Having it all:
An interview with Corinne Low
September 30, 2025
Edouard Vuillard, “Repast in a Garden” (1898)
You can listen to this interview on Substack, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify.
Editor’s note
In her meticulously researched, newly published book, Corinne brings her years of expertise as a Wharton professor and an economist studying gender to answer the age-old question: is it possible for women to have it all?
From parenting to partnership to career planning to self-care, she offers a wealth of accessibly articulated and data-rich insight into so many subjects central to women’s lives—including a detailed account of the many reasons why, historically, ‘having it all’ has been such an elusive goal. If there was one book published on this topic in the last year I would recommend as essential reading, it would be this one.
Jana M. Perkins
Founder, Women of Letters
Corinne Low, PhD, is an associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School, where she teaches an award-winning course on the economics of discrimination. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. She regularly speaks to and advises companies on their practices, and her research has been featured in media outlets from Vanity Fair to the Harvard Business Review. She received her PhD in economics from Columbia University and her BS in economics and public policy from Duke University, and formerly worked for McKinsey & Company. She lives in Philadelphia with her family. Having It All is her first book.
How did your childhood shape your ideas about what work looked like and what was possible for you?
Corinne Low: I grew up with a single mom, and so she was always— like, I talk about winning the bread and baking it too, and that was always her.
I never had a model of, oh, there might be some kind of division of labour within the household, because my mom had to do it all. So I think, for me, I really prioritized career, because I saw that she needed to support herself, and I wanted to be able to be financially independent. And so I always was very, very focused on career, and in particular on being able to earn enough money through my career. I kind of never really thought about family life, or what I wanted a family or a partnership or a structure to raise kids within— what I wanted that to look like. And that’s why, what I talk about in my book, is I feel like I almost just stumbled into that rather than being very intentional in setting that up for myself.
Jana M. Perkins: What you’ve described is really common, I think— not having had that model of division in household labour. And, more than that, maybe even just the recognition that those things had to be done. I know I certainly felt that way, when I moved out and was having to do those things for myself. It was like, “Oh! This actually takes up a lot of time.”
CL: I think, like all kids, I probably didn’t recognize just how much my mom was doing, but she did very much involve us in that household labour because she worked full-time also. We each divided up the chores and had a night to cook dinner, and so when people ask me, like, “Oh, how did you become such a good cook?” I was like, “Well, because my mom bought us a stack of cookbooks, and we each had to choose a recipe and grocery shop and cook something for the whole family for dinner.” So, I think I did develop those skills, but just didn’t think at all about what it looked like to divide it with a partner, and how complex that could be.
And it’s totally in contrast to my career, which I think I’ve planned with a lot of intentionality and kind of thinking about what I wanted to get out of it. At the same time, if you’d asked me when I was nine years old, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would have said, “A writer.” I always would have said a writer — I always loved writing, but I was too practical for that. So when I was graduating college, I was like, “These jobs don’t seem like they’re going to help me pay off my student loans.” I majored in economics, but I minored in journalism, and I took all the creative writing classes I could, but it never seemed practical as a career. So I’ve been really celebrating for myself this kind of beautiful, full-circle moment of, like, “Oh, I got to be a writer after all.”
JMP: I’m curious: were there conversations around work and careers in your house as you were growing up? You mentioned that your mom was working full-time in addition to doing all of the household labour— were there ever conversations where she sort of sat you down and said, “Hey— these are some things to think about, this is how I have thought about it”?
CL: I don’t think so. I think maybe just partly because of being so busy, and that’s also something that I talk about in the book. One of the things that’s changed a lot, over time, is that we spend a lot more time with our kids today than when I was growing up in the 1980s.
There’s a lot more parent-child contact and space for those conversations than when I was growing up in the 80s. You know, one of the things I talk about is that every parent who’s listening can picture that, like, extended bedtime routine with your kids, where you process the day, and highs and lows, and you hear what your kid has to say. In the 1980s, my bedtime routine was go to bed. So I don’t think that I got so much of that from my mom, but I think I just saw how hard she was working and how important it was to be able to make investments that allowed you to support yourself. Because, again, I didn’t have my dad in the household. I didn’t view it as, oh, there’s two paycheques— this is divided. I viewed it as you have to figure out your career that’s going to make you financially independent.
Fast-forward to today. How did the path to what you’re doing now unfold?
CL: I majored in economics while I minored in kind of my true passion of writing.
I loved economics, and I thought it was a really elegant and beautiful way to understand the world. I didn’t necessarily know what a career in economics looked like, but a lot of my friends were interviewing for consulting positions. So, at the same time as I was deciding, like, maybe writing isn’t what’s going to pay off my student loans, my friends were interviewing for these consulting positions. They were like, “Oh, you get a signing bonus— it’s great!” And I was like, “I’ll just give it a try. I’ll interview.”
I got offered a job at the top consulting firm in the world, McKinsey & Company. It was more money than I had ever pictured making, and it was going to pay off my student loans. So I took that job still, in my mind, thinking I did want to continue my education — I wanted to go to graduate school, thinking about maybe getting a PhD — but wanting to explore this private sector opportunity. And during my time at McKinsey, I kind of came to the conclusion that I wanted to understand more: I wanted to do more of the learning and being curious about the world rather than just kind of bringing these ready-made solutions to companies and things like that.
So I ended up deciding to get my PhD in economics, still not thinking I would end up as a professor and academic, but thinking I would be more of a practitioner who had a PhD. Over the course of my PhD was when I really learned that I could do so many of the things I wanted to do— I could have a policy impact, I could engage with companies and with governments, and I could teach, and I could do my research as an academic. So it was only slowly, over the course of my PhD, that I decided maybe I would try an academic career.
I was lucky to get a job at Wharton, because I feel like, at Wharton, I have been able to absolutely be a practitioner at the same time as I’m an academic. And what I mean by that is I partner with governments, and I partner with firms, to talk about the policy applications of my research, and I’ve gotten to do this deep dive into the subject that I’m really passionate about, which is the economics of women’s lives and what it means to be a woman.
How is what we’re maximizing different? How are the constraints we’re facing different than for men? And now, that kind of brings me to my book, because I’ve gotten to be a practitioner and I’ve gotten to share those policy insights. It felt like a lot of my research about gender is so useful, but the people it’s most useful to is just individual women themselves. And they were not getting access to it because it’s in academic journals, or maybe it’s being shared with policymakers, but it’s really not getting out there just to everyday people who I think it can provide some real insights and tools to. So that was what led me to writing the book eventually.
JMP: What was it that led to that initial decision to major in economics? Because I feel like that is not one of those career paths that are really top of mind for a lot of young people. More commonly, I think, we tend to reach for things like, writer — as you said, and pursued — doctor… There are really only a handful of paths that I think we have access to or awareness of as children and young adults. So, I’d love to hear: what was it that sparked that interest for you so early on?
CL: I think I was just, in some ways, lucky that I stumbled on something that I found that ended up being both a good basis for a career that creates financial independence, which was one of my goals, and is something that interests me and that I really enjoy. But it came from, again, that kind of ruthless practicality, where I was like, “Hmm, what am I interested in? I’m interested in political science. I’m interested in developing countries and helping people in developing countries.” And as I talked to people, they were like, “Don’t major in political science,” or, “Don’t major in public health,” because what you need is some of these core skills. If you major in economics, you can always switch to political science, you can always switch to public health and work on those issues, but economics is going to be more of the core skill that you need to then maybe go to graduate school in one of those other areas.
So I was just kind of lucky to have gotten that advice, and it did turn out to be really good advice, but I ended up liking economics more than I thought I would and kind of continuing in that as my discipline of choice to study the issues that I was then interested in. So when I tell people what topics I study, they’re like, “Aren’t you a sociologist or a demographer?” And I’m like, “No, I use economics as a discipline.” It’s a framework, of people maximizing subject to constraints, to then study these topics of women and children and health in developing countries that I think are really important.
JMP: It sounds like you had some really great mentors in your life early on, which maybe we’ll talk about a bit more in our next question, but I just think it’s so wonderful that you were able to have that perspective and that awareness to pursue something based on the skills you would learn. I think that is really one of the core paths to success — and certainly something that I have heard a lot of really successful people talk about, actually — is that, as they were moving through those early decisions, they weren’t thinking about, “What is the end goal? I want to be X title.” They were thinking about, “How do I develop some skills that are sort of in the area of my interest, but that will leave a lot of things open to me?”
CL: I think that’s exactly right. At any point on your career path, it’s less about, like, “This is what I want to be doing right now.” It’s more— I always tell people to think about, “What possibilities does this open up for me? What does this give me, in terms of making that next step potentially that much higher impact, or more lucrative, or whatever my career goals are?”
I tell people to think about that kind of from the beginning of setting out in their careers, thinking about an arc over their lifetime. You are not going to know what path it’s going to take. You’re not going to be able to plan it out from the beginning. But how are you setting yourself up for that next step by gaining some… whether it’s skills, or credentials, or things that are going to help make that next step easier, wherever it takes you?
Did you have any mentors along the way?
CL: So many. I think, for me, school was always a refuge. Growing up with a single mom who didn’t have a lot of time, I think I got some of that positive adult attention from school. And so I always have been somebody who just dedicated myself to my studies.
I was just lucky to have such incredible teachers and mentors there. And, in particular, I think I was really lucky to have some really amazing male mentors in college and graduate school. And I call that out because I think, in my book, I talk a lot about the ways that men sometimes stand in the way of women’s success. But I was so incredibly lucky to have these male mentors, in a male-dominated field of economics — that’s why they were male mentors, right? — who really treated me as somebody who had intellectual potential and whose ideas deserved to be heard.
I think that’s something that sometimes men take for granted about themselves, that, like, “Oh, I have something to contribute to society.” But, as women, sometimes we don’t get that same message, and so I think I was lucky that I kind of felt that through those mentors. One was an undergraduate advisor who pushed me to write a thesis and to consider going to graduate school. And then my PhD advisor, who really encouraged me to try to be an economist — like, capital-E economist — not just use this as a tool to become a practitioner, but to actually think of myself as a scientist and somebody who had contributions to make to a science. So I definitely would not have the career I have without that mentorship.
Tell us about some of the projects, ideas, or questions you’re currently working on.
CL: Right now, there’s two big projects I have going on this year: one is my baby, and one is my book baby. And those are the two projects that are consuming all my time. I gave birth in May, to my second child, and so she’s still little and still takes a lot of time and energy. And then I have my first book coming out, right in the launch phase right now. So the book is written, but there’s still a lot to do around getting it out to people and sharing the information that’s in it, and I’m doing a book tour right now. Those two projects are kind of all of my time right now.
JMP: Yeah, understandably! Congratulations all around! And I am really excited to talk more about this— you have written an incredible book, called Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. I simply adored this book. I will be recommending it to all of my friends. I think it should be required reading. And I love the way you open the book. You write, “In 2017, I gave birth to my son, and also a midlife crisis. … I not only felt as though I didn’t ‘have it all’; I felt like I didn’t have anything.” Walk us through that period.
CL: Well, thank you for your kind words about the book! And yes, that was such an important place for me to start the story, because I think it can sometimes— when people are giving advice, it can sound so trivial, where you’re just, like, “Oh, just do this thing, and it’s all going to work out!” I really did not want my book to gaslight women about the real challenges that we face in making it all add up and how hard it can be sometimes. I wanted to be really honest about my own struggles to make that all work and start from that place of how I was seeing, in my own life, what my research was showing: that, for women, it’s really hard to make it all add up.
I was in a situation that didn’t add up. I was commuting two and a half hours to my job. I had a breastfeeding infant at home. I was on the tenure track at Wharton. And my male colleagues all had wives who were able to carry more of the domestic load. I just saw they had more time in their days than me, and so it wasn’t a surprise that they were publishing more, because they had more to work with. I think, growing up, like, a strong feminist, I had always just believed, if I wanted it enough and I worked hard enough, that I could be equal to men, just kind of through that sheer force of will. It was a real comeuppance to realize that, like, “Oh, no— those structural forces were going to affect me, too.” And I needed to figure out how to navigate them.
JMP: As I was reading, I just kept encountering passage after passage that captured, with such dexterity, what you describe as the “structural, economic, and biological factors that are forcing and constraining [our] choices.”
You write, for example, that, “As an economist, I think the rationale for a lot of our decisions can be boiled down to a simple question: Am I getting a good deal? You make a deal when you accept a job, enter a marriage, or decide to have kids. For each deal, you are contributing time, money, and effort for a perceived payoff. In combination, these deals, with their payoffs and sacrifices, form the experience of your life.” What has it been like — as you’ve been immersed in the world of this book, and now in the promotion of it — what has it been like trying to convey that sort of economic, deal-making perspective to those who maybe have not had a lot of experience thinking in those terms?
CL: When I tell people that I’m an economist, they are thinking like, “Oh, maybe you work on the stock market, or taxes, or something like that.” Right? People just aren’t used to using economic thinking and reasoning when it comes to their personal lives. But economics is fundamentally the science of maximizing subject to constraints, and we do that every day of our lives. We’re trying to figure out how to get…
Where can our listeners and readers find you?
CL: My website is just corinnelow.com, and I’m on Instagram, @corinnelowphd, and I have a Substack: corinnelow.substack.com. My book is out now everywhere that you get books. It’s called Having It All; if you’re in the UK, the UK title is Femonomics, which is also the title of my Substack. And I would love to connect with people and engage and hear your thoughts about the book and your questions.