Having It All

A Wharton economist’s radical framework for empowering women to design a life that goes beyond the work-life binary to create true joy, balance, and fulfillment To be a woman in America today is to be chronically tired. We face unsustainable demands on our time and efforts in every sphere. Traditional advice urges us work harder, optimize better, and, when all else fails, “self-care.” The implicit message is that it is our fault that we are overwhelmed, that we must be doing something wrong. This, says economist and professor Corrine Low, couldn’t be further from reality. At Wharton, she studies the decisions that shape women’s lives and the economic and societal constraints they face when making them. And what her research has demonstrated, time and again, is that unseen economic forces have created an environment that is openly hostile to the needs of women. Indeed, her research highlights just how many additional factors women must consider as they