How women and men are to live together is an age-old question – illuminated, for example, in the novels of Jane Austen, which reveal a tension between marriage as romantic union and economic contract. More than 200 years later, women’s social position has changed immeasurably, yet the complexities of their relationships with men, both in the workforce and especially in the home, remain unresolved.
Starting from the premise that women collectively shoulder an unfair social burden relative to men, US economist Corinne Low sets out to help women negotiate better “deals” in all aspects of their lives. Of Austen’s twin concerns of romance and economics, Low’s focus is decisively on the latter. She invokes the economic concept of a “utility function”, which describes and quantifies a person’s individual preferences and advises women to “think of this as your personal ‘profit’ that you can maximise in the same way a business does”.
Acknowledging that people’s life choices are often constrained, Low nonetheless wants to give women tools to negotiate their “constrained optimum” while advocating for broader social changes that benefit all women. One of the central concerns of the book, and a major underlying explanation of women’s economic disadvantage, is uneven division of labour within the home. Drawing on data from US time-use surveys, Low points out that women do twice as much cooking and cleaning as men. Furthermore, men’s housework time has remained largely static during the past 40 years despite women having significantly increased their participation in the paid workforce. And men who earn 20% of the household income take on no more housework than men who earn 80%, with many women consequently finding themselves to be “winning the bread and baking it too”. (It should be noted that other studies have found men’s contribution has lifted, and that both are “parenting” more than previous generations.)
The book’s genesis is Low’s own unhappy marriage, which she left for a better “deal” that involved moving from New York to Philadelphia to be closer to her job – she is an associate professor at the Wharton School – and employing a live-in au pair to care for her child. Low is sufficiently self aware to concede this particular solution would not be available to all women (least of all the au pair) and is careful to acknowledge that women’s individual constraints and “utility functions” may vary. But the book is nonetheless rooted in the experience of affluent, university-educated American women for whom work-life balance might mean limiting working hours to “only” 40 per week in lieu of the 70 or 80 required to “make partner” in a law firm.
While Low positions the book as radical because it gives women permission to eschew a single-minded pursuit of career success, in a sense her advice is a truism: do what will make you happiest. What is more interesting is her recognition that what makes women happy may differ, on average, from what makes men happy, and these differential preferences might have, at least in part, a biological basis related to women’s and men’s asymmetrical roles in reproduction.
A deeper consideration of this possibility would be welcome but Low skates rather swiftly to the conclusion that “denying these realities [is] more regressive than acknowledging them and trying to figure out how equality of opportunity can be achieved alongside them”.
In particular, Low warns, women must be alert to the ways in which their (arguably) greater propensity for care can be exploited. For example, married heterosexual women who take on more of the burden of childcare and housework to the detriment of their careers will find themselves economically dependent on their husbands as long as they are married and financially disadvantaged if their marriages end. Whereas investment in the home has both immediate and long-term benefits for the family as a whole, investment in one’s career provides a long-term earnings advantage that the career-spouse takes with them on leaving a marriage. Low encourages women to keep tabs on these inequalities and actively mitigate them, at one point suggesting women should start planning for divorce from the day they are married.
Polemical in style, the writing is peppered with business analogies – “I often think of dating as a job interview” – and self-help jargon – “I want you to practise the exercise of turning up the volume on your inner truths about what you are seeking in life”.
These latter exhortations at times read as if Low is directly addressing her former self from the security of a new relationship with a woman who “does my laundry while I travel, coaches my kid’s soccer team and never asks me what to make when it’s her night for dinner”.
The ex-husband whose behaviour prompted all of this remains an indistinct figure with the exception of one telling insight. Low reports when she was struggling to renegotiate the division of labour in her household, he accused her of being “transactional about time”. There is, in truth, something a little depressing about Low’s framing of relationships in such terms. But as Austen’s heroines were aware, romantic choices carry material consequences and – if romance dies – the ledger of gains and losses may be all that remains.
