By Morgan Evans

Photo: Heidi Roland

It’s 7:45 on a Monday morning, and Corinne Low and her wife, Sondra Woodruff, both have big days ahead. It’s Woodruff’s first day at a new job, and Low is steaming a black denim shirt for her. Low, a Wharton professor who researches household and gender economics, is heading into New York to tape a podcast for her forthcoming book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours, and Woodruff mentions she still needs to pack her makeup bag and breast pump for her. Low helps Woodruff finger-comb her locs while their 3-month-old daughter snoozes in a pink onesie on their bed, where the three of them had spent the night co-sleeping. Every 15 minutes or so, Low calls out “Brush your teeth!” to her 8-year-old son, who is readying himself for camp in the next room.

If this seems like an almost performatively blissful portrait of mutual care and tenderness, Low came by it honestly. Her first marriage, to a man, ended in divorce after she twisted herself into knots trying to accommodate his needs. In Having It All, she describes shouldering the vast majority of household tasks, from cooking meals to dealing with Amazon returns, even when she was the primary breadwinner and commuting from New York to her job in Philadelphia. The turning point came soon after their son was born in 2017. She found herself pumping in an Amtrak bathroom on her commute, crying because she wouldn’t be back in time to put her son to bed, while her husband was making no money, working from home after he left his job in marketing to start a business.

Low knew from talking to friends that she wasn’t alone, but she hadn’t understood how pernicious the phenomenon was until she and her co-authors, Jeanne Lafortune and Kyle Hancock, carefully analyzed a survey of American time use for their paper “Winning the Bread and Baking It Too.” They found that even when men earn far less than their wives — even when they’re unemployed and making bupkes — their contribution to housework stays remarkably low. In fact, women’s time spent on housework actually fell after they divorced, and men’s rose, indicating that men technically could perform basic chores but were simply electing not to.

Her research suggested that parenting the second child she’d dreamed of could actually be easier as a single mother. Having it all, in her case, meant subtracting her male partner. She also realized anyone she dated next was not going to be a man. “I’m not physically repulsed by men,” she jokes. “I’m socially and politically repulsed.” She had the good fortune to be, in her estimate, a 2.5 on the Kinsey scale, in which zero is exclusively heterosexual and six is exclusively homosexual, although she now says she’s closer to the homosexual end. “Being attracted to women wasn’t a conscious choice, but actively excluding men from my option set for partnership was,” she explains. Becoming a lesbian, she says, was an “evidence-based decision.” That description amuses Woodruff, who has long known she is queer but is also familiar with the dynamics that Low documents from living with male roommates. “People use evidence to either validate or confirm what they already know,” she observes. The two married in December of last year.

Having It All is an economist’s take on heteropessimism, the ambient disappointment with men that straight women have been registering since at least 2019, when the theorist Asa Seresin coined the term. Amid reams of anecdotal and statistical evidence that men are less mature, less educated, and less emotionally available than their female counterparts, straight women have despaired at their options. A growing number of women are remaining single, making what Low sees as a rational choice to pass on the current dating pool. “I know of few women who would say, ‘There’s no man out there I would want to marry,’ ” says Low. Rather, these women are “opting out of the options that are available.”