Can you spreadsheet your way to equal parenting? With Corinne Low

0:00Last month, I wrote about my parenting spreadsheet. Roughly once a week, I note which mornings, afternoons and evenings I spent looking after my two wonderful toddlers. My husband does the same. The data feeds into a chart showing which of us has done more. Readers responded with this. Every single second I have spent with my children has been a pleasure and a privilege. My wife and I don't use a spreadsheet to record those precious moments. We see them every day in each other's eyes. The maternal role is the most wonderful and rewarding contribution that a woman can make to a family. It stems from the heart.

0:45In the early years, the children connect to the parents via the mother. No spreadsheet can control or express this. Crazy obsessiveness with 50-50 and everything and anything is like a form of communism, totally unachievable due to major inherent differences between men and women. Wonderfully amusing to see that economists can't give up on numbers, even in private life. The question I'd ask the author is, what ranking does spontaneity have in her married life? And how is it measured? Is looking after children a chore? Why does it need to be tracked in a spreadsheet? If you need Excel rows in your marriage to tell that someone should do more, you should not have married in the first place.

1:31I get it. The parenting spreadsheet is highly unusual. But the point is to get me and my husband closer to our shared objective, to split childcare as equally as we can. And yes, it was by idea. I'm an economist. I like data. So much that in today's episode, I'm asking another economist what the data tells us about the job of raising children.

2:00This is The Economics Show with Samaya Keynes. I'm joined this week by Corinne Lowe. Corinne is an Associate Professor of Business Economics and Public Policy at the University of Pennsylvania's Wharton School, where she focuses on the economics of gender and discrimination. Corinne has looked extensively at the economic choices parents make and what they get wrong. She is the author of a book which is called Feminomics in the UK and Having It All in the US. Corinne, hello. Hi, great to be here. Okay, so on this show we always start with a question where the answer is on a scale of one to 10. So on that scale, how insane do you think my parenting spreadsheet is?

2:46One. I love the spreadsheet. Okay, so you think it's a good idea, but have you got your own spreadsheet? Well, on my website, I have a spreadsheet that everybody can download for tracking your time with your partner because I'm like, how can you try to divide things the way you want to divide things without data. And I know because I've been studying the American Time Use Survey that whenever I present the data about how unequal the division of household labor still is between men and women, that everybody is shocked by it. And every man is convinced that they're the exception. They're like, yes, but that's not true for me because I do so much, right?

3:24So, okay, well, let's look at the data then, right? And I think one of the problems is household labor is kind of like an iceberg. There's the big obvious tasks that are like the tip of the iceberg. That's dropping the kid off at daycare, right? Or doing bedtime. But then there's all of this invisible labor beneath the surface, which is making the doctor's appointments. And it's being the one who gets called in to cuddle in those last 45 minutes where you think it's after bedtime and you hope that you could open your laptop and then you get called back into the room, right? And so if we can't see that iceberg, we can't divide it.

3:57And your spreadsheet made that visible. Okay, well, I should probably clarify that the spreadsheet doesn't record all of that stuff, right? The spreadsheet is, were you present physically for a bedtime? And were you parenting for the whole morning? But that kind of invisible labor, so you're advocating measuring that as well all the time? Not all the time. I'm advocating in your household as an experiment, track your time. Because as you said, this is about you and your husband reaching your shared objective, your shared value. And so if you have a conversation that says, we want to equally share parenting duties, right?

4:36And if your husband says, yes, that's how I see myself as a dad. I see myself as an equal partner. Okay, well, let's get curious about how is the reality aligning with that shared objective. And so invisible work, you can also surface. So I guess what I'm saying is I'm even more insane than you. I love it. Well, let's move on beyond my personal situation and talk about the broader data, right? And so what we see in the aggregate data about time use and trends there. So most people know, I think, that women tend to do more child care than men on average. But you've looked at the data in more detail.

5:13What do you think is really surprising to people looking at the overall distribution of work? Well, let's start with child care, because I think that one of the things that's going on there is that dads are doing a ton more child care compared to their own fathers. And so I think a lot of dads feel like they're killing it because they're like, I read my kid a bedtime story. My dad never did that. OK. And they're missing a broader trend, which is that parenting time has just massively exploded since the 1990s. So even though dads are doing so much more than their own dad's dad, the gender gap has not narrowed in the household because women are doing so much more too.

5:59Moms are doing so much more too. Working moms today spend more time with their kids than stay-at-home moms did a generation ago, right? Yeah, I mean, I was looking at the data on this too, and I was really struck. If women had not increased the amount of childcare time that they have done over the past few decades. And basically the men would have caught up by now. Right. But because the women have been doing so much more, that inequality has persisted. It has grown smaller. Right. The gap is decreasing very, very slowly, but it's still pretty big. I would say the ratio has gotten better. But, you know, if you measure the gap in absolute hours, we're both doing so much more.

6:36The gap in hours isn't smaller. And the hours are what impact like how much you sleep. It's how many hours are you putting in, right? But the ratio has gotten better. Yeah. And I think that's exactly right that it's so interesting because I think that's the perspective of a lot of dads as they are kind of thinking, where am I relative to, you know, historical dads? And you don't notice that like the ground has shifted beneath everybody to such an extent. It's literally doubled, right? The time that we spend with our kids and you see it in every category and in categories that we even used to do.

7:08So like doing homework with our kids was not a category that parents spent time on if you go back 30 years. Are there any trends in sort of when that intensification has happened? So is it parents are now spending more time with slightly older kids or is it uniform across the age distribution? Yeah, I think it does hit across the age distribution, but for different reasons. So I think there's two forces at play. One is our better understanding of child development and infant and toddler development. So we now understand that like holding and talking to your infant is building brain connections that will result in literally like higher test scores later on in their life.

7:44And so it used to be perfectly acceptable to kind of put the infant in the crib and walk away. Right. And so you see a huge increase in infant care. And then those human capital investments are also increasing throughout the life cycle. So you see a big increase in playing with our toddlers, but that translates into also sitting at the kitchen table and doing homework with our grade schoolers. And then there's also what people call the rug rat race, which is just this increased competitive pressure to get into elite colleges to compete for scarce jobs in the knowledge economy that's leading to parents also spending a lot of time like chauffeuring their teenagers to after school activities because everybody needs to have three extracurriculars and an internship when they're 14 years old.

8:27So it is sort of across the life cycle, but maybe for some different reasons that you're seeing these different pain points. Were there any other surprising things that you found in the data? Well, the other thing that we see that's so perverse with housework is that as relative earning power within the household changes, when it goes from a male breadwinner to a female breadwinner, it seems like it's easier for the man to kind of adjust by taking on the child care tasks. Because as you said, people also talk about the inherent reward of child care. So maybe this is something that people want to do, but like nobody really wants to sweep.

9:05And I joke that when guys are like, oh, but I love cooking. I joke that I'm like, everybody loves cooking, but nobody loves feeding a toddler three meals and two snacks a day. You know, there's like the nice part of cooking, but there's a lot of routine and the cleanup and all of that, right? And so as relative earning power changes in the household, men do take on more child care, but the housework division does not change. You can look in households where women earn four times as much as men, and the man is still doing as little housework as a man who is, you know, the primary breadwinner. But just returning to child care, even in households where the woman earns more than the man, on average, she will still do more childcare.

9:46More childcare. Both on weekdays and on weekends. Yes, absolutely. Because people often say that if they're like, oh, it's about the constraint of his work. But right, you look at the weekends and you say, okay, he's not maybe working then. I also, in my data, look at couples who are hourly paid, so they can kind of more adjust their hours. And what you'll see is, again, even when her wage rate is dramatically higher than his, he will do less of the household duties, including childcare, and he'll actually work more. So he's putting that time into work, right? But it's inefficient for the household because if he would pick the kids up from daycare, she could pick up a shift as a nurse and actually earn the household more money.

10:27Some of the feedback I got to my recent column was of the flavor, you know, moms are better at parenting, right? Or the kid always asks because of the mom, right? And that's the force that generates some of this inequality. What do we know from the data about that? Well, the first place that I want to push back on that is that's why I actually think it's important that we have the housework data too, because I understand that moms are the ones who are typically pregnant. They're the ones who give birth. They're the ones who breastfeed, right? But I don't sweep the floor with my uterus. And so if you want to claim biological advantage, that does not explain why these other tasks in the household are divided so unequally.

11:05And I think we're going to have to admit that there's some gender roles beyond biological advantage, right? But when it comes to parenting, sure, it's absolutely true that during the time of pregnancy, right, there is some inherent gender inequality of the investments that are being made in a child. And during those first six months of life and, you know, and beyond, when breastfeeding is frequent, you know, up to six months, often children are exclusively breastfed, which, by the way, is also a thing that is much higher today than it was 30 years ago. So 30 years ago, a vanishing percentage of women were still breastfeeding at six months.

11:41And now the majority of women are still breastfeeding at six months. So yes, there are some advantages during those early days. And that can sometimes result in what economists call dynamic complementarity, right? Where once you are the breastfeeding mom, once you're the person who's more present, you took longer leave. And so now you're the kind of childcare expert. You know where the favorite thinky is. You know where the favorite sippy cup is. Well, now the kid wants you, right? And now you're the person who knows how to soothe the kid. And now, you know, the kid is asking for you to be the one who's there.

12:14I think that that is exactly why parents have to be really intentional on pushing back on those patterns. And I don't think it explains all the patterns in the data because so much of what we do for our children kind of has nothing to do with who they want. So much of it is routine, physically intensive work of, you know, being the person to, you know, make them a snack and clean up the kitchen, right? And that's work that anybody can take on, again, does not require a uterus or mammary glands to do it. And so I think what you mentioned is exactly why we have to push back on those defaults and why we have to be really intentional about this.

12:55If our household is a household where both parents are, you know, working outside the home, both parents are contributing financially, and both parents really want to be involved in the care of their children and to divide that in some way that if maybe not equal down the middle is equitable. Okay, you have done a bunch of research looking at same-sex couples. What does that tell us about what's going on here? Well, I've done so much research that I had to marry a woman myself to investigate this further. So yeah, so when you compare with same-sex couples, what we see is that they divide things much more equitably.

13:33They also tend to adjust based on who has higher earning power. And so in the data, we'll see that a heterosexual couple with a male breadwinner, he does very little of the childcare and the housework. and the female lower earning partner does much more. And that's the same pattern in a lesbian couple, that the breadwinner does a little bit less, the non-breadwinner does more. And in a gay male couple, breadwinner does less, non-breadwinner does more. But in couples that are heterosexual with a female breadwinner, that's where we see a violation of that pattern, that the breadwinner now still is the primary childcare provider and still does more of those other household duties.

14:11So I think what comparing to those same-sex couples can tell us is that it doesn't have to be this way. It doesn't have to be inherently women who are taking on all these tasks because, you know, that's not an option in gay male couples where they do have children. There is no woman who can take on these tasks. There is no mom, right? And yet it's still going to get done. Okay. But just to clarify, there is some inequality. There is some specialization within same-sex couples, but is it as extreme as you see in different sex couples? Yes, you do have the specialization and it follows the labor market advantage, but even then it's less extreme.

14:51So the tasks are shared more equitably, even accounting for who has the labor market advantage. Okay, well, I want to throw to a break in a second, but before we do, have you found that the discussion about the division of child care and the division of housework is different in any way? I mean, housework is unpleasant. No one likes cleaning. Some people like cooking, I guess. But kids are great. I love my kids. I love being with my kids. I suppose I love cleaning encrusted banana off the floor a bit less, and that is part of it. But I guess some people might listen to this debate and think, well, all I do in my life is just maximize time with my children.

15:32And if you're thinking about this from a kind of economics perspective, division of everything 50-50, then you've kind of lost the plot. Yeah, and I think that's absolutely part of what makes this conversation hard to have because there's this moral judgment of like, how dare you present caring for your child as domestic labor, home production? Like what kind of a heartless person are you? You know, those adorable faces that you're cleaning banana off of. and I've heard friends say, I don't want to be a mom, but I'd love to be a dad because the piece of parenting that is maximally joyful is the piece where you just kind of show up and you take the kids to the park and you read them a bedtime story and you give them a nice snuggle and then you don't have to do any of the hard stuff, right?

16:19But both things are true that we get utility directly from parenting in that there's parts of parenting that we enjoy and that there's parts of parenting that are a lot of work and that there's parts of parenting that we can enjoy more when we have more support, right? So if you're able to switch off and if you're able to get those breaks and if you're able to get those moments to yourself, then you come in fresh, ready for the toothbrushing battle and you're able to be playful and silly and you're able to get through it. But if you're already exhausted because you were responsible for cooking dinner, feeding them dinner, cleaning the dinner off the floor, getting everybody into their pajamas, and now you have to brush teeth, then that moment isn't going to feel joyful.

17:03That moment is going to feel like one more task. That moment is going to feel like work instead of leisure or fun. So the way I would flip this is to say what enables us to love parenting and to do it the way that we want to do it is having an equitable relationship and the needed support from our partners. I guess I should say at this point, there are many men who do a ton, right? And there are obviously some relationships where actually the guy is doing more because maybe the mum works crazy hours, right? Everyone has their own individual circumstances and, you know, everyone makes their own choices.

17:44I want to throw to a break now. And when we get back, I want to talk about, you know, non-spreadsheet based ways of tackling the average inequalities that we so often see.

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18:43We are back from the break. Okay, so when I was researching my column, I was really struck by this difference in perceptions, right? So you ask mothers who picks up the kid in an emergency from school when they're sick, and they say it's mostly them. And if you ask fathers, they do not agree with that assessment of how the emergency pickups are divided, which you would have thought that you would sort of know. And I guess my question to you is, do you think this is sort of a genuine misremembering on everyone's part? Or is it something else? Well, there's a part of this that just is a human bias.

19:21That if you ask everybody, are you a better or worse driver than average? Pretty much 95 % of people will say they're better than average, which of course isn't possible, right? And so I think there's probably this tendency of, you know, the man says, well, I did pick up once in the last month. And so, yeah, I share that task. I don't want to say I don't do it. And I think that's also a hopeful note, as you were saying before the break, that there are men who do a lot and there's men who really want to and have a self-identity as equal partners, right? They want to be the dad who shows up for the emergency pickup.

19:56And so then they kind of see it as like details that's like, yeah, I was busy, you know, those other times. And so, yeah, my wife did it three quarters of the time, but it's not like she's responsible for this task, right? This is a shared task, right? And that is a piece that actually gives me hope, that little bit of misreporting, I think, because it tells me that there's an intention to participate more fully. And we just have to figure out how to tap into that. Sometimes the way that this conversation is presented is that there are loads of win-win opportunities, right? By sharing childcare more equally, dads can form closer relationships with their kids.

20:28They can improve their relationships with their spouses. Everyone can be less grumpy, less resentful. Everyone's a winner. But there's an alternative take, which is that actually there is just some work involved in raising a family that is unpleasant. See, picking banana off the floor. And actually there are some zero-sum issues here where actually it is kind of an unpleasant reallocation of labor if you are going to get to more equality. Which do you think is the more helpful framing? I think there's a lot of win-win. I think when you have a conversation with your partner that really puts on the table all of the different work that there is to be done, then you could find opportunities for these sort of profitable trades where it could be like, yeah, I don't love doing this, but there's this other task that you don't love doing that I don't like, but I like it more than the one that I'm doing.

21:22Right. And then the second piece is the piece that you said, which is that I think what a lot of men say in surveys that they miss after children is intimacy and warmth from their partner. And investments in scraping the banana off the floor are taking the weight off her shoulders that's going to increase the intimacy and warmth in your relationship. And so I do think that there's this benefit of really being equal partners in that in the long term, you're going to stay married. And as you said, that deeper meaning in our relationship with our kids makes that relationship that much richer. And I think that's something that dads are going to benefit from when their kids become adults.

22:04Do you think part of this is women doing less? I mean, earlier you were talking about the trends of women embracing this much more intensive parenting style. Should women just lean out a bit? Well, I think one of the things I hear from men a lot is they say, like, I would love to do more, but my wife is very particular about this thing and she likes to do it this certain way. Therefore, I'm not going to get involved. Or they'll say, I don't want my wife to have to do all of this cooking or all this childcare, all whatever the task is, because I don't think anybody should do it. I think that we should just not do that particular task.

22:39We should not pack the home lunches and we should use the school lunches or whatever it is, right? So I think that there's truth to both things. So one, I think that from men, people have heard the term weaponized incompetence, which is, you know, oh, I'm just bad at that task and that's why I don't do it. But there's this other piece that's like weaponized indifference, which is if you're always the one saying, well, I just don't care what the kids wear to school. So I let my wife do it. And I don't care what they eat. So she packs the lunches and I don't care what, you know, the house looks like.

23:09So she's the one who takes care of and organizes the toys, right? You're sort of weaponizing your preferences to kind of transfer these duties onto your spouse. And we know that that's the case because when we look at data for couples that do end up divorced, we see that men's time on household tasks increases after divorce. So they start doing these things more because probably they did care about them the whole time. It's not actually that they didn't care about them at all. And I think that's a piece where I would ask men to recognize the way that that indifference transfers the burden to women.

23:41And there's a piece where for women where we are juggling it all and we want to be equals in our careers to our male colleagues, that does mean we're going to have to let some things go, right? It is fundamentally incompatible to be a super 1980s career woman and to be the domestic goddess that we see on Instagram. And so if we think our kids need bento box lunches and we think that our house has to look like a spread out of Good Housekeeping magazine and our garden has to be beautifully cared for at all moments in time, even when we've got two kids under the age of five, we are going to be resentful.

24:18So you've been talking about this for a while and you're an economist. Have you ever been told you're weird? Economists think about this in a weird way. That's something I've been told. All the time. Yeah. What do you think people find really weird about this? Well, even just the whole idea of like, you know, when I talk about child care, I talk about investing in human capital, right? So the idea that you can even optimize over something kind of as fundamental as child care. And I remember I also talk about marriage in this way. And, you know, I remember being told like, do economists really believe this?

24:52like, what about love? And what I would say is that it's not that I don't think that love exists, but I do think there's these more fundamental forces at play. And when I see these averages in the data, as much as you can tell me, well, every story is different, every household is unique. I see these patterns in the data over and over again. And so don't we want to make that explicit? And don't we want to name it and talk about it and think about ways to solve it? Okay, maybe everyone should think like an economist. Just before we go, are there any other interventions that you would advocate for short of everyone having their own spreadsheet?

25:31I think that we've talked about how those defaults develop and, you know, that often women take more extended maternity leave, women become the preferred parents. I think one of the most powerful things is reversing that default by providing opportunities for dad to be the sole or the primary parent. And so you've mentioned doing it by having your husband be the one that daycare calls first, right? And other families find ways to say, is there a way to reverse this, to push back on this default by having this environment be a dad first environment? So dad's in charge of school lunches or dad's in charge of all playdates, all playdate texts go to dads.

26:09And one way you can set up for that from the very beginning is within your household planning for men to take paternity leave. You can't control parental leave policy in the whole country. You know, I certainly can't control it in the US, but within your household, you get to set that policy and you get to say that this is something that we want to invest in because the research shows that when men take paternity leave, not only is there a more equal division of labor from that point forward in the household and is it beneficial for women's careers, even the kids have more equal gender expectations and they say things like, oh, dads can work part-time and care for kids, or moms can have full-time careers outside the household, and they actually do less gendered chores.

26:51So it actually has enormous ripple effect. Any messages for people who don't yet have kids? I think have these conversations early in your relationships and align on what are those shared values and ask the hard questions. Like if a kid is sick and we both have an important presentation that day, how do we decide who stays home? And it's hard to imagine all of those scenarios and have that conversation of, are you willing to take paternity leave and how much? And how do we prepare for that financially, if so? Corinne, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much, Samaya.

27:31This episode was produced by Misha Frankel Duval, with original music from Breen Turner and sound design from Samantha Jovinko. The broadcast engineer was Andrew Georgiades. Edwin Lane was the senior producer. Flo Phillips is the FT's head of audio. I'm Samaya Keynes. Thanks for listening.

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