By Contributor,Rachel Burchfield

Copyright forbes

Dr. Corinne Low
Courtesy of Wharton

In her new book Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, Wharton professor and economist Dr. Corinne Low confirms through data what nearly every woman has always known: having it all is a fallacy. Women aren’t getting a good deal at home or at work, and our happiness is drained as a result. What can be done? Well, there’s actually good news—the data, laid out in Low’s book, can help women make decisions that can help us reclaim our time and our energy. As Low writes, we may not be able to have it all, but we can have it almost.

Low is an associate professor of business and economics and dedicates Having It All to, appropriately, “the women who just can’t do it all.”

“I think that anybody who’s trying to do it all feels like they can’t, right?” Low tells me on Zoom, herself just 12 weeks postpartum and in the middle of a book launch. (She gets it.) “They feel like, ‘I can’t measure up,’ or ‘I can’t handle all this,’ or ‘I’m so exhausted’ and they wonder, ‘Is it just me?’”

Having It All—out September 23—vociferously proves that any woman that feels this way is decidedly not alone. “I think any woman is—they’re feeling like they’re failing,” Low says. “And that was part of why it was so important.” She adds that she wanted to look at the data “because the data shows that they are not alone,” Low continues. “The data shows that I was not alone when I was experiencing this in my own life. And the data shows me that the problems that we’re facing are structural and that, really, they need systemic solutions.”

‘Having It All’ is out on Sept. 23.
Courtesy of Dr. Corinne Low

“You have to decide what actually matters to you”

But there is some power in our own hands, Low asserts: “At the same time, though, there’s things that we can do, and I think the book aims to make people feel more empowered facing that kind of impossibility to really make their own choices about how they want to navigate it,” she says.

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Low knew, when researching for the book, that there would be inequality in childbearing—after all, only women can carry the child, breastfeed and so on. “But that was actually not the biggest inequality in the data,” she tells me, explaining that the biggest inequality fell in what can be categorized as housework—the cooking and cleaning. “And that was pretty shocking for me because that’s not biological—that’s not inherently female,” Low tells me. “And in fact, we see in the data that when men are single, either before marriage or when they’re divorced, that they actually do it [housework] themselves. And so I think that was a piece that was really shocking, and it really to us showed how prevalent gender roles are.”

One of my favorite concepts in the book was the reframe of having it almost instead of the futile attempt to have it all, as the book’s title suggests. “I want to be really specific when it comes to women that you cannot have a career that’s going to be identically exactly to your male colleagues and a life at home that looks like what you see on Instagram, because those two things do not add up in terms of hours in the day,” Low says. “And so you have to decide what actually matters to you and what you need to have a happy and fulfilled life, and that you can have. And so that’s what I call ‘having it almost.’”

Now that we have established that having it all—at least society’s definition of the term—isn’t possible, let’s also combat the impossible work-life balance standards women attempt to hold themselves to. Forbes reported in 2024 data from a 2022 Gallup report that found that 60% of people are emotionally detached at work, and an additional 19% are downright miserable. “This pervasive detachment highlights a fundamental issue: striving for balance is unrealistic and insufficient,” according to Forbes.

Furthermore, research from the American Psychological Association added that stress from attempting to juggle both work and life “is a significant contributor to declining mental health,” Forbes reported, citing the APA’s annual “Stress in America” survey, which found that “work is a top source of stress, often compounded by the pressures of home life.”

“The expectation to balance these seamlessly only exacerbates the problem,” Forbes reported.

“You deserve to have it all—not the perfectionistic, unattainable version of balance defined by society, but the version that feels right for you,” Low writes in the book.

“‘How did my mom do this?’ The answer is that she didn’t”

The book discusses hidden factors that influence women’s decisionmaking and how these choices alter the course of our lives; it also speaks to unique challenges faced by women—ones we have to navigate that men don’t. Low specifically points to women’s career paths taking into account so many additional factors that the career paths of men just don’t. “We’re tired,” Low writes in the book. “Something’s gotta change.” Low examines how women’s happiness and mental health are, in her words, “cratering,” and how “women can’t bend anymore without breaking.” Low herself writes about relatably feeling as though she was failing at everything all at once. I don’t know a woman, actually, who hasn’t felt this way.

“You deserve to have it all—not the perfectionistic, unattainable version of balance defined by society, but the version that feels right for you,” Low writes.

There are reasons why women on the whole feel like it’s too much, Low tells me, explaining that women have entered the workforce in increasing numbers, but “meanwhile, men haven’t changed their kind of behavior at home,” she says. To the point referenced earlier, “men’s housework hours have stayed relatively constant since the mid-1970s,” Low says, armed with data to back her case up. “So women are taking on these dramatically new roles, but men aren’t taking on new roles. So that leaves us kind of playing double duty—offense and defense—at home. And then at the same time, careers are more demanding than ever. So for college educated women on these sort of intensive career tracks, those careers are asking more of us than ever before.”

To add to this, in the 1990s, many views of childhood development changed, so “parents actually started investing a lot more time in their kids,” Low adds. “And so when women today now wonder, ‘Whoa, juggling this all feels like way too much—how did my mom do this?’ The answer is that she didn’t.”

Parents today, she continues, are in the picture with their kids 24/7, “and that is very different, and it means that there’s only so many hours in the day,” Low says. “What we can do in every other domain has to shift to accommodate that, and if it doesn’t, then what we’re giving up is our sleep and our wellbeing and our health.”

Well, that sounds familiar.

Dr. Corinne Low
Shira Yudkoff

“You have to say, ‘Does it work for me?’”

Low calls it “the squeeze”: “I want to give women permission to be like, ‘Oh, I get to navigate this however I want, because I am facing an impossible set of circumstances,’” she tells me. “And so there’s no wrong answer. And that means that if I want to say no to certain things at work, if I want to say no to certain things at home or certain expectations on myself, if I want to make choices as a parent to say, ‘Okay, my kid can only have one activity that I need to drive them to, but I can’t do any more of that,’ then that’s perfectly valid.”

In all of this, she says, we as women can’t forget about ourselves—that we need to sometimes take a step back to recenter on our own needs. “And if your own needs are always coming dead last, there is no way that that can be kind of a life well-lived, filled with joy and meaning, because you’re not actually experiencing your life, you are just surviving it,” Low says. (Did I hear an amen in the back of the room?) “So, to get practical, one of the major things I tell people to do is to remember that they are a member of their household. So when you’re saying, ‘Oh, how does this work for everybody?’ you have to say, ‘Does it work for me?’”

Even before reading Having It All, Low encourages everyone to first get in touch with their values and what’s important to you for a good life, and then to start aligning their time with that vision. She encourages women to pay themselves first with time, realizing that “the system is a system where women have taken on increasingly more. We’ve had this gender revolution where now we can play the same role in the market as men. We can earn as much money as men, but we haven’t had a gender revolution at home.”

Whose fault is this? “I’m going to say it’s literally the clock—the reality of 24 hours in the day compared to what is now being piled on our shoulders and asked of us,” Low tells me. “And so I see this in my data. When you just look at women’s time use, you’re like, ‘Wait a minute, this doesn’t add up,’ because time at work has gone up. Men’s time on housework hasn’t changed, and time on childcare has gone up. So how am I supposed to actually make that add up? You can’t.”

“What I hope to give women is the tools to say, ‘Okay, now that I know that it’s not my fault, now that gives me permission to say no, to make different choices and to not feel like a failure, but instead to feel like that is my optimization subject to the reality of the constraints that I’m facing,’” she adds.

Low tells me that when women read Having It All, she hopes they realize—perhaps for the first time—that they’re not alone. She also hopes that they take some of the strategies in the book into their own lives to tackle the constraints stacked up against them, to have permission to define what success looks like for them, realizing it’s not one uniform solution.

“You have permission to define what success looks like in your own life and to pursue it and to use some of the strategies in the book to pursue it,” Low says.

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