Her path to ‘having it all?’ Be gay and move to Philly, a Wharton economist says.

Corinne Low, a Wharton economist, didn’t have to search far for an example of how women’s familial and professional choices are shaped by an uneven playing field.

In 2017, Low gave birth to her son while building a tenure-track career. Her life soon began to feel unmanageable. She was commuting up to six hours a day from Manhattan to Wharton while also taking care of the household tasks that kept her family functioning: groceries, laundry, cooking, childcare.

The situation reached a crisis point when Low found herself pumping in an Amtrak bathroom while crying; she had been in transit for hours and realized she wouldn’t make it home to see her son before bed.

Low, 41, was not a single parent. But her husband had recently left his job to start his own business, a choice that did not reduce his working hours, but did reduce his salary — to zero.

Low’s personal story is the entry point to her new book, Having it All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting The Most Out of Yours, part self-help manifesto and part economic tract.

When Low examined her own life, she made two major changes that freed her time and altered her circumstances. First, she divorced her husband and decided to exclusively date women. (A summer article in the Cut about Low, headlined "This Economist Crunched the Numbers and Stopped Dating Men," went viral.) She is now married to a woman.

The less viral but equally meaningful shift was that she left New York City — and embraced Philly.

“The underplayed hero of my story, of the changes that I made, was moving to Philadelphia,” she said recently in an interview. “That was actually the more important upgrade.”

When she was living in Manhattan and struggling to keep up, friends had recommended that she hire a live-in au pair, which they said was a more affordable, less transactional form of childcare. But of course, like most New Yorkers, Low had no spare room.

In Philadelphia, she was able to afford a bigger house with more space, which meant she could have an au pair. And her commute went from over two hours to seven minutes by bike, freeing her to build a life “filled with friends, community, time outdoors.”

It all added up. In Philadelphia, Low writes, “I rediscovered myself. I found who I had been before I became a stressed-out, angry, rapidly aging person. I was fun! I was creative! I could relax.“ (She adds the disclaimer that she is “not advocating that everyone who reads this book should leave their marriage and move to a new city,” although, perhaps they should, assuming they move to the right city.)

She wanted to show that the feeling many working women experience — of being under siege from all sides, unable to figure out how to gloriously “have it all” — was not some symptom of being hysterical, but was instead rooted in data.

“I want people to figure out how to claw back some of their time from these structural forces that are squeezing us,” Low said. “Knowing the data, it gives you permission to make some of those choices.”

She found that even in families where women were the primary breadwinners, they still overwhelmingly had to put in a “second shift” at home. Some statistics in the book are startling: For example, men who earn only 20% of the household income in a heterosexual family do the same amount of housework as those who earn 80% of the family’s income, which Low found by analyzing the American Time Use Survey, a massive dataset of how individuals spend their time.

That means even when a woman earns more than twice what her partner earns, she also does twice as much cooking and cleaning.

“That bothers me, because it’s inefficient,” Low said. “Because you’re using the ‘more expensive’ person’s time on these home production tasks.”

In the book, Low aims to advise women on how to get a “better deal” for themselves, by employing the stark logic of her field.

She writes about how women might improve their “personal utility function,” which she describes as a “personal video game score at the end of your life,” grounded in one’s priorities and values. She urges women to think about dating as a job interview for a co-executive in a multipronged, multiyear enterprise, and to think of a job as a “technology for converting time into money.”

She also encourages readers to throw away their houseplants if they are not increasing personal utility function.

“You need to be ruthless in protecting your time from things that are not investments in your future and do not bring you joy," she writes.

One of her most interesting arguments is that women today effectively “hire themselves” for too many jobs within the home. It has become normalized to outsource “male-coded” tasks, like changing a car’s oil or fixing an electrical outlet, by hiring a specialist to do it, Low said.

But women have not updated their mindsets about the market value of their time, and so there remains stigma to outsourcing “female-coded” tasks, like laundry, cooking, or home childcare.

Low sees Having It All as a rejoinder to Sheryl Sandberg’s Lean In: While “leaning in is doing more of what’s not working,” as Low put it, she wants readers of her book to “level up” by removing whatever constraints they’re able to.

Of course, many of the problems facing working women remain systemic, and she writes in the book’s afterword about the necessity of societal changes, including parental leave underwritten by the federal government and creative thinking by employers about how to allow female employees to meet both their professional and domestic obligations during peak child-rearing eras.

After a book tour, Low is now back in Philly with her two young children and her wife and still reveling in the charms of her city.

“When I was busy and on book tour,” she said, “neighbors walked my son to school.”

Readers told Low that they are making changes to their personal lives based on the book. No one has told her they’re moving to Philadelphia — yet.