked a couple of days a week from home. I was fortunate enough to work for a boss who was amenable to that in days when people were not allowed to work from home. But it was, it was a decision, it was a path that I wasn't exactly sure was going to be the right path for me, but it was the way that I could see myself clear to getting to the other side of these toddler years. How did you do it? I mean, the pumping on the Amtrak sounds God awful.
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A
Yeah. So I love that story because you were looking at it exactly the right way. You thought of your job as a tool to maximize your utility and you said, what is the best way to then set this up? And you were able to get away from that mindset that says I just have to pursue what feels like the most prestigious career. Right. For me, what needed to was not my work. For me, what needed to change was my home setup. And so commuting was not working. And it turned out my marriage wasn't working. And this is not a prescription for other people. But for me it also turned out that heterosexuality wasn't working. So I, I now have a 12 week old baby with my wife. So I got divorced. I moved to Philadelphia. At the time, I, I ended up having an au pair because being in Philadelphia, I allowed me the space where that was a financially feasible option. Whereas in Manhattan, the idea of having an Extra room in your apartment is just completely infeasible. That would be a bigger cost than the childcare, Right. So being in Philadelphia allowed me to do that. And so I had no pair and I suddenly said, oh, this is the setup I need. I needed that 7 minute bike commute to my office and I needed this additional childcare support. And then when I started thinking about having a second baby and that was something that I really wanted again, for my life to feel like my life and the life that I wanted to live and not something that was being dictated to me by these outside constraints, I knew that I wasn't going to have a baby with a man. And so I started thinking about doing it on my own. I was dating women and I ended up meeting somebody wonderful and we just welcomed a baby in May and is different with that, different level of home support with somebody who does my laundry and who when I have a work trip, packs up my pumping stuff and makes sure I have the ice packs and the Ziploc bags and all of that stuff. Right. And so that was, to me, the solution was kind of radically changing my home life to give me a lot more support.
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We are back with Corinne Lowe, economist and author of having It All. All right, let's talk about solutions. If somebody is thinking. All right, utility function, utility function. How do I get a grip on what my utility function is in a variety of situations and 4 of variety of women?
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A
Yeah, it's a great question. And it is part of the work of making some of these changes is actually really figuring out, like, what does matter to me. Because we get so many messages about what is supposed to matter. And we also have our evolutionary programming, in some cases, working against us. You know, everybody has done behavioral economics for men, but I don't feel like we've addressed it for women. Like the way that some of our evolutionary programming drives us to care and take care of other people and almost deplete and exhaust ourselves, or to seek those social rewards and payoffs instead of the things that actually matter to us. Right? So you really have to take a step back and ask yourself, what do I really value and why? And so the first exercise I tell people to do is to think, think. What would I want my life to look like if I didn't need to make money? So what would I do with my time? And what would my life setup be like if money wasn't an object? If I were independently wealthy? Of course, that's not the reality. Right. But it can be helpful in really clarifying your values, because very few people say, I would make sure every night to finish those PowerPoint reports for my boss. Right? So that clarifies to you, okay, your job is actually a source of income rather than an end in itself to you, even when it's something that you actually really love. Like, for you, I bet being a writer and helping people understand, you know, their financial lives was actually really important and something that you loved. But I bet if you said, it doesn't pay me, you still would be like, yeah, but I would do it a lot slower. I would do it in a really different way. I wouldn't, you know, spend all hours doing this. Okay, so it can be really clarifying about where do we get utility and are we actually getting utility from our job? Or really fundamentally, are we getting money from our job that we then purchase utility with? And then it also tells us, are you somebody who says, well, if I didn't have to work, then I would spend a lot of time with friends and family or are you saying, well, if I were independently wealthy, I would want to drive the nice car and I would want to have, like, be able to take whatever trips I wanted, and I would want to buy a boat, right? And that tells you, well, money might actually be pretty important in your utility. So it's a way to get in touch with kind of, what do you really value in a world with no constraints? And then you step back into reality and you say, okay, this is a world with constraints. So how do I get as close to that as possible? And for that, you want to really think about what the constraints are, and then you want to separate that from which pieces are my preference. So an example of that is that I hear from moms a lot who are struggling to make it all add up. And then they'll tell me something is a must. They'll say, oh, my gosh, it's so hard to drive my daughter every day to the school that's 45 minutes away. I spend three hours of my day doing that there and back twice a day. So impossible. But she has to go to that school, right? And then they will say, okay, so the constraint is this school that has these characteristics that you like. It's 45 minutes away from where you live right now. That's the constraint, right? But the fact that she has to go there and that you have to live where you live, those are actually preferences, right? And so if we acknowledge the constraint that we haven't invented instantaneous travel, and then we acknowledge your preferences. Now let's ask the why of your preferences to get it Utility. So why do you like that school more than other schools? What is she getting from it? Why do you want to live where you live? What are you getting from it? And then let's see if there might be another way to optimize, kind of subject to the true constraints and preferences that we're facing. Because sometimes people say, my kid needs this thing. But then when I say, how stressed out and miserable are you? And how much are you snapping at your kids? And they're like, oh, my gosh, all the time. I'm totally impatient. I never have any energy for them. Like, does your kid need that thing more than they need you to be relaxed and present and connected because you've put on your own oxygen mask first to actually make this add up for you so that you can take care of them? And that was what I noticed for myself when I moved to Philadelphia, is that I had been so worried about what that would be like for my son. But I actually realized that I was so much more relaxed and had so much more time, that I was such a better mom, that it made up for whatever else, whatever other changes there were.
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B
Can we fast forward 20 years into the life of this woman? Maybe even 30? Right. I'm a generation older than you, and I see women, and I know we have a lot of women in our audience who are in their 50s and in their 60s, and maybe their kids are in college, maybe their parents are older, they're still trying to shove as much money into their retirement accounts as they possibly can, and they're still feeling as if they are going on all cylinders. How do you handle this at that phase in your life?
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Yeah, so it's a great question. I think my book is really trying to speak to people across the life cycle, and especially at some of those times when, oh, maybe a time constraint alleviated because now my kids are off in high school. What do I want to do now? Like, what does optimization look like for me now? And sometimes when we've spent so long just doing all things for other people, it can take a moment to get back in touch with, like, what do I actually want my life to look like? Like, oh, I am the protagonist of this story, actually, and I get to write it. So I think it's a great moment to also take stock again about what you really value and what brings you joy in your life, deep joy and meaning, and making sure your life is set up so that you get some of that. It's also a great moment to revisit the time to money conversion ratio of your job. So is this the chapter where things have gone well, kind of career wise, and so now is the time to find a job with more enjoyment and something that you know you value intrinsically in itself? Or is it the time where, as you said, you're squeezed between needing to pay for a retirement home, paying for college, and still trying to put money into your own retirement? And therefore, actually, maybe what you need is to figure out, is there a way to level up your job at this point in time, now that you're not facing as big of a time constraint with your children's needs, can you actually lean in again to your career and find ways to get a better time to money conversion? And of course, I want you to have societal support in doing that. And this is a big thing I talk about in the book, is that there are not enough on ramps for women who have a lot of human capital but have taken a step back from the labor force in order to invest in their children's human capital. It's a big thing. We need to change societally. But times are changing and there are those opportunities. And I think if you make that second period of investment and sometimes change your own mindset to say, you know what, I can become an influencer at 55, or I can get a new certificate or a degree at this point in my life and again, level up that time to money conversion rate. And then I want to say one more thing about the aging parents, which is just that I think here that is one of the most meaningful things I think we can do with our life is spend time with people we value. And so I don't want to take anything away from that. It's a regret people often have at the end of their life is not spending time with people. And I want women to set some boundaries because so often I hear it's the daughter who's doing everything and there's three sons who are not helping to share that load.
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B
Yeah, sometimes you have to just ask for what you need from your siblings if you're not getting what you need from them. Sometimes they don't know because you just. You're on because you've been taking it on for so long and you haven't told them so. Yeah, absolutely. Have to ask. You've mentioned a number of times the time to money conversion. I often say, you know, money is a limited resource. That's definitely true. But time is the most limited resource. You encourage women to pay themselves first with time. How does that work?
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A
Yeah. So I'm sure that your listeners have heard that personal finance adage of paying yourself first, which is like setting money aside into your savings before you kind of take care of everything else. And so I encourage women to do it with time, which is find the uses of your time that give you the most utility, the things that you value most deeply in some phases of your life that is going to be really connected time with your children. But I also want us to think about things like doing yoga, reading a good book, spending time with friends, just talking, just enjoying. Right. Find the uses of your time that you value the most and literally block them out on your calendar the way that you would a meeting with your boss or an immovable obligation. Put that on your calendar first and let other things fill in around that. Because when we put them last, right, we get everything done first. And then we do have some leisure time left over, but we too often spend it like scrolling on our phones or then we Just end up, like, doing something around the house. We end up doing something that really doesn't bring us that much value because we've waited until we're so depleted completed. So if we put it first, we're gonna use that time in the highest value way possible, and then we are going to make everything else add up somehow. It's the way when you have a deadline at work, you're suddenly able to, you know, get three hours of work done in one hour. Right. Once you kind of block out that time, you're gonna make the rest of it add up. And I have a great anecdote from this. Somebody at my publisher who kind of got to read my book early, she said this was one of the big things that she changed after she read the book. She said she started paying herself first with time. Wait until after she'd gotten everything done around the house on the weekends, and then she would often run out of time to go to the gym. And so instead she started going first and then coming home. And she said not only did it make sure that she got that gym time, and then she still did manage to get the housework done with the time left over. But by the time she got home, her partner was home to help her with the household tasks because it turns out he'd been paying himself first with leisure time the whole time.
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B
Sometimes we try to do that. We farm out some of those choices that we don't want to take on.
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A
Right.
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B
We trade money for time, paying somebody else to do the gardening, which I don't like to do, or the housework, which some people don't like to do. But sometimes you get to the point where you have to make hard choices. Talk about that.
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A
Yeah. So that is one of a. The pieces of work after you have gotten your partner to step up, after you have tried to outsource what you can. And I talk about outsourcing as, you know, as choosing not to hire yourself for a task. And so I ask people to say, should I hire myself for this job and make that decision that way? And after you've tried to, you know, maybe change your time to money conversion, sometimes you still have to make hard choices. What do I mean by that? It's like Marie Kondo, where you, you know, she taught us to throw out our stuff that we didn't really love that much. But for your time, it's that you have to decide what is a really meaningful use of your time and what's clutter, and that might change at different points in your life. But I often see women with young kids who are in a critical point in their careers also running around volunteering at their kids school. And I don't see the dads doing it in the same way. And so the question is, if this is something that you value, is volunteering, caring for other people, is this the time in your life where you actually have time to do it? Or is this something that right now, for the moment, you need to say no to? And it can apply equally at work, women are asked to take on these extra tasks of, you know, serving on this committee and mentoring this person. And again, it doesn't, it might not be consistent with our values to always say no to that, but can you do it right now? And then I also push women and this is the piece I call throwing out your house plants. Because there's some shoulds that I have to have this beautifully cared for garden or house plants, right? And again, that might be something I have space for in some period of my life. But I realized that with how much I travel and with having young kids, that my houseplants with their browning, decaying leaves were just making me feel tremendously guilty. And the question is like, do I actually need to have them? And so there's some stuff like those metaphorical house plants of hand decorated birthday cupcakes and homemade baby food that you may need to set some boundaries with your yourself on because it is impossible for you to have a career that's going to be equal to your male colleagues and then to have a home life that looks like what you see on Instagram. The women who you see on Instagram, that is their career, okay, they are making money through presenting this unattainable version of a home life to you that now you feel inadequate if you don't have.
- [34:56]
B
It is so true. I mean, and I've decided that there are just times in my life where I won't make the guacamole. I mean, that's my example. I can buy the, I make excellent guacamole, but I have to then buy the avocados and have all the ingredients. And really to make good guacamole, which are never perfectly ripe, takes 20 to 30 minutes. And when you could just open a bag and squeeze it out, it's a lot, it's a lot easier. Toward the end of the book, you write something really beautiful. You write, if you find ways to sprinkle a little extra fairy dust, help, comfort, smile, support, and every now and then cash to others who need it, you'll feel More at peace and sustained while contributing to change that benefits everyone. How do you live that philosophy in your own life right now?
- [35:49]
A
Well, this is another thing I actually had to put in balance because I tell the story in the book that during the pandemic, I ended up founding a nonprofit, very much despite myself, non intentionally, but I had started doing some work to help homeless neighbors. And that became something that became bigger than I thought it was going to be. And I was pouring a ton of time into it at a time when I also had limited childcare, as everybody knows who kind of went through this period. And so I was realizing that this was something I really valued and I cared about, but that I was also doing it partly because it made me feel good about myself at a time when my marriage wasn't working that well, at a time when my career actually wasn't going that well. And this made me feel important and needed. And I still do that work. I still actually run this nonprofit. But I realized it doesn't need to be me doing everything, and I need to have some boundaries around it and I need more people doing it with me. And that's also going to make it more sustainable. And so I think there is a balance here because I don't want to give the message to women that they need to endlessly care for everybody around them at the expense expense of themselves. And that said, when we find a way to live our life in a way that does lift other people up, it is what's going to. We're going to look back on in that rocking chair in the retirement home, right. And say, that is a life well lived. And so I try to think sometimes if there's something for my son that I see as an issue at school instead of just solving it for him, can I do something that's going to advocate for all the kids who might not necessarily have parents who are able to come to the school and have a meeting with the principal or whatever it is. Right. I try to think, is there a way for me to address things that I care about that make the world kind of better for everyone? And in terms of my balance, I do have to say, given that I run this nonprofit, which I love and is a labor of love, that means sometimes I have to have boundaries on, okay, I'm not going to do volunteer speaking engagements, even if this is a great organization, because that takes a lot of energy. And if I say no, you know what, maybe they're going to ask a man in my department to do it instead. And sometimes they take on fewer of those tasks. And so I don't want to say it as a, as a mandate, just one more thing for women to have. But I also want to encourage you to think, oh yeah, I'm doing this because that actually does serve my utility function, because it's part of my values and so that's why I'm doing it. And I can view it as part of the integrated purpose of my life instead of just one more obligation.
- [38:21]
B
Dr. Corrine Lowe, the book is Having It All. Thank you so much for doing this with us today.
- [38:26]
A
Thank you so much for having me. It was great to talk.
- [38:29]
B
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