Having It All

Women can carry, deliver, and feed children, using only their own bodies. Men cannot. That marvelous, miraculous difference is irreducible, immutable. It frustrates intellectuals who think they should be able to impose the idealized egalitarian worlds that exist only in their febrile imaginations. 

A particular version of the ideal, the “blank slate” (B.S.) version of feminism (see, for example, Steven Pinker, The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature [Penguin, 2022]), has been especially catastrophic. Young women have been told, by teachers and mentors, that “you must have a career!” Implicitly, and often explicitly, they are being told: “Therefore, you must not bear children.” The “blank slate” theory meant that women could be (and implicitly should be) “like men,” and transcend their evolved nature. B.S. feminism holds that norms, desires, and wants are all socially constructed; “we” (intellectual elites) will simply rebuild women to want what we think they should want. 

It turns out that that prison has higher rent and a better view, but it is ultimately just as constraining as the lock-up it sought to supplant. Telling women that they should be biologically identical to men, and should want only careers, is no better than telling them they must be socially subservient to men, suppressing their intellectual abilities and wanting only to mind the home. 

But there was an interesting challenge to B.S. feminism, from inside feminism itself. In 2012, in an essay in ​The Atlantic, Anne-Marie Slaughter famously said:

I still strongly believe that women can “have it all” (and that men can too). I believe that we can “have it all at the same time.” But not today, not with the way America’s economy and society are currently structured. 

Slaughter conceded that the conventional notion that women could “have it all”—full commitment to a demanding career, and full emotional and physical presence with family, and satisfying and fulfilling personal time—was not only nonsense, but psychologically crippling. The message to women seemed to be that each could have it all, if they would just try harder. If you were unhappy, exhausted, and felt you were failing at everything, that was your fault; suck it up!

Slaughter said that was wrong: The problem was that “have it all” could mean, at most, deciding on the idiosyncratic, personal mix of career, family, and personal life that each woman wanted, and having some plausible chance of achieving that goal. Workplaces would need to allow more flexible schedules, emphasizing outcomes rather than physical presence and “face time.” But not just for women; implicitly, such a change would also require men to advocate for more flexible schedules, and to use the time thereby provided to themselves participate more in family and home labor.

It is in this context that Corinne Low, an economist at Wharton (and, full disclosure, a friend, from when she was an undergraduate at Duke) has written. It’s a book that a number of reviewers have found to be strange, even jarring, because it combines her personal journey through a failed marriage, through ultimately abandoning heterosexual relationships. But there is also (jarringly, to some readers) a sophisticated and quite nuanced analysis of a snapshot of modern family life through the lens of a skilled labor economist.

Low explicitly sets out to explain why so many women—especially mothers—experience what she calls “the squeeze,” the sense of being simultaneously over-demanded at home and at work in institutions still optimized for male life cycles. She blends personal narrative with applied microeconomics to argue that women are rational actors navigating contracts—in the labor market and in households—under asymmetric information, bargaining power, and social norms. 

The empirical argument is drawn from three sources: (1) time-use and household-production data showing persistent gender gaps in unpaid labor (“invisible labor”); (2) labor-market evidence on the motherhood penalty and the value of diversity to firm performance; and (3) institutional changes (e.g., divorce law, parental-leave regimes) that shift bargaining sets. In public excerpts and interviews, she synthesizes these streams to show that even when women’s paid hours and earnings converge, household allocations do not—leading to cumulative stress and lower reported well-being. She also frames partner choice and domestic contracting as repeated games, urging ex-ante screening and explicit “co-CEO” household design. 

The findings are straightforward, and not very surprising: Women still do more housework—even when they are primary earners. The “girl-boss” prescription to act like men misdiagnoses a structural problem, because “have no children” is not really more of a free choice than “only have children.” Workplaces designed to accommodate only “uninterrupted careers” collide with gendered expectations at home, and telling women to “lean in” without rebalancing domestic production creates “the squeeze.”

There are some specific findings which may strike readers as utilitarian and impersonal. But Low is an economist (bless her heart), and that’s how we roll. First, it should be recognized that, whatever the rhetoric, household inequality is “sticky”: Invisible labor explains why couples who target “50/50” still end up 60/40 or worse; awareness gaps and default task “ownership” drive persistent imbalance. 

Second, marriage is complicated. One cannot think only “like an economist,” but pretending that a vague set of expectations about division of labor after the wedding will happen to match up without effort is naïve, and ultimately self-defeating. Everyone, but especially women, have to treat dating/marriage and domestic roles as contracts, and partners (“Co-CEOs of the household”) must be screened to gauge genuine willingness to share cognitive responsibility and physical workload. 

Third, at the workplace firms benefit from difference, not mimicry. Women need not “perform masculinity” to advance; Low both cites and compiles evidence that heterogeneous teams and leadership styles add measurable value. One has to be careful here, because difference for its own sake is not necessarily productive. But differences in the context of creating context-dependent synergies can be profitable. This recommendation may run afoul of the (sometimes accurate) perception that DEI targeted difference, and crude measures of difference, in ways that did not always add value. But the excesses of some DEI zealots shouldn’t obscure the strong empirical regularity that many forms of difference are valuable. 

I found the evidence, and analysis, persuasive. It is likely that Low is more optimistic than this reviewer about state mandates to hurry such changes along, but much of her work could be read as a recipe for marginal changes implemented by businesses themselves. The fact that there is good evidence that having women as part of the workforce is profitable, and that people (especially, but not only, women) are willing to accept lower pay for greater flexibility, suggests an avenue for negotiation with government coercion. 

This reviewer has a wife, and two sisters, all with professional degrees and careers, who share stories. There have also been conversations with female colleagues over decades that have made the diagnosis, and some of the prescriptions, ring true. But the book is vulnerable to the accusation (made in a number of reviews and commentaries) that Low is focusing on a small, elite cadre of women who (like my wife and sisters) have the opportunity for top-level careers. By rearranging conditions for the benefit of those few women who might “have it all,” there is little here for women (and men, for that matter) who cannot afford children on other dimensions, such as education, housing, and health care. 

While that criticism is fair, I think it is beside the point. At its core, this book is about establishing a setting where more women have a genuine choice and have the agency to pursue their own goals while elevating the importance, and feasibility, of family commitments. Society has made the mistake of over-weighting the difference between women and men. We then tried to “fix” that error by pretending we could simply elide the difference entirely. There has to be a better way.