A book for men of all ages

Corinne Low's "Having it All" is essential reading

Piha Beach silhouettes

There’s no end of books about the “young men” problem. Even more so when it comes to podcasts and livestreams. Yet all this content is predominantly churned out by men with little seeming regard for the input of women.

My wife recently passed along her copy of Corinne Low’s Having It All: What Data Tells Us about Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours. The economist and associate professor of business economics and public policy at the Wharton School wrote the book for women, though it deserves a place on every man’s shelf. And not just young men.

In that light, I’m going to compare Low’s work with Scott Galloway’s Notes on Being a Man, which we recently covered on Conspirituality. Galloway offers solid (and basic) financial advice when appearing on news shows. He argues for a higher federal minimum wage, expanded antitrust enforcement, and greater oversight of tech platforms, all policies I can get on board with. A self-help book for men is another thing. This is a dude who posted a shirtless selfie during a TED talk while expressing a visceral disdain for fatness. I (correctly) figured it would spill over into his man-to-man advice.

Reading Low so soon after Galloway, I noticed a number of glaring differences. Both examine the struggles of career, relationships, and family, but from vastly different perspectives. Their main points of contention center around:

• The value of relentless ambition

• How to manage relationships

• Who is truly disadvantaged in society

Galloway claims the lion’s share of problems fall on men, when in reality, women have always and continue to face many more challenges, individually and systemically. The biased focus on the male crisis plays out heavily in media coverage as well, where it’s presented as an existential threat. Sure, when men go berserk, wars happen. But the female crisis is at least equally relevant when it comes to the well-being of society—perhaps more so, as Low argues.

When it comes to work, Galloway argues “balance is a myth.” He insists that making a ton of money requires an obsession with work during your twenties and thirties. Work becomes a defining characteristic of a man’s identity. You have to burn a massive amount of fuel early on to reach the pinnacle later.

Low rejects this approach. She was the breadwinner in her prior marriage. While both partners were initially financially successful, he left to start a business, leaving her to carry the economic burden and domestic work work. This is a recurring and essential theme in her book.

As for career ambition, Low says the “lean in” mentality (glorified by Sheryl Sandberg) only serves capitalism and bosses by demanding women work harder to overcome structural barriers they didn’t create. She advises women to stop romanticizing work and treat their job as a “technology for converting time into money.” She advises setting strict boundaries to protect sleep, leisure, and sanity. Basically, she’s arguing to remember work is a means to an end, not an identity to pursue.

Let’s stop romanticizing work. Instead, let’s see it as a tool to help us reach our ultimate goal: maximizing utility. How is it a tool? Well, work can do something amazing: It converts your time and effort into money, which can be exchanged for other things that other people are better at making than you are! Jobs give us an ATM that we can put time and effort into, and get money out of.

Back to relationships. Galloway explicitly warns against keeping a ledger in a marriage. He believes couples that constantly keep score waste energy and end up feeling like they’re losing. Instead, he advocates for providing “surplus value,” or giving more love and support than you take, without keeping track of who did what.

This is where data come into play. Low points out that a man who earns 20% of household income does as much domestic work as a man who earns 80%. Which is to say, not a lot.

After having a child, Low quickly realized she was still doing most of the housework. As a behavioral economist, she insists that women must keep score to combat inequality. Low advises women to track their household and childcare tasks in 15-minute increments so they can confront their partners with hard data and renegotiate the division of labor.

It’s very helpful. My wife and I made a spreadsheet covering all monthly expenses, because while I cover most big-ticket items, she manages many recurring expenses. The same happens with labor: I take care of yard work and garbage while she manages numerous daily tasks. When it’s all in front of you, the imbalances become quite clear. You don’t have to go tit for tat with every duty and expense, but ledgers are certainly helpful.

When moving to Portland in 2022, we began trading off on cooking duties. We each make dinner three nights a week. The cook packages the leftovers and cleans the counters, stove, and sink, while the other person does the dishes. The arrangement is fantastic. I’ve long loved cooking but quantifying it has made me exceptionally better at it. Like a lot of men, I have blind spots, though this is one we addressed a while back. Low’s book is great at identifying other trouble issues.

Onto the big one: the social crisis. Galloway argues men are increasingly adrift, lonely, and economically unviable. He critiques the cultural demonization of men, calling “toxic masculinity” an oxymoron. He argues that men need to reclaim a healthy, aspirational masculinity based on being protectors and providers.

Let’s stop pretending toxic masculinity doesn’t exist. The “boys being boys” attitude is a chronic crisis that needs to be addressed to even begin to understand the acute modern crisis Galloway is invoking.

Meanwhile, Low focuses on a crisis of female exhaustion. Women are breaking under what she calls “the squeeze,” trying to match male career trajectories while doing most of the cooking and cleaning. The system is fundamentally built for men and stacked against women. Take the Trump administration, predominantly composed of men: they loathe analytical tools like DEI and CRT. They’d laugh at the very suggestion of a ledger.

The problem isn’t confined to America. Low notes that 89% of the world’s population lives somewhere with falling marriage rates. She’s not pinning it on male loneliness, however.

When I see these falling birth and marriage rates, I see women pushing back on a system that isn’t working for them.

Galloway isn’t blind to gender imbalances. He writes that “female advancement in the past three decades is stunning,” explicitly stating no one should slow that trajectory. However, he firmly believes the modern crisis is distinctly male. He claims society treats empathy as a “zero-sum game,” which correctly focused on the struggles of women and other marginalized groups for two generations, but now actively ignores young men. To him, the primary crisis facing young women is a direct byproduct of this male failure. Because young men are struggling, young women now face an “intensifying competition for a shrinking pool of what they view as viable mates.”

Low has another take. She says the true crisis (one backed with data) is female exhaustion and stalled systemic progress. She points out that women’s labor force participation and the closing of the gender wage gap plateaued in the 1990s. Instead of men being the primary victims of the modern economy, Low discusses a profound “crisis of female happiness” and cratering mental health among women. Back to the squeeze: when women entered the workforce, men did not reciprocate by taking on an equal share of domestic labor.

In fact, despite all the emphasis on the “male problem,” Low points out that when women’s earning power was growing in the early 2000s, their overall happiness went down the drain.

This decline has been in absolute terms—women’s happiness is lower than it was twenty years ago—but it’s even larger when considered relative to men, whose happiness has been improving.

Besides reading data, Low conducts experiments. In one study, male and female participants negotiated with random partners for a $20 reward. She noticed men acted quite differently when negotiating with other men compared to women. What she discovered flips so-called common business wisdom on its head.

Our experiment showed that women not only weren’t worse at negotiation than men but also that they were better at making sure some kind of mutually beneficial deal was struck, rather than being so rigid that no one ended up with anything. In a professional setting, the cost of such negotiation breakdowns could be enormous—imagine, for example, ending a long-term contract or partnership—and possibly much larger than a failure to get slightly better terms in an agreement. But despite this evidence, I’ve never once heard of corporate seminars for men instructing them on how to negotiate more like women.

Still, most advice to women advocates for becoming more cutthroat, which doesn’t say much given who’s usually offering that advice.

Now onto child leave. As shitty as it is in America, it favors women in terms of length. But something insidious happens: women take on most functions of child care, which turns into men saying “well, she’s good at that, so she’ll continue to handle it.” Not only do mothers have to battle a “child penalty” when returning to work—younger mothers have more trouble advancing in their careers and earning more money, which levels out a bit when the woman is in her forties—they’re also burdened with more tasks because their husbands don’t want to learn what they’re supposedly so good at.

It’s funny that men are often perceived as cold, rational actors and women are the emotional bunch, because their advice on choosing partners is the exact opposite. Galloway emphasizes physical attraction followed by alignment on passion, values, and money. He thinks men should find a partner they want to be affectionate with and who genuinely wants to see them win.

Low suggests a much more transactional, “cold-state” approach. She believes the “hot state” of romantic love blinds women to the eventual compromises they’ll make. She advises women to treat dating like a job interview for a “co-CEO,” actively assessing a potential partner’s track record with laundry, childcare, and their willingness to share the invisible mental load of running a household.

It’s also funny that Scott suggests such alignment when he writes shit like this:

Yoga? It was mostly an excuse to meet women. The studio was called Muti. Eighty percent of the students were hot, easy-to-approach women. I ended up dating two yoga instructors. For a man who doesn’t know many people in New York and wants to clear his head and get some exercise (and go on dates), I highly recommend yoga.

He mentions Muti, but mostly works out with Equinox. If there’s one thing I’m qualified to speak about, it’s yoga at Equinox in New York City, where I taught thousands of classes in the aughts and early teens. Two studios in particular come to mind. Soho, where the yoga studio is all glass, positioned right next to the stairwell leading into the men’s locker room; and Chelsea, on the Highline, also all glass, which was subject to the invasive stares of construction workers while the park was being built. In both cases, I watched men unflinchingly gaze at the dozens of women in my class, which is not a comfortable scenario. Galloway telling dudes to go to yoga to fuck falls really flat, especially when weighed against his advice to match on “values.”

While Galloway sees marriage as an engine for wealth creation, Low views data differently. She warns that modern marriage is often an economic trap for women. Both writers recognize divorce is financially devastating for both partners; they also agree that women come out of divorce in worse shape. That said, Low advises women to treat divorce like a business negotiation with a “difficult but important client.”

There’s parenting advice in both books, but that’s not a topic of interest, so I glossed over most of it, at least when it comes to the actual raising of children. This powerful passage on the overall topic of children by Low is worth sharing, however.

I coined the term reproductive capital to describe the economic resource that fertility represents. Precisely because reproductive capital carries economic power—being able to decide who gets to fertilize their eggs gives women access to resources—one can also note that societies that attempt to limit women’s power tend to take away their right to decide whether, when, and with whom to have children.

Hello, MAGA America.

How about their advice for fixing this mess?

Galloway focuses on broad economic and educational interventions to give young men better opportunities to launch and build viability:

• Raise the minimum wage to $25/hour. He says this will combat the housing crisis and make young people economically viable.

• Expand higher education. He criticizes elite universities for relying on “scarcity” to build luxury brands. He wants the top 20 universities to expand their incoming freshman seats by 50% within a decade.

• Mandatory service jobs. He believes every young man should be required to work a service job. He argues this serves as a boot camp for life that builds resilience, humility, and the empathy required to function in society.

• Regulate the “Addiction Economy.” He strongly supports state laws and school policies that physically restrict cellphone use in the classroom.

Meanwhile, Low argues that women “leaning in” will never equalize the gender wage gap. She advocates for a systemic overhaul to stop penalizing women for biological realities. A few specific policy recommendations:

• Government-Funded, Shorter Parental Leave. She points out that when employers are forced to foot the bill for maternity leave, it creates a financial incentive for them to discriminate against hiring women of childbearing age. She also writes that shorter periods of guaranteed paid leave (8 to 12 weeks) actually result in less workplace discrimination than extended 6-to-12 month leaves.

• “Use It or Lose It” Paternity Leave. She notes that men often use paternity leave to catch up on work, not child-raising activities, citing academics who churn out papers during this time. Instead, she wants a cultural shift at home. She points to evidence from Spain and Sweden that shows mandatory paternity is crucial for getting men to take their share of the parenting load and establishing lifelong equity in domestic labor.

• Provider-Neutral Childcare Subsidies. Childcare subsidies should be paid out equally whether a family purchases care on the open market or a mother chooses to stay home and provide it herself. She says this will structurally recognize that taking care of your own child is a valid economic activity.

• Redesigning Career Timelines. Employers need to create “local” routes parallel to the career “express” highway. For example, offering 60% client loads or creating holding patterns for residencies and partner tracks so women don’t have to choose between their reproductive peak and their career peak.

• Bias-Proofing the Workplace. To stop subjective hiring bias, Low recommends evaluating resumes side-by-side rather than sequentially. She also insists that organizations must stop relying on women to do “non-promotable” tasks (like office housework or mentoring) for free, and instead guarantee these tasks are included in formal performance reviews and distributed equally to men.

Whether or not men learn from Low’s book is one thing. I still advise them to read it. I believe Galloway was well intentioned when writing his book. There’s just so many angles he wasn’t able to consider.

Much of the conversation around male loneliness revolves around women. Sure, male friendships and vulnerabilities, but most tilts toward relationships, sex, and family. I’m unsure why any man would limit advice to only half the equation. Low has given us an excellent resource for filling in that gap.