Program: How swapping a husband for a wife made this economist better off

Corrine
I gave birth to my son and also a midlife crisis at the same time.

Yumi
It's 2017 and Corinne Low is juggling being the sole breadwinner in her household, commuting by train to her job in a whole other state, and pumping breast milk in the carriage toilets.

Corrine
I would sometimes spend six hours on the train to be in the office for four hours. And then I would still feel like I missed those joyful moments with my son. So I wasn't the type of mom I wanted to be and I felt like I was falling behind in my career.

Yumi
This level of stress and misery was not what Corinne imagined for her life. She'd been on track to land the prestigious position of Tenured Professor of Economics at Wharton University in Philadelphia. She was kick-ass. She was smart. She was accomplished.

Corrine
I saw my mom struggling financially and I said, you've got to get your education, you've got to have a good career because that's how you're going to support yourself. And so I just laser focused on that. And then, you know, I started dating a nice guy and married him and, you know, kind of felt like the rest was going to work itself out.

Yumi
Oh, my friend, guess what? It didn't work itself out. Corinne was gobsmacked to find herself stuck in the very gender roles she'd been warning her students about for years. Earning the money, but also doing the cooking and the cleaning, taking care of the emotional needs of her family and being the default parent. And it was costing her dearly. As you're going to hear, Corinne made some big changes in her life to redress the horrendous, but also very typical imbalance of labour in her marriage. Best of all, she's written a book called Feminomics that can help us see the truckload of bullshit that we put up with from an economic perspective and about the way the exploitation of female labour is sewn into the DNA of marriage and heterosexuality. I'm Yumi Stynes, ladies we need to talk about levelling up with Corinne Low.

Corrine
The advice that I give in my book is like to really think about partner selection.

Yumi
Corinne is an economist. Her work is about viewing the world on a ledger of profit and loss, even romantic relationships. She says women get clouded by love when we're starting out with a partner and we do not ask the right questions.

Corrine
We just kind of fall into it because we fall in love with somebody. And, you know, then before you know it, that love wears thin because no one is cute when you're cleaning their toothpaste off the bathroom sink.

Yumi
Corinne reckons that right off the bat, yes, I'm talking about even in that gorgeous love bubble phase, women should be making tough assessments about how their partner is going to support them in the running of the household down the track.

Corrine
Think about who do you want to be the co-CEO of your household with you because it's an incredibly important role. And I don't think we think about it as carefully as we plot our career choices.

Yumi
So is your point that we need to be way more careful in choosing that life partner?

Corrine
Yeah, I think we interview for the wrong position. I think we interview for the position of boyfriend. And so we ask questions like, what kind of movies do you like? Whereas if we were actually interviewing for the position that they're going to fill in our life, which is, you know, the co-CEO of your household, you know, then we should be asking who does your laundry? What do you like to cook for dinner? What was the last piece of furniture that you ordered online? And do you have a good dentist recommendation? Because you're going to find out that the last person who made him a dentist appointment was his mother, and he's waiting for you to be the next person to make him one.

Yumi
Looking back at her own experience, Corinne sees that there were some early warning signs that her husband was not going to be a capable co-CEO.

Corrine
I mean, the division of labour before we got married, before we had a baby, was already a struggle.

Yumi
When her son came along, that gap widened even further.

Corrine
I felt like I didn't have any time to, you know, try to devote to my career because I was also trying to keep the home, you know, running and organised and trying to take care of my son and reading all of the books that are going to tell you how to parent.

Yumi
It was a time Corinne calls the squeeze. This is when your home responsibilities peak, right when you really need to put in serious hard yards at work to advance your career. But for Corinne, and for so many of us, this is a time when the male partner just does not step up. They are quite happy to watch you pick up more of the homework, while theirs stays unchanged. Corinne's experience isn't unique. Research backs it up.

Corrine
The data shows that it's going to get more unequal, actually, when you get married. It gets more unequal when you have children. And so I think you've got to fix it. You've got to nip it in the bud. The time to have the conversation is now. It's yesterday. Because the more you let it go on, the more it's going to take from you. And when you let yourself become a depleted shell of yourself in service of your family, you're not doing anyone

Yumi
any favours. Before we go any further, I want to bring up the phrase that you use, home production. I'm in at the office at the moment. I just had the most hilarious conversation about 20 minutes ago with a bunch of women in their middle age, talking about the mental load and how the first time they heard that phrase was on this podcast. And I was like, wait till you hear the lady I'm about to interview this afternoon. Home production is a really interesting way to describe that domestic labour. Can you explain why you use those words?

Corrine
Yeah, absolutely. This is so important. From an economics perspective, when you wipe the countertop, when you order throw pillows and you put them on the couch, when you make a delicious meal, you are creating economic value. And so that has just as much value as when you go to work and you produce something that somebody buys and somebody gives you a paycheck for that. Because you are creating what we call utility, which is how economists measure happiness and welfare and wellbeing. And so it's no more valuable to have the paycheck that allows you to buy groceries that put the meal on the table than it is to be the one who plans the meal, shops for the meal and cooks the meal to put it on the table.

Yumi
What Corinne is saying is that home production is economic production, only we don't traditionally put a price tag on it.

Corrine
If you had to outsource that, if you had to hire somebody to do all those tasks that women do day in and day out, let me tell you that price tag would be enormous.

Yumi
There are tasks around the house that are obvious, like taking out the bins, mowing the lawn, barbecuing, that stereotypically men carry out.

Corrine
But underneath the surface, there's that iceberg of invisible labour, right? And that's the part that women so often end up owning. And that's the unglamorous stuff that keeps the household running. It's not cooking the nice meal or barbecuing, it's feeding a toddler three meals and two snacks a day and

Yumi
cleaning up after them. Yeah, it never, ever ends, that stuff too. So can you talk to us about what happens in a household when women earn more than their male spouses? Do the male spouses then pick up more of the work around the house?

Corrine
Yes. So I started looking at the data on women's time use, and I found that when a woman is the primary breadwinner, she still does almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as her lower earning male partner. And I thought it was going to be driven by childcare because, you know, I was like, it makes sense that maybe there's some biological component there or it's because you're the one who's pregnant, you're the ones who breastfeed, you're the one who takes maternity leave. But the disparity is actually larger in cooking and cleaning than it is in childcare. And what I see in the data is that it doesn't matter if the man earns 80% of the household income and then you're like, okay, maybe it's fair, he doesn't do as much around the house, or if he earns 20% of the household income, she is going to do almost double of those cooking and cleaning tasks, and it's really shocking.

Yumi
And what are the external forces that create that and make that okay?

Corrine
I think it has to be gender roles because I tried to give men the benefit of the doubt, and I said, all right, is it that they don't know how to do it? Is it about productivity and they didn't learn how to do these tasks, right? But what I see is that even when they become unemployed, what I see is they don't take on those tasks. What happens when they become unemployed is their leisure time just skyrockets. They're sitting on the couch, they're playing video games, right? But when there's a woman in the household, they start just assuming that she's going to do it.

Yumi
Surely the word entitlement needs to come into this conversation, Corinne.

Corrine
I mean, I think as a society, we just devalue women's time so much and we program men that what's important in their lives is their individual ambition, right? Whatever they want to accomplish. And we have got to rewrite those scripts because it's not working. And when you look at the fact that global fertility is falling, I think it is a lot of women saying, this is a bad deal, right? I used to have to get married out of economic necessity because I needed him to support me. But if I have my own paycheck and I'm still going to be expected to act like a homemaker even though I have a full-time job, it's not a good deal.

Yumi
It's a terrible deal. And can you tell us how the amount of child-rearing labor time has gone up in recent years?

Corrine
So for anybody who's listening that's an elder millennial or who's Gen X, right? Our bedtime routine was go to bed, okay? Nobody read our stories. Nobody laid there with us for an hour. We were out biking around the neighborhood. No snacks, no water bottles. I mean, we must have been very dehydrated, right? And now when you think about our children, right, we are driving them to activities. We are holding those babies. We're baby-wearing. We're extended breastfeeding. We're pumping when we go back to work. We're reading the 10,000 books. We're doing the socio-emotional processing. We're sitting on the floor. We're sitting on the kitchen table doing homework. It never ends. And it literally shows up in the time use data that moms today are spending twice as much time. It's on average an extra seven hours a week. And if you think about that, an extra seven hours a week when our careers are also more demanding and when men's time doing housework is the same as it was in the 1970s, ladies, we need to talk because it doesn't add up.

Yumi
Can you tell us about how when you had your son, so in your particular example, how the domestic labor split between you and your husband?

Corrine
Yeah. I feel like I don't want to make my ex-husband into a caricature because, you know, he did like people would be like, oh, yeah, he's kind of a good guy, right? He holds the baby or he gives the baby a bottle sometimes or takes him for a walk or whatever, right? But the key thing was he wasn't working and I was.

Yumi
But wait, because while Corrine was drowning in all that male entitlement, that thankless labor, the cooking, the shopping, the knowing how to get things done labor, the world thought, hmm, let's add something so left field, so unpredictable that it'll be like tossing a live grenade into a grand piano. Yep. Let's add to this already tough scenario. A pandemic.

Corrine
And we didn't have child care for 13 weeks. And, you know, he said, OK, well, I can take the baby for this hour and then you have him for, you know, this time. And then I said, like, wait a minute, only one of us is earning a paycheck and it's me. And he was starting a business. So in his mind, he was working, right? In his mind, he still needed all of that time, but it wasn't paying any of our bills. I was taking on extra courses in my teaching job, you know, just to make extra money because we only had one paycheck coming in. And I saw so many of my friends twisting themselves into pretzels to make things work for their families. And I thought I cannot imagine a woman saying, oh, we just had a new baby. I'm going to leave my job and try to start a business, you

Yumi
know. Even though she'd been researching this stuff for years, Corinne was still shocked at how much gender roles dictated when it came to looking after her son during COVID. And she noticed a pattern.

Corrine
I looked at my male colleagues and when that pandemic child care interruption came in, whatever their wives were doing, their wives were the ones to take on that extra labor because their husbands were professors at Wharton. Of course, they needed the time to work. And I was like, wait a minute, I'm a professor at Wharton, but that was never even a thought or a consideration. And I know I'm not alone because I have so many friends who are in the same position. When they are breadwinners, it never reverses. You never see that male homemaker who really owns the domestic labor the way that women do. Yeah.

Yumi
Oh, my God. No, I've never seen it in my life. You've written about useless man syndrome. Can you tell me a bit more about that?

Corrine
Yeah. And ironically, this is going back to the blog that I had when I was in graduate school. And so, ironically, I was already picking up on these patterns. This was pre-baby, right? And I was talking about this idea that men get to pretend to be incompetent, right? They get to claim like, you're just better at cooking, or you just notice when things need to be cleaned around the house, or the baby just calms down better with you, right? And I was like, wait a minute, but you go to work and you have competence at work, right? Or when you need to learn something for whatever activity you're into, you learn it for that. So, is it really about skill and ability, or is it about a choice?

Yumi
When Corrine had a baby, it wasn't as if everything she needed to know to raise her son was suddenly downloaded into her brain from a great uterus-shaped computer in the sky. She taught herself what to do. She read books. She followed forums. She talked to other people with experience.

Corrine
invested in my competence. And so, I think when we talk about weaponized incompetence for men, it's because it's a choice. It's a choice to say, this isn't an area that I'm actually going to invest in. This isn't an area that I'm going to prioritize because I'm going to let my wife do it. And so, one of my strategies for women that I recommend in the book is to choose your own areas to weaponize your incompetence. So, find some areas in your household to say, oh, I don't know anything about that. You're going to have to deal with that.

Yumi
Eve Rodsky talks a bit about this in her work. Do you have any examples of where you could possibly step away and the household doesn't fall to ruin and the garbage doesn't remain inside the house?

Corrine
Yeah. Well, it depends on, you know, your particular relationship, right? And you do need a partner who is somewhat invested. You know, there's different approaches I would use. If your partner is somewhat invested in this, right, then I would use something like Eve Rodsky's method where you actually sit down and you say, here's what the work of running a household looks like. What areas am I going to own and what areas are you going to own? And if you're going to own it, listen, I don't need a low-level junior employee to delegate to, okay? I need a co-CEO.

Yumi
Some partners will not be willing to step up to a managerial position. And if that's the case, Corrine reckons you have to redirect your efforts.

Corrine
You've got to find the energy that you are putting into him and putting into the relationship and you've got to get it back, right? Yeah. So you've got to stop trying to cook the dinner that he likes to eat and the kids like to eat and everything is going to be, you know, perfect and beautiful. You've got to stop doing his laundry. You've got to stop picking up his dry cleaning. You've got to try to get your energy back and put it into what you need and what your kids need. And then sink or swim. He's either going to step up and realize that he needs to run the load of laundry if he needs underwear for work or he's going to smell bad, but that's going to be his problem.

Yumi
In her own life, Corrine realized what needed to change. She got

Corrine
divorced. I have to admit it was only once it became crystal clear that the situation was not serving my son that I finally said, that's it, I'm done. And looking back, I had this deep grief that once I was divorced and the clouds parted and my life was actually so much easier and I got tenure because I had time to work and I got the help that I needed and I moved to a cheaper city, seven minutes from my job instead of two and a half hours from my job. And I made friends and I felt young again. And then I felt this deep grief that I hadn't thought that I deserved that, that I was only willing to make that change once I thought it was better for my son, but not for myself. And that's part of why I wrote the book was to tell women, whatever it is in your life that's not working, and maybe it's not your marriage that needs to change. Maybe it's your job. Maybe it's where you live. Maybe it's other relationships in your life that aren't serving you. But if it feels like you are gritting your teeth to get through every day, if you're collapsing into a pile of tears at the end of the day, if you can't remember the last time you had true joy, if you don't feel alive in your body, if you don't feel connected to the experience of your life, you get to make a change just for you.

Yumi
It's a radical message that we deserve to set up our lives in a way that makes us happy. In her book, Corinne explains the concept of utility. This is a measure of what makes you happy, but also adds meaning to your life. And it's different for everyone. For some people, it might be time spent deeply laughing with close friends or how much bushwalking through nature you get to do. For someone else, it might be winning at a baking competition. Corinne says to imagine your unique utility being measured at the end of your life, you want to imagine amassing the most points like it's a video game score. We get

Corrine
the message that for us, happiness is everybody else being happy. It's my partner, my kids, my boss all being happy with me. That means I did a good job. But we have to get back in touch with what actually makes us happy, what actually makes us fulfilled. Because at the end of the day, that video game score is ours.

Yumi
So, Corinne, I've heard you say stagnation is a decision. What do you mean by that?

Corrine
I think one thing is fear. It's just the unknown is so scary. And I was there myself before I got divorced. I was like, it's going to be so hard, right? It's like to do everything myself. It's going to be so hard. But you don't realize in a marriage that's not working, you already were doing everything yourself, but you had an extra person to take care of. So, the data actually shows that women's time cooking and cleaning goes down after a divorce because they weren't dividing the work with their husbands, right? Their husband was creating more work to be done, right? And so, I was in the lucky position. I know you were in this position too of actually being the breadwinner. And even though that felt very unfair when I was married, it gave me the ability and the freedom to leave.

Yumi
How did you meet the woman who would become your wife?

Corrine
Great question. So, this is the happy spoiler alert, which is that after I got divorced, I didn't want to date men anymore. And I decided to set my Tinder profile to women only because I was just decided I needed a break from those gender roles that were making those decisions for me. And so, I put all my profiles, I put only women, and I met my wife on a dating app called Hinge. But I happened to meet somebody who I loved, who's an amazing partner. We had a baby together. I had a baby six months ago, so I have a new baby this time around and things are feeling really different. Wow. And it is so refreshing to have a partner where we divide things up according to our strengths and our preferences and our schedules, but not according to gender.

Yumi
So, is this solution for all of us to become lesbians?

Corrine
I don't think it's a choice for everyone. I was lucky to be in the middle of the Kinsey scale that measures your attraction. So, unfortunately, it's not a choice for everyone. But I'm like, I don't think you need to divorce your husband and marry a woman, but I do think you need to marry someone who does the laundry, right? So, I think we have to be choosier because that's the only way men are going to change is that the message has to be, look, if you're not showing up as a full partner, you are not getting my reproductive and domestic labor that is tremendously valuable, okay? I am not just giving that away.

Yumi
I'm a huge advocate for divorcing your husband, which drives my producers nuts because they're like, Yumi, you've got to stop saying that. But why do so many women stay even when they're feeling exploited, when they're feeling underappreciated, when they're feeling tired?

Corrine
I do think there's a lot of reasons that women stay, but I think they can feel empowered by the data, right, that says time-wise from a marriage that's not working, it actually will get easier on the other side.

Yumi
Yeah, it's kind of like having a rotten tooth pulled, unpleasant while it's happening, but a vast improvement in quality of life once it's out. And look, I know being able to leave your husband requires a fair bit of privilege. So, let's put a pin in that for now and think about how we can wrestle back some real time for ourselves in a meaningful way right now.

Corrine
So, maybe you outsource something or maybe you just say no to something, but you're going to get something off your plate. And what I want you to replace it with is true leisure time. And what I mean by leisure time is something that fills your cup first. It's not for anybody else, not baking cookies with your kids. That's parenting. You might enjoy it, but that's parenting. Something that fills your cup. Because if you think in terms of utility points, leisure is productive. The same way if you go to work for an hour, you get money and you can buy something that gives you utility, it's just as productive to spend your time on something that gives you utility. And you've got to treat it like a sacred obligation because you only get one life. So, whatever it is that brings you joy, I want you to block that out on your calendar, get something else off of your plate and put leisure time in its place and refill your cup because we can't keep going on like this. Something has to change.

Yumi
Thank you to Corinne Low for your amazing insights. And yes, if you're someone who is ready to admit that something has to change, I hope you have in your life at least a tiny seed of something that gives you joy. A seed that you can plant and nurture and grow and turn it into something thriving and maybe even eventually spend your later years sitting in the shade of this wonderful thing that you've grown. This podcast was produced on the lands of the Gundungurra, Gadigal and Muwinina peoples. Ladies, We Need To Talk is mixed by Anne-Marie de Bettencourt, produced by Elsa Silberstein and Sarah Mashman. Supervising Producer is Tamar Cranswick and our Executive Producer is Alex Lollback. This series was created by Claudine Ryan.