Addi’s Reviews > Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours > Status Update

From an economic lens, Low frames a job as a technology that converts time into money. The critical variable is the time-to-money conversion rate. When women must donate large amounts of unpaid time—through caregiving, emotional labor, and household management—their lifetime earnings are reduced, even if their hourly wages appear equal.
Specialization itself is not the problem. Different does not mean worse. The issue arises when specialization is undervalued, unprotected, and asymmetrically imposed. Society readily accepts outsourcing male-coded labor (e.g., landscaping, repairs), yet is uncomfortable outsourcing female-coded labor like childcare or domestic management. When families refuse to outsource, Low argues, they are still making a choice—they are hiring themselves, often at great personal cost to women’s time and well-being.
Low also highlights the invisible donations of time women make—time spent meeting the needs and interests of others rather than advancing their own. Instead of arguing about fairness abstractly, she suggests focusing on aligning incentives and structures so outcomes improve for everyone.
Finally, Low underscores that parental mental health directly impacts child well-being, making these trade-offs not just personal but societal. In the U.S., where childbirth is significantly more dangerous than in peer nations like the UK, the costs of ignoring women’s time, health, and labor are especially high.
Bottom line:
The promise that women can “have it all” obscures the real constraint: time. Without structural changes in how labor—paid and unpaid—is valued, protected, and shared, the ideal remains mathematically and emotionally unattainable for most women.