High-Achieving Women and the Work-Family Balancing Act

Having It All, from the Wharton economist Corinne Low, is a book that’s tailored to a fairly narrow audience—but won’t admit it. “Women can’t bend anymore without breaking,” warns an early paragraph. 

Low continues: "We can’t tweak or life hack our way to more hours in the day or around the major structural issue that’s making our lives impossible: that there is simply no way to juggle a fifty- to eighty-hour career with full-time housework and—for those of us who are mothers—parenting load."

Yikes! Are women these days really expected to put in 50 to 80 hours a week plus another full-time job? Well, no, we learn, when Low presents the actual numbers just a few pages later, leading readers to wonder why she made such a sweeping generalization to begin with.

The Division of Labor in the Modern Marriage

She offers data on time use by American women and men, ages 25-45, running through the late 2010s—including individuals of all marriage, employment, and parenthood statuses. By the end of this period, women worked for pay for about 30 hours per week, while spending roughly another 25 hours on housework and child care. Men worked about 10 more hours for pay (but still not 50, much less 80) while doing less at home. Women do seem to put in a few more total hours in this analysis, though even on that front, I’d note that the exact gender balance is sensitive to sample choices and evolves over time. See here for my own analysis of time use among married parents of minor kids from 2003 through 2022, for example.

But Low’s narrative is true for a subset of career-focused women, including, at one point, Low herself, who spends some time telling her own story. Low has important things to say to those women—and the men they’re stuck with.

Despite her occasional use of questionable rhetoric, Low is an intriguing thinker, bringing economic concepts, extensive data analysis, and frank discussions of biology and evolution into the realm of family life. She’s not a particularly big fan of the male of the species, but she’s far from a boring academic feminist insisting that men and women are exactly the same.

Low and her husband lived in the New York City area, even though she worked in Philadelphia, which meant several hours on the train each day even when things were running on time. Unsurprisingly, while this arrangement was livable in the couple’s early years when she was a grad student and he had a corporate job, it was less of a fit when the couple had a baby, Low got a tenure-track position, and the husband tried starting his own business while still not doing enough around the house. At one point, she found herself pumping breastmilk and sobbing in an Amtrak bathroom because she wouldn’t make it home in time to see her baby. She eventually divorced, moved to Philly, and started dating women for good measure.

Low’s case, as she describes it, is extreme—indeed, jaw-dropping. I think my wife would divorce me for suggesting she spend hours on a train every day while I dabbled in self-employment. But aspects of this story reflect deeper patterns.

There are still a fair number of couples where the woman stays home and the man works, and in dual-earning couples, we see a less drastic form of specialization on average: men spend more time at work while women do more child care and housework. This tends to happen even if, as Low’s own work has shown, the man is making a far lower hourly wage. These can certainly be reasonable arrangements for couples that choose them (though couples where the much-lower-paid worker spends more time at work might want to pause for a rethink). 

Low advises choosing a career path that lines up with your long-term ambitions and life plan—choosing jobs that set boundaries consistent with your desired work/life balance.

Work-Family Balance for Today's Working Moms

In the aggregate, these patterns can also reflect the differing preferences of men and women. A recent IFS report showed that while married moms with young kids have become more likely to work full-time in just the past few years—with more than half now working 35 or more hours—only about 4 in 10 married moms with young kids see full-time work as their preferred situation. About the same number would like to work part-time, and 1 in 5 would prefer not to work at all. Low herself, meanwhile, argues that women “care” more about kids than men do (and recalls vociferously disagreeing with a male colleague who seemed offended by this characterization). She also suggests that couples where one person works or earns more than the other might reasonably divide housework unevenly to balance it out.

The big caveat: When men find themselves in situations where they should be doing more housework—most dramatically, when their wife is the sole earner or has a far more demanding work schedule—they tend to drop the ball. This causes an asymmetry between hard-charging men and hard-charging women that clearly, and understandably, irks Low. A high-achieving man can likely find a suitable partner willing to shoulder the lion’s share of housework and child care. But a (heterosexual) woman wanting to work 50 to 80-hour weeks does not have similar opportunities. Fewer men find the domestic sphere attractive; for women, as Low writes, “having a high-earning partner probably activates something primal about them being a great provider”; and in couples where men do take on the home role, they quite often suck at it. This is a serious problem for only a minority of households, but it certainly can be a real problem.

Low's Advice for Working Women

Anyway, what does Low see as the best approach to women’s predicament? Think like an economist and maximize your utility within the constraints you face. The constraints on working women, Low explains, stem from a mix of biology, preferences, and social structures. The “evolutionary focuses” of “caring” and “love” pull especially hard on women, Low writes, noting that it can be rewarding to respond to such urges, but also that these inclinations can sometimes hold women back from broader ambitions at work. (For her, it’s analogous to how an evolved taste for sugar can lead to suboptimal behavior in today’s world.) Women also have different interests, go into different fields from men, and inevitably face career setbacks when childbirth interrupts their lives. All of these decisions and preferences are also shaped, of course, by societal expectations, discrimination, and sexual harassment.

With these constraints and realities in mind, much of Low’s advice boils down to being deliberate in the application of common sense, especially when making major decisions. She advises choosing a career path that lines up with your long-term ambitions and life plan—choosing jobs that set boundaries consistent with your desired work/life balance. And despite her clear sympathies for the career-focused, she ultimately does show respect for women who put their priorities elsewhere (ahem, have different “utility functions”), and even for women who wouldn’t mind having a high-earning partner so they could stop working and care for the kids at home.

It’s also important to ask what tasks at home you should be doing, and what you should be hiring other people for, especially if you have a decent income but not a lot of time. Low explains that, after getting divorced and hiring an au pair, she found herself wondering if this was “what life is like for people with equal partners.” Well, no, a paid servant is not like that, but hiring one can certainly help manage some of the tensions that motivate Low’s frustrations here.

Some of my favorite material in the book involves how to choose, and manage life with, a partner. Low suggests an unsentimental approach to the former task: love is important, but you also need to carefully evaluate the feasibility of the life you’d build together. For those already in relationships, though, I especially liked her suggestion for couples arguing about housework to fill out time diaries to measure time use. That way, it is easier to tell if the man is shirking—or if the woman has just read too many books telling her that he is. Couples can also explicitly agree on what work needs to be done and who should do which tasks, rather than just drifting into a division of labor that might be unfair.

Corinne Low is one of the most interesting and provocative economists working on family issues, and I’ve discussed her work previously in this space. Even readers with very different views of how families should work will find things to learn from the data she presents and the arguments she makes in Having It All.

Robert VerBruggen is a research fellow at the Institute for Family Studies, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute, and a contributing editor at National Review.