← So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
So Money with Farnoosh Torabi
1919: What the Data Proves About Marriage, Motherhood, and Having It All - A Conversation with Wharton Professor Dr. Corinne Low
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Okay, only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first. There the last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes.
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So money episode 1919 what the data.
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Proves about marriage, motherhood and Having It All A conversation with Wharton Professor Dr. Corrine Low.
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Podcast Host Intro
You're listening to so Money with award winning money guru Farnoosh Torabi. Each day get a 30 minute dose of financial inspiration from the world's top business minds, authors, influencers and from Farnoosh yourselves. Looking for ways to save on gas or double your double coupons. Sorry, you're in the wrong place. Seeking profound ways to live a richer, happier life. Welcome to SO money.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
The issue that I had in heterosexual marriage was the way it felt like gender was steering the ship that I took a lot of umbrage to because at that point I was pre tenure. I needed to make that investment to be able to keep my job at Wharton. And when Covid came around, all of my male colleagues who you know, were married to women, I watched as their wives, no matter what their careers were, no matter what state their job was in, no matter what phase they were in, Their wives were the ones who stayed home with the kids because of course he's got to keep publishing papers or he's not going to get tenure, right? But because I was the one as a woman who was on the tenure track, right? And just because I was the woman, I did not get that same benefit in the relationship of it being viewed that my career was a joint asset for both of us. Right. I think there's this default where we're used to the man's career pays off for both of us. And we tend not to think of women's careers that way. So it would. What I would like to see is I would love to be able to see people introduce some of the elements of having a same sex relationship within their heterosexual marriages, right? To say, like, we should be dividing what we do in the home according to strengths, according to preferences, according to needs. We shouldn't be letting gender roles make these decisions. And when you're falling into those defaults, like, go ahead and interrogate that because we should be able to evolve past that.
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Farnoosh Torabi
And it's a self interrogation more times than not, because 100% it's our own blocks. A lot of times it's we, you know, it's guilt, you know, or it's like conditioning. I need to do this because I'm mom or I'm dad, you know, and so you have to catch yourself in the moment. Welcome to so Money, everyone. I'm Farnoosh Tarabi. You know, for a long time as women, we've been told that if we want equality in the workplace, in our.
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Financial lives, in the home, we need to lean in harder. We need to work more, organize better, choose better partners, be more efficient.
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And yet here we are, we're more educated than ever.
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We're more present in the workforce than ever.
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And somehow we are really, really tired. We're more exhausted than ever.
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And my guest today says that this isn't a contradiction, it's a data point.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe is an associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School at UPenn and, and.
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The author of the new book Having it what Data Tells Us about Women's Lives and Getting the Most out of yours.
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And she has spent the last 15.
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Years studying how women actually live, how.
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We work, how we partner, how we.
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Parent, and how we divide time and labor inside our homes. And her research shows that things are getting uncomfortable. Our careers have evolved dramatically, but the structure of our marriages and household labor have barely changed since the 70s. Even when women are Earning more even.
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When both partners work full time, even.
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In households that feel progressive.
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In our conversation, Dr. Lowe walks us.
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Through the data behind why modern women are so tired, why the mental load remains stubbornly unequal, and why cooking, cleaning.
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Caregiving, and the invisible work of running.
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A household still fall disproportionately on women, regardless of who brings home the bigger paycheck.
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We dig into things like outsourcing, why.
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Society undervalues values, women's time, and why we're far more comfortable paying someone to change the oil than paying someone to make dinner. And then there's Dr. Lowe's personal story.
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Which you just heard, one that the.
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Media turned into a flashy headline, but rarely well explained. After divorcing a man, Dr. Lowe remarried a woman.
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And in doing so, she experienced something unexpected.
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When gender stopped silently organizing the household. Equality no longer had to be negotiated in. It could be designed. So we talk handily about what same.
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Sex couples get right about partnership, and.
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Why true equality at home requires integrating defaults, not just dividing tasks.
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We also get into the bigger questions that we're all asking right now, like.
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When to have kids, how motherhood reshapes our careers, and why women still take the professional hit for caregiving.
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And of course, how technology and the future of AI and.
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And all the economic shifts that are happening may actually make women's labor more, not less, essential in the future. Some good news. Here we go. Let's get into it with Dr. Corrine Lowe.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe, welcome to Sew Money.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Thanks for having me, Farnesh. I can't wait.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Me too. All right, so let's get into it. Your book is called Having it all, and the subtitle is what Data Tells Us about Women's Lives and Getting the Most out of Yours. You know, so let's be truthful. We have all wisened to the reality that having it all is a myth. At least I think the women in our audience, we get it. But your book offers a fresh set of eyes to this and the data. So let's just start with some of the new revelations about women's lives that you have discovered.
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You're.
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Obviously, you have progressed this concept, right? And you want us to know some. Some new things about that. Having it all is a myth. And. And dot, dot, dot.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah. So I approach this for my discipline as an economist who's been studying the economic lives of women for my entire career. 15 years of research. It's all in the book and my own lived experience and a lot of stories of women who are in the thick of it. Right there with you for the people who are listening. So what the data shows is that what we are trying to do right now as working women, especially as working moms, is uniquely challenging from a time perspective because we are trying to do more in our careers and our jobs are demanding more from us than ever before. While at the same time, gender roles have not changed in the home. So men are doing the same amount of cooking and cleaning as they did in the 1970s, and they do the same amount in the household, no matter who earns more money. A topic that I know that you've looked at. And so you. Even when she's the female breadwinner, she still does twice as much cooking and cleaning, so she doesn't get the relief that her male colleagues get because they have that help at home. And then finally that the time that we spend with our kids has just exploded. So we're spending twice as much time with our kids as parents a generation ago. And so all of that adds up to us being very tired, which I know is going to sound familiar.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Say that some of the data did really surprise me. And I don't know if it's because I live on the east coast in more of these, like, you know, more progressive areas of the country. My husband's very involved. I feel like we'll get to mental load in a moment. I think there is an imbalance there, but I think when it comes to child rearing and things like that, it feels like, look, we're both very tired at the end of the day. So there, there is that. And we know there's an increasing number of stay at home father. So how did you go about finding that data, especially around the fact that men are doing as much work, or let's just say the same amount of work as they were in the 70s at home.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Well, so I wanna make a distinction here between childcare and then and cooking and cleaning. So what stayed constant is the cooking and cleaning time, which I actually find is a really good proxy for the mental load because it's this kind of unglamorous work of running a household that you just have to like keep doing every day, you know, and you don't necessarily get like an intrinsic RE from doing it. Like, we like spending time with our kids, but like, nobody really likes loading the dishwasher. Right. So I think that I want to make a distinction there because men's parenting time has increased. But the key thing is because both of us, men and women, have increased our parenting time so much, the gender gap in the household is actually wider. And so psychologically, we have this tendency to compare today's dads to the dads of the past, and we say, they're doing so much, and those dads are saying, I'm doing so much. I read my kid a bedtime story. My dad never read me a bedtime story. I dropped the kid off at school. My dad never did that. Right. And that is actually true. But they are missing the fact that women's time has increased so much more that their wife is actually doing more than her mom did also. Right. And that piece feels a little bit invisible. And so I think that does lead to some of these misunderstandings. And then when it comes to a household, that actually gets to the point of being more egalitarian, like your house household, what I think is interesting there is that if you were to take that couple and compare them in the data to a couple that had the same earnings split, but the genders were reversed, there, you would find it wouldn't be egalitarian. It would be the lower earner who would be the woman in that case, who would be taking on so much more. Right. So what I find is that, you know, when. When the. The woman is the breadwinner, that's when it finally does get to be something like 50, 50 in. But in a case where the man is the breadwinner, the wife is doing 80%. Right. So it's. There's sort of these, like, invisible places where on the margin, it's like, even with. I think a lot of women are at a point where they're like, okay, this feels okay in my household. And yet still, if I were to compare them to a man in a kind of similar earnings division situation, he has that benefit of his female partner just taking on so much more.
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Farnoosh Torabi
You also write about how we value women's time differently than men's time. Can you unpack that some more for us?
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Well, I started thinking about this as, like, a more systemic problem. I mean, we all know, right, that there's so much stuff that women do that is economic production that we tend not to assign value to. Right. But I started thinking about this as this bigger systemic problem when I would start to talk about outsourcing. And right away, a lot of people would push back and say, like, well, you have to be really rich to do that, or that's not, you know, a practical solution. Or, like, that just doesn't feel right. Or it feels.
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Farnoosh Torabi
It's like a values thing. Too. Like, we just don't do that.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
We don't do that. And then I said, well, I started asking people, well, do you take your car to the mechanic to get an oil change or do you do it yourself? Your husband changes the oil. And nobody would say their husband changed the oil. Right. And yet there was this, like, instinctive, you know, we didn't categorize that as outsourcing, even though that's absolutely the same thing. Because I think of outsourcing as it's choosing to hire somebody for something that you theoretically could do yourself. And, like, really changing your oil is actually not that complicated. Right. Like, actually, everybody could could, you know, spend an hour, two hours reading the books, watching YouTube and could do it themselves. But we don't hire our husbands to change the oil. And yet we hire ourselves for all of those female coded domestic tasks. And so that's a place where I almost feel like the same way men are stuck in the 1970s in terms of the amount of cooking and cleaning that they do, that we're a little stuck in the 1970s in terms of this mindset where we haven't updated that our time is now as valuable outside the house as those husbands of yesteryear when, you know, everybody started deciding, we're gonna take our car to the mechanic to change the oil. That transition has happened for the value of women's time now because of the career opportunities that we have today. And therefore we might be hiring ourselves for too many jobs around the house. And so I don't wanna sound out of touch. I know that there are families where there are real financial constraints where this does really seem impossible to do. But I do push back a little bit because for a lot of the families that say, well, outsourcing isn't financially feasible for us, they are taking the car to the mechanic. They are hiring somebody to clean the gutters. Right. They are outsourcing for those male coded tasks. But it becomes an unaffordable luxury when it's a female coded task instead.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Well said. Well, point. And I love your book because it's not just data. There's great permission slips to do things with that data. And now, you know, you write about, don't lean in, level up. You can say no to your kids if the bedtime routine is taking an hour and a half. You know, we used to do this and I just, oh, my gosh, my kids are 11 and 8. And up until a couple weeks ago.
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We were still sitting outside their rooms.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah.
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Farnoosh Torabi
You know, waiting for them to actually still fall asleep. The logic was, well, they'll, they're gonna.
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Get up and they're gonna bother us.
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You know, they may, but they'll learn. You know, they'll come downstairs, they'll ask for water, but at least when I'm.
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Downstairs, I'm getting work done.
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And then I just usher them back upstairs, right? Like we were, we were just, it was becoming too much. And so saying no to them and, and negotiating with your partner, you know, your book, More women are going to read it likely than men. And something that I came up against when I wrote When She Makes More is that the ultra feminists said to me, here we go. A book written for women on how to, how to sort of correct overcorrect in a male dominated world, in a world built for men in a patriarchy. Whereas we really need to fix the patriarchy, right? And I agree, like, that is a true statement that we live in a patriarchy. But it's, you know, what are we supposed to do? Just fold our hands and, you know, women are coming to me asking for help. So this is, this is, you know, second best, I suppose.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
No 100%. And second best is like a real, like, economics concept where we say, like, yes, there's like unconstrained optimization. If you, if you were dictator of the world, this is how it would look, right? And then how do you optimize within the realities of like the actual world that you're living in? And that is, it was so important for me to write that book because it is so easy right now in this moment that we're in, to get into this internal death spiral of like, well, I can't change that and I can't change that, and that's unfair and that's stacked against me. And then you feel like you have no agency. And I think the reality is like, you do still have agency to make things work better for you. And the other thing that I, because I've read your book, I've told you I've read your book and what I loved about your book is that your book was trying to make things add up for couples, make things fair to women who were the breadwinners, while also honoring that most people, like want to have a good relationship with their spouse. This isn't a zero sum game. It's, it's not like you're, like, you're being so unfair to me. I should get this like, inch more. And like, this is like, it's not the same. It's not a scorecard.
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Farnoosh Torabi
You're not keeping score.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Right. And because so much of the surplus from a relationship comes from, like, us actually wanting to do things for each other. And when that's reciprocal, there's just tremendous value that can come out of that. Right. It's like when it's actually reciprocal, like, cooking dinner doesn't have to feel like domestic labor. Cooking dinner can feel like love. One of the ways that you show love, as long as the other person is showing love to you with the things that feel hard to you, they're taking those things off your plate. And so that's what I. What I love about your book. And I think that's exactly the approach that I want to take with mine, too. Even though people, listeners who know my personal story know that I read Farnish's book at the time when I was the breadwinner in my relationship married to a man. And I was what I call in my book, winning the bread and baking it too, because I was do also.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Doing and freezing it and then taking it out a year later and then re eating.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
And so I ended up, you know, one of my level ups was that I got divorced and I also moved to a cheaper city and closer to my job. And all of those things have improved my life. But I want people reading my book to understand. Yeah, I'm not saying that you need to blow up these relationships, but I am saying that you need to set and hold on to your boundaries and the things that make you whole. Because so often, like with your story, with bedtime, I think as women, we just, like, give away, piece by piece, those things that we need to be okay until we've, like, forgotten. We're like the giving tree. Right. We end up as that empty stump. And it. That just is not how we should be living. And I think so often then the imbalance in our relationship, it's not like there's anyone else to blame. It's not like, oh, it's the patriarchy or it's my husband. It is also our own, like, lack of self value to say, like, my needs are important here. Right. And like, the fact that I just want to go downstairs and have a cup of tea. That's reason enough to, like, set the boundary around bedtime.
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Farnoosh Torabi
And you said it, I think it was in an interview on CBS where you were like, me being happier improves my relationship with my son.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah, absolutely. Surprise. Yeah. Your kids are going to remember more. If you were able to be, like, fun and relaxed and connected with them, then they're going to remember the ways that you twisted yourself into knots. Knots to kind of make every little thing perfect or to do everything yourself versus get the store bought cupcakes or even the store bought holiday meal. So.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Oh, my gosh. Yes, they like the store bought. Anyway. My kids hate my baking. Oh, my gosh. Well, I want to circle back to your personal life because this has become a bit of a firestorm in the media. The media loves to run with this story, and I want you to tell us the real, the real truth behind it. So I think it was, you know, like the flashiest of flashy headlines, like Dr. Lowe, you know, divorces her man and marries a woman because she says it was. It made the most economical sense. You know, the data proved that the best way to reach parity in a relationship as a woman is to marry another woman, which is of course like a showstopper. So. So tell us your, your path to your next marriage, your current marriage. And obviously this isn't, you know, I don't, I don't think you're telling everyone, every woman to marry a woman you believe in, you know, love, and love is love.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
So.
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Farnoosh Torabi
But tell us why it's working out for you.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah, well, I think I, I made the mistake of like making a joke that I make a lot because obviously there is some irony in this fact that I did, I did divorce a man and I got married to a woman. And I have been studying time use in different couples and that inequality that I see, where if a woman is the breadwinner, she's still doing more cooking and cleaning, that's not going to be true in a lesbian relationship. So if you look at lesbian relationships or if you look at gay male relationships, whoever is the higher earner does less and whoever's the lower earner does more. Right? And so, you know, my joke has always been when I present that graph that I'm like, oh, and this is why being a lesbian is an evidence based decision. Okay? And yes, I thought that was funny. And then that became the big headline around my book. Is that. Take a beat.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Because that is also not ideal. Because I've interviewed same sex couples and what I have found in those, in that flip where the lower earner does more, they will pull me aside and say, you know, I feel like I gotta earn my keep. It's not because they're doing it in a lovingly way. They're like, well, how do I prove my worth in this relationship? So it's, it's a little bit more complex than that. I think there's a lot we can learn from same sex couples when it comes to because where it where I think it's exemplary and I've interviewed again many same sex couples is that it isn't about who makes what. It's more about we're doing what we want to do because we're either good at it or one has more time to do it. Or you know, but just do what they got to do.
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Farnoosh Torabi
Yep.
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yes. And that's what I like. What I talk about is when you you're thinking about division of responsibility, I'm like, I want us to move beyond just fair and I want us to be asking is it evidence based? Is it nourishing to us and is it sustainable? Right. And what I mean by evidence based is that like how we divide things up should be based, you know, time availability. And it's not just earnings, but it's whose career needs an investment at a given point. Because it could be that the wife is actually earning less, but she's earning less because she took time to invest in having kids and breastfeeding those kids. And so now actually, her career is the one that needs investment, right? And so that's the, you know, or it could be one partner's in school and they. They're not earning anything, but they've got to finish their exams because that's what's gonna enable them to have a career, right? So what I did find that is refreshing when I, you know, now I'm in a same sex marriage is that you get rid of the assumption, you get rid of gender as one of the structures that makes those decisions for you, right? And so you are left. It's still something to navigate because, you know, for example, like, I do earn more in my current marriage, but my wife has a dream job that's a new opportunity for her where, like, she really needs to prove herself and wants to prove herself, right? And so I am actually doing more at home right now in this moment. But I know that it's not because of my gender, right? And that, like, that is a huge help because it means, like, we are able to say, look, in this moment, your career is the one that needs that extra time. Whereas, like, I'm a tenured professor. Part of the reason that I earn more right now is because I already kind of made it to that milestone. So I don't have that same margin where if I don't prove myself, I'm not getting that next promotion right now. So it's actually okay for me to be the one that, like, stays home because, you know, the nanny is sick, right? But the issue that I had in heterosexual marriage was the way it felt like gender was steering the ship that I took a lot of umbrage to because at that point, I was pre tenure. I needed to make that investment to be able to keep my job at Wharton. And when Covid came around, all of my male colleagues who, you know, were married to women I watched as their wife, no matter what their careers were, no matter what state their job was in, no matter what phase they were in, their wives were the ones who stayed home with the kids because, of course he's gotta keep publishing papers or he's not gonna get tenure, right? But because I was the one as a woman who was on the tenure track, right? And just because I was the woman, I did not get that same benefit in the relationship of it being viewed that my career was a joint asset for both of us. Us, Right. I think there's this default where we're used to the man's career pays off for both of us. And we tend not to think of women's careers that way. So it would. What I would like to see is I would love to be able to see people introduce some of the elements of having a same sex relationship within their heterosexual marriages. Right. To say like we should be dividing what we do in the home according to strengths, according to preferences, according to needs. We shouldn't be letting gender roles make these decisions. And when you're falling into those defaults, like go ahead and interrogate that because we should be able to evolve past that.
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Farnoosh Torabi
And it's a self interrogation more times than not. Because a hundred percent it's our own blocks, you know, we might, Yes. A lot of times it's we, you know, it's guilt, you know, or it's like conditioning. I need to do this because I'm mom or I'm dad, you know, and so you have to catch yourself in the moment.
- [30:32]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah. And that's where sometimes, you know, then we also need to ask for our partners support in sometimes stepping up maybe even beyond where what their view is, where like look, I have felt guilty every time I have to go on a work trip and I've never seen one of my male colleagues agonize the way I've seen my female colleagues agonize about work trips, about needing to leave the kids at home. And you know, we, we feel so much guilt about the bedtime, about being able to chaperone the field trip, about being able to, you know, make something home baked. And so sometimes like if we're in one of those phases where our careers really need investment, one of the things we need from our male partner is one support in setting and holding our own boundaries and reminding us like, look, like you give so much to the kids and you're gonna be there tomorrow and next week, but you need to take this opportunity right now. But we also need them to step up. Because what I hear from my female friends is they say, yes, I am guilting myself to be home at 5pm for dinner time. But that's because I know that my spouse isn't gonna do that. My spouse is gonna say it's fine for the nanny to feed them dinner or it' for them to have the extra aftercare or whatever every single day. Whereas I'm saying I want us to spend parenting time with them. And so if he's not gonna step up, I'm gonna do it because I want that to be the what our kids get. And I also see that around food where you know, the mom is the one saying I really care if they eat something that's healthy, something that's nourishing, something that's balanced. And so, yeah, now I'm killing myself to pack their lunches or to make the home cooked meals. But if I tried to outsource that to my spouse, he would just say takeout, right? He would say, you know, let them eat the school. So there's something on us where we need to sometimes adjust our quality standards. We need to sometimes be okay with imperfect, with what I call having it almost.
- [32:22]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah.
- [32:22]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
But supportive partnerships are gonna be where our partner says, let me meet you halfway. Not just in splitting what I think needs to be done, but in actually like supporting your vision of, you know, what this should look like so that our kids actually have all of their needs met. So our home actually looks n place. Right. Because if, if they just do what they think is strictly necessary. Right. That's not really ever going to be half of what's on our plate.
- [32:55]
Farnoosh Torabi
You're just surviving, not thriving. I love what you say.
- [32:58]
You're getting a promotion, dear.
- [33:00]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Exactly.
- [33:02]
Farnoosh Torabi
That was like my mind. I mean, brilliant. Just brilliant, you know?
- [33:07]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yes. So for like the women listening, you're looking to have how to have this conversation. What you're going to say is gonna be like, look, I don't need a low level junior employee to delegate to. Okay, so you are getting a promotion. You're moving up to senior management. And senior management means you don't call me five times from the grocery store. It means that you really figure out how to own and manage this task and everything involved in it. And you're going to work out all of the details. So you're going to look up what's the address of the pediatrician again? Right. What vaccines do they need to get this time Time you're gonna own it all.
- [33:41]
Farnoosh Torabi
You know, when I was deciding when to have children, you know, it was a, it was not just a sort of biological question. You know, there's a clock, obviously, but I was also a financial calculus. You know, I wanted to be able to have savings. I wanted to be able to be at a certain place in my career where I, you know, could afford to take time off and go ramp back in on and not feel the consequences. Because I remember being in my 20s and watching women colleagues sacrifice a lot as they were growing their families at sensitive times in their careers. And so what is the advice today? What have you found? Is there data to support more optimal times for women to begin having families?
- [34:34]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Well, one of the things, my biggest message to women about this is that it is so hard to actually time when we have children. And there's so many factors that are beyond our control that I really think that the foremost concern on this needs to be when works for you and your family. You know, when works for you and your partner. Because I just would hate for anyone to be in the position that they try to like time this so optimally and they're like, I'm gonna do it exactly when I'm 37. And then they find that they're have trouble, right? And maybe it then takes five years for them to conceive. And so I think that what is true is that the way I look at careers is that they are a machine that converts our time into money. And the more you invest in that machine and you upgrade it, the better time to money conversion ratio you get. Right? And so that's for me, like getting tenure means that now I can put like, like less time in and I get more money out right out of my career. So if you try to have kids before you've made any of those investments, right then at the time when you're most squeezed, time wise, you're also not going to have this like, you know, healthy money machine that. So you're going to end up having to put a lot of time into your career as well or just not getting enough money out and you're going to feel squeezed that way. So I think it's good to think about what can I do to upgrade my money machine before I have kids. That doesn't mean necessarily delay the timing. It might mean that you're saying I'm going to be really focused on making those investments for a period before I have kids and trying to kind of achieve this milestone. It also might mean that you want to think about, for those of you who, where it's financially feasible, freezing eggs or freezing embryos. So that if you have a year in mind, if you're like, oh, I know I want to have kids when I'm 35, but you're going to start having that first kid at 35. Well, the data shows that that second kid at 37 or 38 is already putting you in a risky territory where there's a lot of variation. Some women are going to be able to conceive naturally at that age, absolutely no problem. And some women are already going to be encountering fertility struggles at that age. So freezing eggs is a way that's going to give you, you more option value. It's literally like having a sock option available, right. That you can choose to kind of exercise that option. So that's another thing that people might want to consider. But I pretty strongly counsel against saying that, like, I have to try to find this optimal time because the reality is, and I just have to be frank, you are going to take a hit in your career. That's what the data shows. And it's not. I don't look at it as like a penalty. Right. When you have children, and if I studied your credit card statement, I would see that you would suddenly be spending less money on, you know, nights out, fancy dinners, alcohol, and you'd be spending more money on diapers and, you know, baby clothes for. Right. And toys and Montessori themed toys. So it's the same thing with your time. It's that when you have kids, you invest, you have this other place to invest your time, so you invest less of it in your own human capital for a short period of time and you invest more of it in the child's human capital. It's just like that spending reallocation. Right. So it's a choice of where to invest your time because you get really high returns to investing time in your child's human capital. And that's. There's economic models that show this. And so I don't look at it as a penalty. I look at it as this shift in priorities. But kind of knowing that's true, it can be smart to bank some of those investments before you decide to kind of start shifting your attention.
- [38:08]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yeah, it'll be interesting to see what happens in the future. Right now, women and couples are choosing to have fewer children for a host of reasons. Money, one of them, but just also like, preference. They're looking at the world and the future and they're like, nope, don't want to bring a kid into the world. So speaking of, have you been looking at things like AI and how the future technologically might shift the workload and the having it all paradigm for women and couples? Is any of your data dovetailing any of that right now?
- [38:49]
Yeah.
- [38:49]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
You know what, what's so interesting is that as much as people devalue the work that women do, it's really hard to replace it with AI. Right. So when you think about like the work that women do, both the kind of like fine grained work around the household, like there's a video of like a robot trying to load a dishwasher and it turns out it's like it's really hard for a robot to load dishwasher. Right.
- [39:12]
Farnoosh Torabi
My husband showed it to me it was like at a 100 speed, and he had, it was, it was fast forward, you know, sped up, but at normal speed, it was so slow, it took him like a day to clear the table.
- [39:23]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah. So this is actually, like, these tasks are actually really hard. And so, like, we're not getting rid of a lot of these tasks. But then when you think about the mental load, when you think about knowing everybody's calendars, knowing everybody's teachers, knowing which child needs what, helping our kids with their homework, we are very hard to replace in those domains. And, and so I think that that piece of it, like AI, is not going to save us from that. Better or worse. I mean, one of the shocks that's happening that I think is going to be hard is that AI is continuing to displace male labor. And that means that this reality of we're going to have two incomes or we're going to have families that are relying on women's income. Right. That is going to continue to be the case. And that's why I think we need to learn to create households that aren't so reliant on gender roles, because it's just so inefficient. If, and I see this in the data there, the woman is earning four times as much at her job and she's still working fewer hours and doing twice as much housework because the man is still working more hours even though he's earning so much less. Right. And that just isn't efficient in the household in terms of making the whole household richer. I, you know, I joke that, like, if he would pick up the kids from daycare, she could pick up, up the. Pick up a shift as a nurse. Right. Because that's often what I see in the data. Right. It could be a couple where, you know, he's a truck driver and she's a nurse, and he's working more hours even when her hourly wage is higher. So AI is really going to force us to confront those gender roles because it's going to mean that, you know, there are industries that are going to be displaced. There are places where you used to kind of have reliable earnings where you're not. And women's income is just going to continue to be so important.
- [41:06]
Farnoosh Torabi
Important.
- [41:07]
Yeah.
- [41:07]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
And then for the young people out there who are like, well, how do I plot a career where there are these kind of huge potential changes and disruptions coming? I think my advice there is to think about the skills that are durable and transferable to different industries. Right. So skills like really being good at leadership and communication and synthesizing information and working with a team. These are skills that are very difficult to replace with AI and they're transferable to a lot of different industries. So even if the software industry takes a hit, right. You can bring those skills to the consumer packaged goods industry. So I think there's still every reason to invest a lot in human capital. Anytime there is a technology that changes, there is a certain group of people who it displaces, but there's a certain group of people whose time it makes more valuable because now you're kind of more productive because of the. This interplay between the technology and the human labor because it can't really fully get rid of the humans. You still need that kind of senior management level. Right. So there are still so many places for young people to invest in their careers. But I do think you have to avoid kind of being so narrowly focused that there's only one job that you can do, because none of us can predict exactly where all of this dust is going to settle. And that's the same when it comes to, within a marriage. Like, the problem is if men are just focused on. On all I know how to do is earn a paycheck, right. Then they don't have the full set of skills that you need to be a partner, no matter what the future holds, no matter how our economy evolves. Because we might not need you to play the role of breadwinner. We might need you to play the role of, you know, chief people officer in the household. And I need you to have skills for that too.
- [42:58]
Farnoosh Torabi
Well, if anyone just wants to come to my house and make. Make lunch for my kids in the morning, I'm hiring because I did the math. I was like, that's, that's like 300 meals, you know, that I make or whatever it is. And that's just one meal.
- [43:12]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yes.
- [43:13]
Farnoosh Torabi
A day.
- [43:14]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
It's just.
- [43:14]
Farnoosh Torabi
Corinne, oh, my gosh. Thank you so much. Please write a follow up to this book. And I hope that the data will be better in, you know, in 30.
- [43:22]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Years, moving in the right direction. And the thing that gives me hope is actually exactly what you referenced about people being worried that, you know, saying, do we want to get married? Do we want to have kids at all? And I think because surveys show that marriage and partnership is so important to men, so they're going to have to figure out that they need to step up if they want to keep getting married and having children. So I have a lot of hope for the future. I just think it's going to be a little bit of a bumpy transition because it's always hard to learn new skills. But like men out there, I believe in you. I think that you can handle this promotion.
- [43:55]
Farnoosh Torabi
Yes. Co CEO.
- [43:57]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Yeah.
- [43:57]
Farnoosh Torabi
Dr. Corinne Low, thank you, thank you. Thank you so much for joining us. I knew this was gonna be a good one. And happy holidays.
- [44:04]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
Thank you so much. Farnoosh.
- [44:09]
Farnoosh Torabi
Thanks so much to Dr. Corrine Lowe for joining us.
- [44:12]
Dr. Lowe's book again is called Having.
- [44:14]
It what Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most out of Yours. That link is in our show Notes.
- [44:21]
I'll see you back here on Friday for AskFarnoosh. And I hope your day is so Money.
- [44:40]
Dr. Corrine Lowe
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Farnoosh Torabi
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Dr. Corrine Lowe
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