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Below, Corinne Low shares five key insights from her new book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Womens Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours. Corinne is an economist and professor at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Her research has been published in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and the Journal of Political Economy. She also regularly speaks to and advises companies on their practices. Whats the big idea? Women face unequal demands at home and in the workplace, making having it all costly. Research shows how hidden factors shape choices and offers a way to reclaim time, energy, and joy. Listen to the audio version of this Book Biteread by Corinne herselfbelow, or in the Next Big Idea App. 1. Its not in your head; its in the data In 2017, I gave birth to my sonand had a midlife crisis. Things that used to work, like commuting two and a half hours to my job, just didnt add up anymore. I was constantly stressed, angry, depleted, and so tired all the time. Pumping in the Amtrak bathroom, crying that I would miss my sons bedtime because of a train delay, I wondered, Is it just me? I started studying womens time use, and the data told me I was far from alone. Women are getting squeezed from all sides. As our time in the labor market has increased, our time on home responsibilities hasnt declined accordingly. This is for two reasons: Mens time spent cooking and cleaning has stayed fixed since the 1970s. The way we parent has become much more intensive than a generation ago. Mothers in the ’80s were not babywearing and pumping at work or driving to a million activities. I grew up in the ’80s, and we were out riding bikes with no snacks and no water bottleswe must have been very dehydrated! The parenting game has changed. Some changes are great and have to do with our greater understanding of child development, but we spend almost twice as much time with our kids as compared to mothers only a generation ago. Without getting sufficient help from our partners, there just arent enough hours in the day. The amount our partners do also doesnt change when women are the primary breadwinners at home. Women who are the breadwinners still do twice as much cooking and cleaning as their lower-earning male partnerswinning the bread and baking it too. If you look at time usage over a lifecycle, you see womens time use on kids and housework swells to a mountain in our thirties (a period I call the squeeze), and the mirror image of that is our time on leisure and career investments, which goes down like a valley. During that period, time inequality with men is also at its peak. They do less childcare and housework and have more work and leisure time. We need to figure out a different way forward. 2. Your goal in life is utility, not career success The problems facing women in the workplace are structural. Were trying to be a Frankenstein of a super career woman at the office and an Instagram mom at home. We feel like were falling behind because were trying to do more (succeed in a world built by and for men) with less. But economists model human beings as maximizing not career success, not prestige, but their utility function. Your utility function is unique to you. Utility is like a firms profit function. Your personal profit function is made up of all the things that bring you joy, meaning, and fulfillment over the course of your lifetime. If you were to look back at your life when youre 85 years old, what would make you say, That was a life well lived? Your career is part of that, but its not the whole thing. Your utility function is unique to you. Only you know what brings you the deepest feelings of satisfaction. So, you cant compare yourself to someone else in terms of accomplishment because theyve accomplished different thingstheir utility function is different! Meaning, theyre maximizing something else. 3. A job is a tool to turn time into money Lets talk about where your career fits into your utility function. Your job converts time (the natural resource youre endowed with to maximize utility) into money. Your job is like an ATM; you put time into it and get money out of it. Ideally, it does this with minimal hassle and maybe some enjoyment, potentially adding to your utility rather than subtracting from it. But when I ask people what they would do with their time if money were no object, almost no one says theyd try to file more reports or climb higher on the corporate ladder. Thats because we recognize that a job is a means to utility, not an end. If we didnt need the money that comes from employment, wed spend most of our time on things we really enjoy: being with loved ones, hobbies, nature, and taking care of ourselves. We need to think of our careers a little more transactionally than the business books at airports press us to. Exactly how much money do I need at each phase of my life, and how do I plot a career that gets me that while eating up as little of my precious time as possible? This means thinking hard about the lifecycle of your job. Investing lots of time in your twenties can make sense because youre not as squeezed by home responsibilities, and it can buy you a better time-to-money conversion rate from your job later in life. But you want to make sure youre in a field where you are working toward the ability to take your foot off the gas at some pointlike during the squeezeand use more of that time making utility directly. Otherwise, the prize for the pie-eating contest is more pie! Your investment in your career should be proportional to the role money plays in maximizing your utility. Everything else is just chasing success at the expense of true happiness. 4. You can work like a girl and get paid There is no evidence that male traits are actually more productive, and there certainly isnt any evidence that women will be rewarded for mimicking them. When I got to Wharton, a male colleague told me that students respect you more when you are tough, saying that I needed to show them who was boss right from the start. So, I marked them tardy if they were a minute late, and guess what? They hated it coming from me. A female professor told me that shed found her students expected her to be really nice, and she had to fulfill their social expectations to receive good reviews. Research backs up this anecdote: Women are often penalized for failing to exhibit expected traits like niceness and community-mindedness. I want women to view their gendered traits as superpowers. While its also true that the evidence shows that men are, on average, more competitive, more risk-loving, tougher negotiators, and greater self-promoters, it does not say that those things lead to more productivity or higher profits. In a study on competitiveness, men were overcompetitive. Subjects performed a task and had to decide whether they wanted to receive payment for their efforts or participate in a tournament, where they would only be paid if they scored the highest. Of the worst-performing men (the men certain to lose the tournament), 60% still chose to enter rather than take the guaranteed payoff. In my own research on negotiation, I found that male-male pairs were more than twice as likely to fail to reach an agreement and therefore walk away from a negotiation with nothing. I want women to view their gendered traits as superpowers, and find workplaces where they can get ahead by being themselvesnot by pretending to be a man and getting punished for it anyway. 5. We must radically prioritize what contributes to our happiness When the deck is stacked against us, we cant keep trying to play fairmeeting everyone elses needs, and never our own. We have to become ruthless in aligning our time with what gives us utility. Take these three steps: Renegotiate how time and money are allocated in your household. Throw out your houseplants and make other hard choices. Pay yourself first with leisure time. First, to renegotiate the deal in your household, I want you and your partner to track your time. Often, men think theyre doing about half the household work, but thats only because they do half of the things they know about. While theyre doing half the school drop-offs, youre the one making sure there are clothes in the right size, lunches packed, after-school care, and playdates are scheduledhalf of which you multitask during work. If you track your time, you might realize theres a lot more inequality than you think, and you can start reallocating. Once you reallocate the households joint time budget, if theres still inequality in work and leisure time, see if reallocating money can help. Not outsourcing a task is hiring yourself to do it. We rarely do this with male-coded tasks (like car repair and plumbing), but somehow, for female-coded tasks, we forget that doing something in-house has an opportunity cost of where else you could invest that time. If youre a lawyer who bills at a certain rate, or a nurse who could pick up an extra shift, can you really afford that much of your own time for laundry? We have to become ruthless in aligning our time with what gives us utility. Second, throw out your houseplants is my pithy phrase for decluttering your time of anything thats an obligation rather than a calling. For me, it was wilting houseplants that I didnt have time to care for and made me feel like a failure. For you, it might be volunteering at your kids school, making homemade baby food, or planning the office retreat. Understanding how were being squeezed from all sides gives you the freedom to say, Nope, this doesnt add up for me right now. Importantly, you can always say yes later when youre in a different, and easier, chapter of your life. Lastly, pay yourself first with leisure time. We do get some time to ourselves, but often its just little crumbles of time left over at the end of the day. By then, were so depleted we end up just zoning out on our phones. If we block out time for the things that bring us the most joy and meaning, everything else can claim the scraps! Its like how we can suddenly get a project done in an hour before the deadlinethings expand to fill the available space in our calendars. Block your leisure time like an important meeting, and let yourself be your own top priority. Enjoy our full library of Book Bitesread by the authors!in the Next Big Idea app. This article originally appeared in Next Big Idea Club magazine and is reprinted with permission.
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Circa 1450, the creative community was jolted. The printing press had just been invented in Europe. Scribes, typically monks who had spent lifetimes perfecting the spiritual art of hand-copying manuscripts, saw their specialized skills suddenly rendered obsolete. Yet in short order, the disruptive innovation democratized knowledge, enabled the Renaissance, and created entirely new creative roles for editors, typesetters, printmakers, and illustrators. More than five centuries later, Photoshop sparked similar concerns about devaluing traditional skills and compromising image integrity. Artists worried it would cheapen the craft. Instead, it became foundational to modern graphic design, opening new creative possibilities while making visual expression accessible to wider audiences. New tools that initially seem threatening often become indispensable partners in creative work. People in creative fields are, by nature, creative. They tend to think beyond what currently exists and adopt emerging technologies to accelerate their process, embolden their output, and make their medium more accessible. ENTER: AI Artificial intelligences threats to the creative community are well documented. At the same time, we are also seeing myriad ways the technology can quickly deliver valuable information, patterns, and research that can liberate the creative community to spend more time actually creating. When it comes to my area of expertiseempowering the design community to leverage the full emotional, narrative, and commercial power of colorAI can be a valuable partner in the creative process. Pantone just introduced a new tool, in fact, that employs conversational AI technology to help creatives expedite designs research and inspiration phases. The tool helps users explore color palettes, leverage trend forecasting data, and generate design concepts. But while AI can process data and identify patterns, the forward-looking trend insights themselves remain uniquely human, rooted in cultural analysis and nuanced insight, intuition, and imagination. A creative process that uses artificial intelligence also demands human intelligence. AI tools trained on human-identified trends help designers respond with greater speed, depth, and nuance, but the trends themselves must first be recognized by human experts attuned to cultural shifts. REQUIRED: THE HUMAN IMAGINATION When Pantone selected Mocha Mousse as Color of the Year 2025an evocative brown leaning into our desire for everyday pleasuresno machine learning model could have sensed the burgeoning cultural ethos it spoke to. Human forecasters recognized a global appetite for thoughtful indulgence, harmonious comfort, and personal luxury, all expressed by this rich, deep brown. Trend forecasting demands humanspeople who sense subtle undercurrents of collective emotion before they surface, who understand when comfort becomes more important than adventure, when personal expression pushes back against homogenization , when nostalgia begins to feel fresh again. Color scientists track films in production, new artists, fashion movements, emerging lifestyles, socioeconomic shifts, evolving technologies and materialsbuilding a comprehensive view of where culture is headed. After all, humans are animals, and animals have always used color as a multifaceted and sentient signal system: attracting mates, establishing identity, communicating mood, warning of danger. Just as a vermilion flycatcher uses red feathers to attract females while a kingsnakes bright red bands warn predators away, we use color to send messages about who we are and what we desire. These messages shift with our cultural moment in ways no algorithm or technology can anticipate. The insights require the unique ability to sense what’s emerging before it fully arrives. From the printing press to Photoshop to AI, new technologies amplify what creatives can do. It makes processes swifter, bolder, more affordable, and more accessible. AI can help creatives tap into powerful color stories and trend insights. But the creative vision, the cultural fluency, and the ability to sense what will move people remains distinctly, irreplaceably human. AI is another powerful tool in the creative arsenal, most potent when it augments rather than attempts to replace human insight and imagination. Sky Kelley is president of Pantone.
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E-Commerce
Were living through a seismic workforce disruption. Business leaders are poised to have a significant impact on the way our economy is shaped over the next decade. You already see it with the big company CEOs creating a cult of celebrity far beyond anything weve seen historically, but this phenomenon cascades down to all leaders across companies. Today, however, your personal brand is built in authentic micro-momentshow you lead meetings, navigate change, and bring others along. What story are you telling?Earlier this month, I sat down with Marissa Andrada and Al Dea at Guilds Opportunity Summit to discuss why personal brand building is no longer optional for leaders who want to drive meaningful impact. DOES PERSONAL BRAND NEED A REBRAND? The concept of a personal brand can sound like a marketing buzzword. But if you write it off as such, youre going to fall behind. We arent advocating for leaders to break out their tripods at a conference and do the latest Taylor Swift TikTok dance (but if thats authentic to you, go for it). Your personal brandor leadership signature if you really want to avoid the b wordis built through micro-moments: the tone you bring to a meeting, the decisions you make, and how you develop and support people during times of transformation.As Al put it, Every stakeholder conversation is a chance to show people what youre about. That starts with understanding the beliefs and motivations that drive others. People can only see things from their seat, he added. If you want them to see things from yours, you first need to see things from theirs. ELEVATE YOUR WORK THROUGH STRATEGIC STORYTELLING Personal brand canand shouldcoexist with humility. For the introverts among us, this isnt about self-promotion. Its about translating your teams impact into stories that resonate with the business. Strategic storytelling connects people to purpose. It transforms complex initiatives into narratives that inspire action and resonate with the business. As leaders, we can help our teams do this by focusing on what I call the three Cs: clarity, commitment, and consistency.Clarity: Clear really is kind. Strip out jargon and acronyms. Ask yourself: Would the average employee understand what Im trying to say? If not, simplify.Commitment: Audiences can sense when youre reciting a script versus speaking from conviction. Belief cant be fakedand when leaders try, trust erodes fast. Consistency: Rome wasn’t built in a day, and your leadership signature wont be either. Words and action, over a sustained period of time, reinforce your stated values. The small, unseen momentshow you respond to challenges, how you show up when no ones watchingcreate the foundation of your credibility. 2 SHIFTS TO BUILD YOUR PERSONAL BRAND FOUNDATION Mindfully consider your personal style and how you want your brand to show up. Gut-check that with others. Ask yourself: What do you want others to say about your leadership? Does that align with the feedback I receive? If not, where are there gaps and how can I work toward reconciling them? Here are two shifts you can make today to create that foundation. 1) Ground in outcomes Too often, leaders fall into the same traps we coach early-career workers to avoid on their resumes. Shift away from the activity, into the outcome. Activity: We led a large-scale software integration this quarter. Outcome: We transformed how our company connects people strategy to business results.Leading with outcomes helps to contextualize the weight and the why behind your teams work, building credibility with the listener. 2) Mind your language On our San Diego panel, Marissa shared a story of her time at Universal Studios. Early on, she introduced herself to business leads with HR-speak: Im here to help develop a new performance management and talent planning process. She received clear, actionable feedback that the corporate jargonwhat she jokingly called corponicswas not resonating. The very colleagues she was trying to rally did not know what she was saying.Taking their feedback, she dropped the lingo, and recalibrated to human-first language. Instead of succession planning, she said, Were growing fast. When youre ready for your next role, how do you ensure someones ready to step into your seat? AUTHENTIC LEADERSHIP IN AN ERA OF ERODED TRUST Personal brands can no longer be “crafted” in a conference room with a team of external consultants. Todays workforce is skeptical, discerning, and exhausted. Decades of information overload, polarization, and change have left employees craving authenticity and wary of anything that feels performative. People are drawn to leaders who reflect their stated values through daily interactions. If you think your leadership brand only lives on LinkedIn, youre tracking the wrong KPIs. Do your public posts reflect the experiences your customers and teams are having privately? The leaders who will define the next decade are those whose public narratives match their private behaviors. When leaders clarify their values, master storytelling, and lead with authenticity, they dont just strengthen their own brandsthey rebuild trust in business itself. One example Marissa shared in San Diego, was her time as chief people officer at Chipotle and the experience of partnering with Guild to transform their employee tuition reimbursement program into an initiative that reinforced the companys belief in peoples potential. The result? Measurable business outcomes. Chipotle saw stronger retention and greater internal mobility made possible by the new skills through education. THE BIGGER PICTURE Building a personal brand isnt about self-promotion. Its about creating alignment between who you are, how you lead, and the impact you create. By cultivating clarity of values, mastering the art of strategic storytelling, and leading with authenticity, todays executives can build personal brands that elevate their voices and strengthen trust in their organizations. In doing so, leaders transform branding from an exercise in visibility into a discipline of influence anchored in purpose. Rebecca Biestman is CMO of Guild.
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E-Commerce
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