Lily Houston-Smith (Producer)

Hey, Infamous listeners, producer Lily Houston-Smith here.

So you might've gotten on this train years ago, but for me, 2025 was the year I finally got into grocery delivery.

And no, you are not listening to an ad right now.

This is the episode.

But I will say it's kind of magical.

You tap a few buttons and like an hour later, your groceries are at your door.

You pay for it, of course, something along the lines of $20 or $40, depending on where you live and how you tip.

But I live in a neighborhood that doesn't have a lot of good grocery stores, which means that grocery shopping usually means getting on a subway, which also costs money and means a bunch of stairs, plus all the stairs it takes to get into my apartment, which is a fourth floor walk-up.

That's how I justify the expense.

But the question is, why do I feel like I have to be defensive about spending this money?

Well, the conversation that you're about to hear might explain why.

Vanessa is going to talk to Dr. Corinne Lowe, an economist who studies gender and the author of Having It All, What Data Tells Us About Women's Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.

We wanted to play it for you because I know right now in the new year, we're making all kinds of resolutions.

maybe to save money by not getting so much food delivered.

But Corinne helps us reframe this and think about it totally differently.

Maybe a better resolution is to think about getting the most out of our time.

She explains how there's so much more stigma around outsourcing certain female-coded tasks, like grocery shopping or cleaning, even though we outsource male-coded ones all the time.

Like you don't think twice about paying someone to change your oil or fix your leaky pipes.

She argues that this guilt is a holdover from an earlier era when women's time outside the home was not valued that highly.

But the world has changed, which becomes really clear when you look at the numbers.