Melody Wilding: Today I am joined by Dr. Corinne Lowe. She’s a widely respected associate professor of business, economics and public policy at Wharton, which is one of the top business schools in the us. And there she researches gender discrimination and workplace dynamics. She’s here to chat with us today, all about her new book, having It All, what Data Tells Us about Women’s Lives and How to get the most out of yours.

This is a really fascinating conversation because Corrine isn’t one of those academics who just studies the system from the sidelines. She decodes economics, which is tough because in particular, let’s face it, it can be a pretty stale science and she decodes it in a way that is useful to real people making real decisions.

She Is going to help you apply economic thinking to deeply personal questions. You might have things like, should I have kids? When is the right time to have them to avoid any penalty in my career? How do other couples, where both people may be working and have demanding jobs, how do they really negotiate responsibilities behind closed doors?

It’s refreshing because a lot of career growth advice out there for women is very rah rah. You go, girl, you got this. Don’t stress. Take care of you. We are not bringing our pompoms out today, but what you will hear is a thoughtful, insightful, grounded conversation that is perfect. Whether you identify as a woman who is in this stage of life, or you love someone who is, all right, let’s dive in.

Corinne, thank you so much for joining me. I’m so happy to have you on the show.

Corinne Low: Oh, thanks for having me. Can’t wait.

Melody Wilding: Yes. I wanted to start with, there’s this story you tell about way back in 2017, you found yourself in what you call the squeeze. So take

Corinne Low: Yep. Yep.

Melody Wilding: What was happening and how did all of that lead to the book, Having it All.

Corinne Low: Yeah, so I say in the book, I gave birth to my son and also a midlife crisis because everything that I Thought work was had set up to work before I had a baby. Stopped working once I had a baby. So I felt like I was falling behind my male colleagues at work. I was fighting with my husband all.

the time because I felt like I wasn’t getting a fair deal at home.

I was doing more of the home production. Uh, that’s what economists call, you know, housework and childcare and all of those things. And I was commuting two and a half hours to my job. worst of all, um, because at the time we only had one income mine, um, I didn’t feel like I could like throw money at the problem.

Of course, that’s the advice you always get as a working mom is like, spend money to make time and I didn’t feel like I had extra money. So, um, at the time I really felt like I was failing, you know, like I had, you know, messed something up or taken a wrong turn. And then when I started looking at the data, I just realized how much more common this experience was. and that, you know, it wasn’t just me, it was really systemic forces that were squeezing women like me.

Melody Wilding: I think so many people listening to this can relate. Many of the women I work with that listen to the show, they are in demanding roles. They may or may not be the breadwinner. They in their role are often getting saddled with the office housework, which we can talk about yet. That’s only one side of the coin. They also have a big demanding life outside of work. Maybe children, they have pets, they have a house they have to take care of. They may have a aging parents or siblings that they’re also responsible for too. And what the, the book is called Having it All, you know, and I, I think I came up in the Girl Boss kind of era where that lean in, all of that was part of the, the zeitgeist.

Having it all, it carries a lot of baggage with it, which you very expertly and eloquently unpack in the book. So when you are using that term, what do you mean by it and what do you think people are getting wrong about the idea of having it all?

Corinne Low: Yeah, so I mean, I, the term is meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek. The cover is meant to be a little bit tongue in cheek. You know, we, uh, what I show is like having it all is dinner’s on fire. Your baby’s crying, your coffee is spilled, your heel is broken, right? Um, because it’s it’s too much. Having it all is too much.

And I think what we sometimes miss in this conversation is that what it means to have it all has actually changed because are spending twice as much time with our kids as parents a generation ago. And so we are actually trying to do something different than those kind of first women who were the trailblazers who entered the workforce.

that was TV dinners, and. Screen time is a babysitter and formula feeding, right? And we are trying to do the organic homemade baby food and the enriching baby Einstein toys on the floor. The love every toys on the floor, right? And Extended bedtime, tuck-ins and breastfeeding after we go back to work. I’m like, was literally pumping right before we got on the call. Um, so it’s different. We’re playing a different game. And so we feel like we’re losing, you know, this game because we’re, we’re playing a different one. And you know what I document in the book we need talk about the squeeze is the way these pressures just push down on us at one specific point in our lives.

So, as you said, it’s when our kids are young, it’s sometimes it’s when our parents are aging at the same time. It’s when the caregiving responsibilities and the investments that we need to make in our careers peak at the same time. And I think Sheryl Sandberg looked at that data, looked at how women were exiting the workforce, or they were, you know, down cycling in their careers during that period.

And she was like, well, what’s wrong with women? They’re, they’re stepping out when they need to be leaning in, right? Whereas I look at that data and I say, how are these systems failing us? How are these systems failing to support us through this very temporary squeeze that we’re gonna come outta the other side on?

And the problem is too often we’ve had to take kind of a permanent one-way exit in our career to survive this very temporary period.

Melody Wilding: That becomes a compounding effect, right? If you, if you step out for a period of time, then it’s harder to get back in. You may be starting at a lower income, and then there’s this cascading effect of that affects your ability to afford childcare. And it just, the dominoes, the dominoes go.

Corinne Low: And it affects the dynamic within your relationship because then like, oh, okay, well he earns more money, so now his career is the priority. So now he should be the one to take the promotion or take the work trip and you should be the one to stay home with the sick kid, right? And so we see that those small gaps really magnify in relationships.

Um, and that’s why often we see women in heterosexual relationships be on a, a different, um, trajectory in terms of their earnings over time.

Melody Wilding: Now you were mentioning the systems are failing us. I, I do wanna unpack that a little. I also wanna talk about what, what can we do as individuals in, in our day to day while we advocate and unfortunately have to wait for the systems around us to change. But, but let’s start with that first, because, women in particular fall into a lot of self blame, like you were saying.

I, I just can’t balance it all. I see everyone else with their Pinterest perfect, you know, holiday spreads and their kids in perfect clothes, and I feel like I’m just scraping it together every day trying to get by. Maybe I feed myself and wash my hair every once in a while. And what are some of those invisible forces that are working against us that we may have been previously internalizing as, a deficit in ourselves.

Corinne Low: So there’s forces in like our society in terms of how we support working parents, how we support care, labor, labor. And then there’s forces in our jobs that are kind of undermining us, right? So in terms of our career and our earnings, I lay out in the book that there’s kind of four things that hit women.

It is marriage, it’s kids, discrimination, and it’s sexual harassment, and women are facing kind of all four of those forces in their careers. So why do I say that marriage is something that impacts your careers. Well, exactly as I kind of laid out, it’s like, because a husband’s career sometimes ends up being a kind of bigger priority, right?

it’s, there’s that saying like, we marry our glass ceilings, and what you see is that, you know, when men get married, there’s a benefit because, the wife is doing so much more of the home production. He has more time to work, but when a woman gets married, it’s a negative because she’s taking on that work within the household.

And that’s what we see in the data, is that women are still doing twice as much cooking and cleaning even when they’re the breadwinners. So you take a woman who’s the breadwinner, she’s VP at her company, but because within her household she doesn’t have the same support, if you then parallel her with a male VP who has a wife at home, right? She’s coming to the table with half a deck of cards. She just doesn’t have the same hours to kind of lean in to invest in her career.

why kids? Because of women kind of being the default parent because of biologically women are the creators of children, which means pregnancy, childbirth, and breastfeeding.

Those are things that, you know, we cannot outsource. We can’t, you know, to the most part, we, can, if someone do for us. is tremendously labor intensive, and it’s something that the, lean in women of the past became executives. They did not breastfeed and pump after returning to work. This is kind of a newer phenomenon, so if you go back, to really into the, 1990s, less than 20% of women were still breastfeeding at six months, and today that’s 60% of women.

And then discrimination. I document in the book that women face discrimination, both in hiring that you know, they’re still considered just when people think about their gut instinct or you know their overall the airport test, right? Anything that’s relying on those gut feelings or vibes, they are still biased against women, especially when you’re hiring for a role that’s more stereotypically male. So it’s gonna be stronger in STEM jobs. But I have a study showing that in STEM jobs companies would hire a man with a 3.75 GPA over a woman with a 4.0 GPA. And then women are also discriminated against in promotions because firms are anticipating that they might take maternity leave or might take, you know, a step back from their careers.

And so the data shows that even when women go on to not have any children they still get promoted at lower rates than their male colleagues until they hit age 40. And then the boss is like, oh, I guess she’s not gonna have kids. She can have the promotion. So they get discriminated against in hiring, discriminated against in promotion, and then still face sexual harassment.

Which the reason I think it’s important to raise is that’s not just something that makes our jobs inconvenient or annoying. It’s something that actually costs women money. Because when women are sexually harassed and, this is a study out of Sweden showing that. 25% of workers of female workers experience sexual harassment over the course of a year, in male-dominated jobs.

And when they that happens, they’re likely to switch jobs or switch industries. And what that means is that they’re gonna give up pay. They’re gonna give up pay to. Find a refuge, a place where they’re not gonna experience that harassment. So, so many systemic forces. And then I didn’t even get into the fact that just we don’t have the support, right.

That women in some other countries might have in terms of childcare, in terms of maternity leave and all those, those other things.

Melody Wilding: Oh my gosh. There is so much, so, so much to unpack here. The, the point I wanted to underscore as well is you were talking about women stepping out of the, the workforce or even the, the potential up to age 40 of them having to do that. Even what I see too is, is people who, if their kids are school aged, any school age, right up until they’re driving themselves and going to college, you may have duties after school that then preclude you from going to the networking event or the dinner or taking that business trip, right?

Where some of this rapport, relationship influence building happens, and again, the the cascade keeps piling on. So I wanna, I wanna, double click on the, on the marriage piece

and potentially unbalanced workloads in marriages. Now, let me say for the record, if my husband listens to this show, I am extremely, extremely grateful that we have, we have a very, very, I don’t wanna say it, it’s balanced, but we talk a lot about splitting the labor between us of taking care of our house, and then we have cats at the moment, and who’s bringing the car to do this, and who has this work thing going on. Okay, so I’m gonna take on more of the household things this week, so I’m very grateful we have that open dialogue together. But where do you even start if you have a partner and you’re feeling this burden, this bag that, that you’re carrying, what do you do? How do you broach that topic? Where do you go with this? What do you recommend?

Corinne Low: Yeah. So I think there’s a lot of strategies that I lay out in the book for kind of having this conversation and deciding kind of what you wanna tackle first. but I think, as you’ve said, one of the most important things to figure out, how do you wanna tackle this, is just, do I have a, willing partner in this, right?

Because if you know, alright, I have a willing partner, he wants to share the load, he wants to do half, then there’s one set of strategies and the strategy that I would recommend there, and I actually recommend it to you, is trying actually tracking your time with your partner. Because if they say they wanna do half, then it’s saying, all right, shared values, we’ve both agreed we’re aligned that we wanna be splitting this up.

You know, 50/50 or whatever the fair division is, let’s curious, get some data and see how our reality aligns with that. And what I often find when couples do that, even the ones where they will say, you know, look, he’s a great partner. He wants to do half is yeah, he’s doing half of the tip of the iceberg, right? But there’s this iceberg of invisible labor beneath the surface. And so. You know, half of, you know, the, the, the visible tasks of, you know, hey, I cook dinner every other night, but maybe not the meal planning or the grocery shopping, or making sure that there’s cookware, you know, that is keeps up with the latest environmental. Standards and doesn’t have toxic non cook coatings on it. Right. And all of that research and the mental load and the energy that goes into things like that. Or setting up the composting system or making sure that the recycling is clean so that it can actually get recycled. So that’s where I see the recognition on your face.

And I know because these are things that women take on in their household and often they kind of, yeah.

Melody Wilding: I, I’m, I’m just laughing because we, we recently like, it’s so, the composting was such a niche and perfect example. We just went through this, we spent way too many hours on figuring out a new composting system. So that’s why I’m laughing ’cause you nailed it.

Corinne Low: Yeah and it’s, and you know, and so much of that is just this, you know, invisible day-to-day grind. And often when we look at how we allocate, how tasks at home, you know, men say like, well, okay, I feel like I’m doing a lot because I know that, you know, yeah, sure she has her domains that she does more of.

But I do more of taking care of the car. I do more of taking care of the lawn. I do more of taking care of the house and repairing things. And then when I look at those tasks. Those are things that happen yearly, monthly, and weekly. Whereas women’s tasks often happen daily and hourly. So again, when you track your time, you sometimes get back pretty shocking data about how much time is being allocated to household tasks over the course of a week.

So that’s a recommendation. If you have that willing partner, if you feel like already that even that first conversation is gonna be a barrier, because you’re gonna get back some kind of defensiveness, which is, it’s your choice to do that. You just want things done a certain way and I don’t, so it’s your choice, or you know. You’re gonna get back, well, I earn more money and I’m really busy at work, so I can’t do that. Or you’re gonna get back, well, if you don’t wanna do it, then just hire somebody to do it. Or even just someone who doesn’t wanna have the conversation, that’s a different story, right? And so. do think that that’s where what people, people told me about my book is helpful for them because it puts things in terms of economics and so it’s not just a feeling, it’s not just, Hey, I feel this is unfair, or hey, this is, you know, bothering me, but it’s really in terms of breaking it down to dollars and cents that like by me taking on these tasks, we’re making a choice to not invest in my career. And I might be making less money right now if that’s the reality in your household,

but that means then, I won’t ever have the opportunity to be making more money or to be contributing more because I can’t make those investments. so really putting those costs, down in more economic terms is sometimes persuasive. and the other piece of economic reasoning that I think is helpful for people is also another dynamic I see couples fall into is what I call the low level junior employee dynamic, where you’re delegating things to your husband, but you are still the manager, right?

So you are still owning the mental load and you’re still owning this, you know, the planning and the, you know, uh, designing the task. But, you know, he’s just executing. And that that’s. It’s not good for either party, right? I think people want

ownership and they want that sense of, you know, I, you know, can be at operating at a higher level. So I think that’s where the conversation is. Look, honey, you’re getting a promotion, okay? You’re moving into senior management. And so these tasks that you’re taking on, you’ve gotta own them from start to finish. You’ve gotta be the food expert in the house where I don’t even know what’s in the refrigerator. Or if you’re taking on, you know, the kids’ medical appointments, then you’ve gotta take the time to look up, who’s the pediatrician and what’s the last time that they got a flu shot? Right. Instead of putting that back on me. But you’re just gonna drive them to the appointment. So I think there’s, depending on your situation, there’s lots of different conversations, you know, potentially to be had.

and that’s what I try to do in the book is not to prescribe because everyone’s situation is different. Right. people who’ve read the book and know my story, I ended up getting divorced. That is not gonna be the solution that works for everybody. That’s not gonna be what everybody needs to do. But the book is about charting your way to kind of your optimum given your preferences, the things that are important to you and the constraints that you face.

Melody Wilding: Even recognizing that you are in that junior employee dynamic is

Corinne Low: Yeah.

Melody Wilding: huge because I, I have seen so many women I work with, certainly myself, where just the internalized sense of responsibility that we have, that we don’t even question that this is our job, this is my duty. This is just, it’s just what I do. And it can lead to, I see this all the time in my work, is this dynamic of over-functioning and under-functioning.

Corinne Low: Yes.

Melody Wilding: You’re over-functioning, stepping in. Doing everything with the groceries at work. You’re the one volunteering saying, I’ll fix this, don’t worry. I have it handled. And that can create the dynamic where other people around you are under functioning because you got it. You have everything covered. So they don’t have to or don’t learn how to step up on their own.

This is important because I think what you’re saying, or at least implying, is that there will be this uncomfortable adjustment period where things are not going to go as you as you hope, and there may be feelings you have and feelings your partner or your team has about that as well, but it’s in service of this better, bigger picture that you’re working towards.

Corinne Low: Yes, a hundred percent. And that’s what, economists call either startup costs or fixed costs, right? You kind of have to make an investment up front in order for something to be better going forward. And the problem with human brains is that we hate those upfront costs. So everybody can name an example of this where there’s something that you need to do to like fix something forever, but you just keep putting it off because you know the way your brain sees it. You see, okay, there’s this tiny inconvenient. You know, that I’m dealing with each day, but I’m gonna have to pay this big cost to fix it. But when I compare those two things in this moment, it’s not worth me paying that big cost. But the key thing is, you don’t just avert that inconvenience one time. You avert that inconvenience for, you know, the rest of your life potentially.

something I talk about in the book is, you know, the way that psychology behavior, it’s called behavioral economics, impacts our decision making and how, you know, it gives us something called status quo bias. It means we tend to stay stuck in situations that aren’t serving us because it’s too hard to kind of make that initial onetime change and deal with a little bit of the pain.

But I think if you view it that way, if you view it as an invest. And everybody who’s listening has made some big investments at some point in your life. You decided to go to college, even though in the moment when you go to college, you’re making less money than what you could have been making during those years, but you’re investing in a career, right? that there, we have some societal defaults that like, you’re expected to do this, and so we kind of have, you know, been able to wear the path of those, um. kind of into the ground, where now it’s easy to follow that path, right? Other places that path, especially for women is kind of untrodden, right?

And so you’re venturing out on your own to try to carve a new path to say, I’m not gonna keep sacrificing myself. I’m not gonna keep being the one that comes last. So I am gonna make some of these investments, even if they’re painful in setting up a life that actually works for me, where I actually get my needs met.

Melody Wilding: And framing it in terms of startup costs is brilliant because it, it, number one, it defines what it is instead of this kind of abstract emotional guilt feeling you have.

Corinne Low: Yeah

Melody Wilding: it makes it so much more objective. It depersonalizes. And to, to understand, oh, this is just a startup cost. I can approach it just much more matter of factly than you might have in the past, which I love.

Okay. You, you also say in the book, you say you encourage people to think like an economist. So you were talking about being aware of startup costs. It’s a great analogy or connection to, to the work you do and and what you study. What are other ways we need to think and run our time like an economist?

Corinne Low: Yeah. So one of the things right there is just acknowledging that our time has value, and I think this is what you said, that we’re stuck in this mindset. We’re responsible for everything I think we are kind of stuck back in the 1970s where women’s time did not have significant value outside the household because if your economy runs on physical labor. Women aren’t as able to produce as men in that domain. And so men’s time has more value outside the household. But in our modern knowledge-based economy, women are every bit as competitive as men in that domain. And so our time really can have significant value outside the household. And so then we have to think about something called opportunity cost we are spending time on a household task that comes at the expense of being able to invest that time in our careers. And you might not see the payoff right away because you know, for some of us if you are a shift worker or if you’re somebody who has an hourly profession, If you charge by the hour, then you kind of see the relationship right away. You’re like, okay, if I spend an hour on this, I’m foregoing an hour of client work or whatever. but if you have a career where you’re paid a salary, you might not see it, but that cost is still there. If you take that hour and you invest it in a household task, instead of doing something in the workplace, you’re not making an investment in your salary growing in the next period, right? So there still is going to be that cost. And so I think once we recognize that, that our time has value, then we should think differently about household, household tasks.

One we should be willing to outsource some things. Which always it causes a lot of, I told my own story about feeling like that was the advice that you got. And I was like, well, I don’t have any money either, so that’s not really that helpful. but importantly it’s not that we had no money, it’s about where we were choosing to spend our money. And often we choose to spend our money, even very modest income families on taking care of tasks that men could do, but hiring professionals for those. So we take our car to the mechanic for an oil change. We do hire the plumber or we hire the electrician. But when it comes to a female coded task, we feel like that’s an unaffordable luxury because it’s something that, of course I can do it, I should be able to do it at home. And again, I think we’re stuck in that old mindset where our time did not have value.

And again, when you think in terms of an investment, as an economist, we’re saying, look, it’s not, do you feel like you have this money laying around right now? Because nobody felt like they had $50,000 laying around to invest in their college education either. But we did that because we recognized it was an investment in our future earnings. And so if you’re in the squeeze, if you’re in a crucial period where you’re trying to make partner at the law firm, right, you’re trying to make tenure as an academic, when you are spending that money on freeing up your time, you are investing in all of that future earnings that you potentially can have, if you can get over this hump, if you can get through this period. And knowing the data that the squeeze is very temporary was so helpful for me, and even this financial planning because it enables you to say I can actually do things that aren’t sustainable financially because this period is going to end. So instead of saying like, no, we can’t afford to eat takeout every night, you know, forever. No one’s talking about doing it forever. Need to do it for this one year to get through this period where, you know, like I said, you’re going up for partner or you’ve got some kind of, kind of major career investment, or you just realize, hey, next year the kid is gonna be in full-time school and I’m gonna get that much time back. and you’re also gonna get money back. And that’s the ironic part about the squeeze, is that when the time squeeze abates the money squeeze also tends to abate because as soon as our kids go to school, we don’t have to pay for childcare. And then some of those career investments that we’ve made start to pay off. And so again, you don’t have to be doing this forever, you just have to get through this period. But the final thing I’ll say about, once you recognize that your time has value then there’s a piece of it that’s just saying, well, some of this doesn’t need to get done because you said, what we see is we see the peak performance in the food domain, in the fashion domain. In the household domain, okay. The people who are putting that on Instagram, or even just putting their photos up on Facebook, they’re the people who take a lot of pride in that, who do an amazing job at that, right? But then we want to take all of those things and put them in our time basket, and they do not all fit. We wanna say, okay, I need the, you know magazine level home decor, and I need the, you know, healthy gourmet chef meals and I need to have the, you know, influencer level fashion. And those things do not all fit in your time basket time has value and it means you wanna be strategic about where you invest your time and say no to some of those things. Choose to let some of those domains go because no man is out here feeling like a failure. Even if he’s accomplishing at work, even if he’s doing great as a parent, but feeling like a failure because things don’t look pretty or perfect enough.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And as you were talking earlier that that question was coming to mind for me is what, what expectations do we need to adjust? You were talking about, you know, the non-toxic cookware and, oh no, what can I have in my kitchen now and do, and I guess, how do we reconcile? Because we may have a a high value of health and our family’s safety or whatever it may be. But we also have also have to make these tough trade-offs with our time that I can’t spend three hours looking up what’s the best spatula to have in my kitchen. So how do we reconcile when some of those values may be in conflict with one another?

Corinne Low: So I talk about this with parenting time in every domain, and this is one of those areas, right, in the health domain as well, where just because something is evidence-based, we can think about that as one input into the equation. But we don’t need to put every single input in, right? We have to be smart about what inputs we’re putting into the equation. So like a low stress level and everybody getting enough sleep is like super, super important for health, right? And often when as moms we take too much stress on ourselves, one of the first things that goes is our sleep. super detrimental for our health. So if we’re saying, okay, we’re spending so much time on these other things that it’s actually impacting our stress level and our sleep, that’s actually not a good bargain, right? And so there’s so many things that we do just to provide our kids with, you know neighborhoods with safer things in our home, but just a foundation of, good mental health, low stress, good sleep. And I mean, this is what part of what I think is so fundamentally unfair in our society is that when the government makes these tradeoffs to say, yeah, we could regulate this chemical, but we’ve decided it’s not worth the money it’s gonna cost for us to regulate this chemical. So instead we’re gonna put this on you, right? We’re gonna put this on you as the parent, that now you have to make these determinations in these tradeoffs. So one of the things I point out is like Society is not willing to give our child every single input that we, that they need. And so, as I said, one of the things that’s most unfair about our society is that that means that only the parents who are able to make those investments, who have the time and money to make those investments you know. to change those things for their families and other families aren’t. And so, you know, what we really wanna be moving towards is like a model of safety as a public good where everybody can access it. But for the stressed out moms who are just feeling like it’s one more thing on their plate, what I would say is, you have to. What we used to call in consulting 80/20, the problem, You’ve gotta get the 80% solution, not the a hundred percent solution. And the reason we would say that is that we would say, look, you could probably spend 20% of your time solving 80% of the problem, but if you try to solve the last 20%, that’s gonna be another 80% of your time.

So. Do the, what I call having it almost right, do the almost perfect version to say, look, what are the biggest things that I can influence? And I’m gonna provide those inputs. And as I said, you don’t have to provide every single input. Your kid is going to do just fine if they don’t have the homemade organic baby food. Your kid is going to be just fine if you decide that it’s formula feeding, if you decide that it’s school lunches instead of handmade lunches. If you decide that you’re using non-stick cookware this year, your kid is going to be fine.

Melody Wilding: I so appreciate you saying this, and I’m sure this is hitting home for a lot of people. 80/20 was exactly what was coming to mind as you were talking, and also watching for this scope creep of the shoulds, the musts, the half dos, because I, I just think of it as, you know, you’re. You’re just scrolling on Instagram or whatever it may be, and then you see, oh, this is a, this is a chemical you should be watching out for in your makeup and get rid of all makeup that has this certain chemical. And now it almost becomes this task in your brain of, oh, I have to evaluate all of my makeup, maybe my kids’ makeup, if they’re that age, replace all of that. And even questioning. Does that really have to happen? Is that a should, must have to. That’s really a nice to have, right? It’s, and I just think so many of us, especially, I’m very perfectionistic in my life and so I. It, it becomes almost like this rule I have to follow and to be good. I have to follow what the rules are and what the evidence-based guidelines are. But as you were saying, it’s this, it’s this more holistic picture that I, that I hear you advocating for, which is, it’s, it’s so important to keep that perspective when you are stressed out and you are tired and you’re not, maybe not operating with your full energy. Right. You’re, you’re. Prefrontal cortex is maybe a little more shut down than you would ideally want it to be, and you are reacting out of that stress state. It’s so much easier for these defaults to happen. Yeah.

Corinne Low: And I love that the way that you laid it out, because that’s exactly how social media operates, is by creating an imperative to act and the act to spend money that didn’t exist before. Right. So just observing that. Observing, when you look at your phone, how often does that translate in? Oh, now I have this imperative to act and it’s linked to that somebody’s gonna make money off of me potentially taking this action. I’m gonna have to buy the safer pan or the non-toxic cleaning supply, or, this other makeup. That’s exactly the goal of that content. And so it’s about reframing the word influencer, to hear the word influence. That they are influencing you, they’re influencing your decision making in a way that causes you to spend more money. It makes you you more profitable for the corporations that ultimately, you know, back these social media platforms. Right. So I think just as soon as you can clock that right to just say. Oh, I feel that because I spent time on my phone and now I feel I have this imperative to act, who does that benefit? Right? Who is going to make money off of me taking that action and. Then just to call out the underlying BS because if it’s so important that we’re not exposed to these chemicals, then they should be regulated, right? It shouldn’t be on individual parents to kind of have to figure this out. They should be regulated.

So maybe that’s the action. You know, the way we can kind of subvert it is take that action instead by saying, okay, what I, instead what I’m gonna do is kind of appeal towards this collective action to kind of make, make this better instead of kind of giving into that. You know that relief of that cycle because you said you laid it out, it’s a cycle. Once it creates that imperative to act the way I relieve that imperative to act and therefore get the dopamine payoff is clicking add to cart on something, right? So. Maybe we can complete that cycle by taking a different kind of action to kind of solve those problems for everyone. But also it’s a great way to kind of clock the influence that social media consumption has on the rest of our time and how it can make the way we spend our time less nourishing because it’s us with a lot of other stuff. You know, that’s kind of supplanting our own actual priorities.

Melody Wilding: Oh my gosh. It reminds me of the, there’s this advice in writing that if you’re struggling with a sentence, try deleting it. You can find nine times out of 10, the writing’s better. If you just delete that sentence, it’s sort of the same thing. Can you just delete that task from your to-do list? And do you miss it? Does it come back up again more times than not, no. ’cause it was just this added burden you were, you were putting on your list.

Corinne Low: Yeah, a hundred percent. It’s like the advice when you’re decluttering, you like put stuff

Melody Wilding: Yes.

Corinne Low: If need it in like a week, then you can probably throw it out. Right. And there’s a lot of stuff like that on our to-do list where I’m like, flip it. Do the stuff that matters to you most. Do your leisure time. I say pay yourself first with leisure time. Do your highest priority stuff, your long-term projects, do that first and then that busy work. If it’s still sitting in the box, the metaphorical box at the end of the week, maybe you can just delete it from your to-do list.

Melody Wilding: Thank you so much. This, I think this is gonna be a huge eyeopener and a relief for a lot of people who find themself in that squeeze. It feels like this impossible bind to get out of, and you’ve given us so much to think about, to put it in perspective, to navigate through it. Where can people connect with you and find your book?

Corinne Low: So the book is available wherever you get your book. So if you like to listen on Audible, it’s on there. It’s called Having It All In the US. If you’re international, the international title is Femonomics, which is also the title of my substack. So I’m on substack corinnelow.substack.com. I’m on Instagram, Corinne Low, PhD, and on my website corinnelow.com.

I have time tracking spreadsheets, so if you wanna try that. Exercise of tracking your time with your spouse, or with your partner or just for yourself. There’s also one for you to just do it for yourself and see if you’re spending your time in ways you value. I have these awesome spreadsheets on my website that make graphs for you about how you spend your. Time once you fill out the tracker. But thank you so much, melody. This was a lot of fun. And, I hope that the tools that we talked about help people feel like they can reclaim some of their time and get back in the driver’s seat.