Having It All:
The Hidden Forces Exhausting Women, and How We Can Thrive Anyway
You’re not imagining it.
The odds are still stacked against women.
We have the data to prove it.
And we have the power to change it.
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 to 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.
In the same way that behavioral psychologists like Daniel Kahneman and Dan Ariely have sought to understand the hidden factors and biases that cause people make mistakes at the bank or the grocery store, economist Corinne Low investigates how the most significant decisions in women’s lives are shaped by overlooked internal and external factors. The result is a book that offers readers a guide to getting the best deal for their lives and careers in a world full of constraints. It is also a call to action for firms, policymakers, and anyone else with an iota of power to get to work on the tough job of changing these constraints instead of the easier one we seem to default to: criticizing women.
“Having It All shows us in painfully clear detail that women cannot bend anymore without breaking. Dr Low brilliantly illustrates that we must confront outdated social structures harming women, and she offers us an evidence-based roadmap for moving forward. This is a groundbreaking book that will have an impact on the life of the reader and the society that surrounds them.”
— Eve Rodsky, Author, Fair Play