Corinne Low: ‘I’m more concerned about the female happiness gap than the gender wage gap’

In the book Winning the Bread and Baking It Too, the economist Corinne Low, along with Kyle Hancock and Jeanne Lafortune, analyzes how even when women are the primary breadwinners, they perform two to four times more housework than men. Their research explores how households could benefit if lower-income men adjusted their schedules to take on more domestic tasks and allowed higher-income women to work longer hours outside the home. Their analysis revealed that the time women spend on housework decreases after divorce, while men’s time increases. In other words, men are technically capable of performing basic tasks, but they simply choose not to.

Upon seeing this data, Corinne Low analyzed her own situation. In 2017, shortly after having her first child, she found herself pumping breast milk in the bathroom at work and then crying on the way home because she wouldn’t be able to put her son to bed in time. She reflected on how her husband, who had quit his job to start a business, was doing nothing around the house. “How could an economist have accepted such a terrible deal?” she wondered. That’s when she decided to make some drastic changes.

She got a divorce and moved from New York to Philadelphia, where instead of spending two and a half hours a day on the train to commute to work, she could reach the office in seven minutes by bicycle. In Philly, she could afford a live-in au pair, which meant having real help with her son for the first time. “Even when it was clear that my marriage wasn’t working, I had been so scared of the prospect of single parenting that I was willing to accept a bad deal. Imagine my surprise when, instead of getting harder, things actually got easier. I had more time, more energy, new work ideas. I daresay I was even...well-rested? The data validates my experience here: divorced mothers sleep more than married ones,” she asserted in Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours (Flatiron Books, 2025), a book that poses the question of what would happen if the world stopped assuming that the problems in women’s lives are all caused by their own choices. Instead, it proposes examining the structural, economic, and biological factors that force and limit those choices. Low asserts that by accepting a job, getting married, or deciding to have children, each person makes a commitment in which they invest time, money, and effort in exchange for a reward.

In her writing, she explains how she realized that if she wanted to “have it all,” she would have to do without her partner. She also knew that her next partner wouldn’t be a man. “Men don’t disgust me physically, but socially and politically,” she told The Cut. “Being attracted to women wasn’t a conscious choice, but actively excluding men from my options for partners was.”

“I say that ironically. I’ve had great conversations about the book with men who really do want to do better,” she clarifies to EL PAÍS. “When I say that, I don’t mean individual men. I mean men as a class, who have done many things that have made things hard for women. And that’s precisely what I present in the book,” she explains.

Question. When talking about “excluding men” when looking for a partner, it might seem that a bisexual person is choosing whether to date men or women and directing their desire…

Answer. What I mean is, I set my Tinder settings to show me only women, but I don’t think we can choose who we’re attracted to. I present this data that shows that lesbian couples divide the housework more evenly than heterosexual couples. And I joke that this is why being a lesbian is an evidence-based decision. It’s true that I went through a rough heterosexual marriage. And when I got out of it, I thought, ‘I don’t feel attracted to men right now, because I don’t want to deal with their bullshit!’ And I decided to only date women. But I’m not making a proclamation that says nobody should marry a man.

Q. Can men have it all?

A. If a man is married, the default position is that he will have it all because he gets to have his kids, he gets to have his house, somebody is looking after those things and he gets to have his career and nobody questions that. I think many unmarried men now have a harder time—and this is where I believe there’s hope for change—because they wonder why women reject them. They don’t realize that what they need to do is be better partners, not get angry with women or try to control them.

Q. How can we make them see that they really need to improve in that area?

A. It’s a big question, and I think we can and must answer it to end some really deep societal problems that we’re having right now because I think angry men are really bad for society. We need different influencers, because there are many men sending the message—which comes from the manosphere—that what you should do is be angry and then you should start being mean to women. They are encouraged to look for “a submissive woman,” and the problem is the feminists who don’t want to listen to men. There are many influencers who promote this hatred of women, and so we need different voices providing the opposite. I follow some positive male influencers on Instagram, and I hope they gain more traction.

Q. You say you are raising your son so that he “won’t be a useless man” in the future. How are you doing that?

A. I try to involve him in the work that I’m doing. I say things like, “we have to clean up the living room so that we can stay here and watch a movie” or “we have to put the game away so that we don’t lose pieces,” or I make dinner with him. He loves helping me cook, although this only happens when they’re little, and as they get older, there comes a point when they don’t want to help anymore, and you have to keep trying. Another important thing is showing him that I’m a whole person and that my life doesn’t revolve solely around him. When I became a mom, I wanted to be different from my own mother and be a present, sensitive, and considerate mother who prioritized his needs. But I let it go on the other direction and let my own needs come last. So now part of my mantra is that if something is going to work for us as a family, it has to work for me. And I make that very clear. Something important that parents must do to raise the next generation is to show that mom gets to be a person too because otherwise, if you give everything and leave yourself nothing, he’s going to expect that from his wife in the future.

Q. The idea of being a single mother frightened you, and that’s why you found yourself trapped in your marriage, a common predicament.

A. I want to make it clear that for many women, their marriage can be saved, and if it can, being married has many advantages. I remember a woman joking that she had to get married because she couldn’t afford an apartment in this city. But if deep down you know you’re not getting what you need from the relationship, you have to do something about it. The sad thing is that fear prevents us from exploring other options. That’s why I tell women to think about negotiation theory and their best alternative to negotiated agreement, and ask themselves the following questions: What would it really be like to be single? What would it really look like to be single? And how can I make it a better deal? So how can I invest in my human capital? Even if I’m a stay-at-home mom, why not take a course or get a certificate? I encourage people to do that so they can then clearly express what they need for the relationship to work. And if they don’t get it, they shouldn’t be afraid to consider other options, keeping in mind that if you try to make a change, sometimes things get harder before they get better.

Q. As an economist, you saw that your marriage wasn’t “a good deal.” How can we think like economists when analyzing our relationships and making decisions?

A. It doesn’t really have that much to do with me being an economist. It’s human nature to see what’s in front of us and try to solve it in the moment, because our genes evolved in a survival scenario, a life-or-death situation. We have to move out of survival mode and into self-actualization mode, which is difficult. Men have been taught from a young age that the purpose of their lives is to fulfill their ambitions, self-actualization, to achieve something, and that’s why there are so many books for men about how to achieve certain things. Because that’s how they’ve been programmed: this is their goal in life. That can sometimes conflict with family needs. One example I see in my data is couples where the wife earns twice as much as the husband, but he still works more hours than she does. Because he still sees his goal as going to work and earning as much money as possible, he doesn’t realize that if he could take something off her plate and she could work more hours, as a household they would have more money. It would mean putting aside his individual ambition to improve the family’s situation. That’s why I believe men need to be deprogrammed from the idea that success only means achieving individual success, earning as much money as possible, and satisfying their own individual ambitions, and to think more in terms of family.

Q. The world seems very concerned about the epidemic of male loneliness, but what about the happiness crisis that haunts women?

A. If we’re worried about male loneliness, I have a solution: teach men how to be better partners. In a way, it’s a broader phenomenon of all of us being siloed in our lives and lonely and not knowing how to form community. We should be hand-wringing more about female happiness, and this shows how society is set up to think that men matter and women don’t because you don’t see a bunch of think pieces and hand-wringing about female happiness and you don’t see that being put on men. I’m more concerned about the female happiness gap than the gender wage gap. If women are unhappy also, so many women being the primary parent, that’s also bad for the next generation.

Q. In 2012, Anne-Marie Slaughter published an article in The Atlantic titled “Why Women Still Can’t Have It All.” In 2025, why will women still not be able to have it all?

A. Parenting is harder now than it was a generation ago because the trade-off is harder. Parenting has become so much more intensive, and so that’s why I think we’re going to have to change our definition of what that is, and it’s going to mean letting everything be imperfect, from careers to how we parent and how we keep our homes, because otherwise it just doesn’t add up in a 24-hour day.

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