Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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. I found this conversation to be really eye-opening and inspiring for 2026. I hope you do too.
Welcome, Corrine.
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Chapter 2: How does Dr. Corinne Low define 'having it all'?
It's not possible to both do all of those new things we're doing and do all of the old things we were doing, right? Right. So yeah, maybe our mom did have time to go to the grocery store and to do the laundry and to make the home-baked cookies or to make something that we're remembering as like a special way that she showed her love when we were kids.
But that's because she was not tucking us into bed and reading bedtime stories. She was not driving us back and forth to travel soccer and sitting there on the sidelines and being like, yeah, you scored a goal. So the ways that we invest in our kids now – and by the way, also, she was not breastfeeding and pumping when she went back to work.
Like the data on the rates of breastfeeding at six months used to be like less than 10% of the population was still breastfeeding at six months. So we are making those other investments. So if our time basket is only so big, it might be that like all of these new things can't fit in there with all of those old things. And we might need to take something out.
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Chapter 3: What are the challenges women face in balancing work and family?
So I do think a lot of people are benefiting from that care from the grandparents. It's just a question of how long does it last and when does it shift?
Exactly.
Do you have to take care of them?
Exactly. And I think that shift is coming earlier. And so for some people, it is the sandwich generation of it's hitting while their kids still need a lot, right? Versus hitting once they're empty nesters. And then you would say like, okay, now I have bandwidth for this. But it's like, oh, okay, whoa.
And I don't know if you feel this way, but for me, it's like, oh my God, your parents just age all of a sudden, right? You just all of a sudden wake up and you're like, wow, this happened. I was not ready for this, right? And it appears in a phase of your life where you're still feeling like, oh, I was still trying to make all of that add up, and now I've got to introduce this to it.
And it's gendered. It's gendered. Right.
Okay. So talk to me about that.
Yeah. No. In the time use data, we just see women doing so much more of this caregiving labor, just drastically more of this caregiving labor. And it's even when It's the in-laws, even when it's taking care of his parents, the women are doing a lot of that labor. So that is, it's not just, it's not in your head. It's not a feeling.
It's backed up by the time use data that women just spend more time on this.
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Chapter 4: Why do women feel guilt about outsourcing household tasks?
It is an incredibly profound experience to have your parents get old and die on you. What? Why are they doing this to me? But like it is a profound experience. So of all I just said, how are we going to get the government to pay for this? Like WTF? Hello, this is a job.
Yeah. 100% to all of that. And I also, I'll say before we get into the what do we do about it piece of it, that's why when I talk about utility, I say you can't actually equate utility and happiness because sometimes we do things that absolutely do not feel happy or joyful, but they serve our values. They're meaningful. So on this book tour, I was really glad it brought me to a stop where
I have an aunt who has dementia who I haven't seen for a long time and I, you know, got to spend an afternoon with her and, you know, it might be the last time that I get to see her. And I spent that time crying and telling her stories and telling her that I loved her and
if you were looking from the outside and you said, if I think of utility as happiness, I would be like, this obviously doesn't look like happiness or joy. And that's my problem with, there's a lot of pressure on us to maximize happiness and be happy and joyful and live a life that has more happiness. And I'm not sure that that's the goal, right?
And so that's why I think utility is a useful term because What you are doing when you bring your kids to your mom, you're making meaning with them, right? You're serving your values. You're teaching them values. You're making meaning for your mom that you know is in her utility function and that then shows up in your utility function because you value that. You value her well-being.
And that's why I just think utility is such a useful framework because it helps us to see that things that feel bad can be good. And it makes us feel less trapped, even though – not to take anything – I don't want to gaslight anybody about how hard it is because, like, oh, my God, is it hard, right? But just to understand, to say –
Instead of feeling trapped, seeing this as, no, the reason I'm doing this, the reason I'm investing so much in this is that I do value this person's well-being and I do value the meaning of this time together. So I think it's a helpful way to give ourselves back agency to understand that framework of utility.
No, it's a very good way of thinking of it. Yeah.
And this is so unfair. And it's structurally unfair. And it's like, then you have these huge disparities between the people who have kids or have spouses and who don't. And that, you know, this should really be something that we can solve collectively as a society. And we've made it harder as a society because we have the nuclear family and because people move away from their natal home.
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