Kurt Nelson  0:07  
Hey, grooves, welcome to behavior. Grooves. I'm Kurt Nelson

Tim Houlihan  0:10  
and I'm Tim Houlihan. This is the podcast that communicates serious science in not so serious ways.

Kurt Nelson  0:17  
No, we are not serious at all, are we? But it's very serious information, and today we're very seriously taking our talk with Corinne Lowe, an economist at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and author of the new book having it all. And corinne's work dives deep into the economic and behavioral forces shaping gender roles, parenting and modern day relationships.

Tim Houlihan  0:40  
This may sound familiar, if you're a regular listener. We've covered similar ground with other researchers, but Corinne is an economist, and her way of looking at these problems is, well, it's very much like an economist. It's a very number driven conversation,

Kurt Nelson  0:55  
exactly. And one of the big ideas that Corinne brings to light is that the gender revolution, it stopped halfway Tim and what she means by that is that women have entered the workforce in massive numbers and took on lots of new responsibilities in households and work and variety of other things, But men didn't step it up at home to offset the extra work that women were doing. And that imbalance, she argues, is at the core of why there are so many modern families that are stressed, stretched and feeling like they're having it almost, almost. I

Tim Houlihan  1:38  
love that term. I love that having it almost okay. And as I said before, she brings in the data so she's got she backs it up. And this is pretty fantastic. Now, Corinne identifies how women today spend twice as much time, twice as much time with their kids as mothers did a generation ago. That's amazing. That's crazy. It is truly but men's household contributions have barely budged since the 1970s

Kurt Nelson  2:06  
All right, I have to tell you that that hit way too close to home for me, right? I recognized in the in the moment, you can probably see it in my face, like when she was talking, right, that there were aspects of what she was saying that were reflective of my life, and it doesn't feel good

Tim Houlihan  2:26  
me too, which made this even more interesting, right? Since I connected to my own experiences in my own life, and hopefully corinne's comments and observations can highlight something that will hopefully change this imbalance for

Kurt Nelson  2:43  
all of us. Agreed, agreed. And now what's really refreshing with what she is saying is that she reframes this right. She doesn't call for everyone to lean in harder. It is like, oh, we have to do this differently. No, she's called for a smarter equilibrium, and she'll cover that in more detail in the conversation. And I think it's really valuable for people to listen in. She Bren, she blends this idea of behavioral economics of data. And I don't know, Tim, would you say a healthy dose of humor to show why gender roles are still, as she puts it, a hell of a drug.

Tim Houlihan  3:25  
So very true. So whether you're managing a team or a household or both, right, you're going to find something insightful and maybe a little provocative in this conversation. And you'll hear those insights come through. And Corinne is optimistic, bigger than sunshine disposition, because she is totally outsized in that regard.

Kurt Nelson  3:45  
All right, so, so grab a lavender ice latte, decaf, that is, if you're like Corinne, and settle in for a fascinating talk about the economics of family, fairness and finding your groove, and enjoy our conversation with Corinne Lo.

Tim Houlihan  4:08  
Corinne Lo, welcome to behavioral

Speaker 1  4:10  
grooves. Thanks for having me. It's a pleasure

Tim Houlihan  4:14  
to have you here today, and we're going to get started with some few fun questions. The first one being, would you prefer to learn a new instrument or a new language?

Speaker 1  4:24  
I think by revealed preference, it's language, because I'm doing Spanish on Duolingo and I am not learning any instruments

Tim Houlihan  4:33  
I love that you just framed that in behavioral science terms.

Kurt Nelson  4:36  
Thank you. All right. But if you were asked that question, and you didn't have to go and look at revealed is, does it still the same? Are you still gonna pick your language? Are you gonna go

Speaker 1  4:49  
My house is a very My house is a very intimidating house to pursue music in, because my wife is a former professional musician. She still does music, but has a Kurt. Day job now, and so I'm not even allowed to sing to our infant daughter, because I might teach her,

Tim Houlihan  5:08  
wow, okay, okay, well, maybe there's an opportunity. All right, I'm not even gonna go there.

Kurt Nelson  5:16  
Okay, all right. Second Speed Round question, are you a coffee drinker, a tea drinker, or something else?

Speaker 1  5:24  
I can't drink any caffeine, even though I love both of those things in decaf form.

Kurt Nelson  5:31  
Okay, is it? Is it a coffee in the morning, thing, tea in the afternoon? Or does it whichever is like you're feeling at the moment?

Speaker 1  5:39  
Yeah, it's whatever I feel like. But I'd say drink of the moment when it's hot out is lavender iced latte decaf.

Tim Houlihan  5:47  
That sounds lavender ice latte decaf. Okay, yeah, no caffeine. Okay, interesting. Or what if it's cold out,

Speaker 1  5:58  
then tea, then I think we go with a Earl gray with milk and sugar. Oh, you

Tim Houlihan  6:04  
you load it up. Okay. Now, then we could actually get into a whole discussion about how you prepare that when you put the cream in, when you put the sugar in, okay, because there's

Speaker 1  6:14  
don't let the milk make it cold before it finishes brewing. It is important.

Tim Houlihan  6:21  
Okay, excellent. All right. Third Speed Round question, true or false? Women are coping, not thriving in their dual roles at home and at work.

Speaker 1  6:30  
I mean, some women are thriving, and I'm happy for them, but I would say on average, yeah, we're just hanging in

Tim Houlihan  6:36  
there. Just hanging in there. Okay, there is a lot more to talk about there, we will definitely come

Kurt Nelson  6:42  
back to that all right, and our last of our speed round questions, and I'm choosing from a couple here, so I'm gonna go with this one. I'm gonna go with this one, true or false. Women should think more like economists when making life choices

Speaker 1  7:01  
true. I mean, I think everybody should think more like economist.

Tim Houlihan  7:06  
Because you are an economist, we're

Unknown Speaker  7:08  
gonna get into fights now.

Kurt Nelson  7:13  
You want us to be all rational and thinking like, you know, utility and payoffs and various different pieces. All right, let's go. This is gonna be

Tim Houlihan  7:22  
fun, okay? All right, well, we are talking with Corinne Lowe about her new book having it all. And you frame women as economic agents, right? And who are rational beings trying to optimize their lives within a world of constraints. And I mentioned a whole bunch of economic terms there, like economic agents, rational beings, optimization constraints. These are, this is all fodder for discussion, but I just want to start with there. All of this is adding up to women primarily Having it All right. Is that? Is that fair to say that all these things can conspire together to actually produce a world that's where women are having it all fair enough.

Speaker 1  8:01  
Well, what I would say is, I think that women are struggling right now to have it all, and are feeling like having it all is a little bit too much. And we're going to get into what the data says about that. And why

Tim Houlihan  8:13  
is having it all more about like having most of it, or having having almost

Speaker 1  8:20  
all. So that is, in fact, my new hashtag is having it almost because, you know, that's how I feel when, like the other day, I was taping a podcast, and I thought that my baby was going to be napping during that podcast, but she had other ideas, and so I taped a podcast while breastfeeding her, and it was hashtag, having it almost,

Kurt Nelson  8:40  
almost, almost, oh, my God. Well, let's, let's, let's talk about the, the components that you brought up there, about, all right, many women are struggling and, and what is it that you're talking about here? About, what is that? What is that struggle from? And then, I mean, we'll get into what can we do about it, or what can women do about it? But let's talk where is that struggle coming from first?

Speaker 1  9:07  
Yeah, so there's two big structural forces, and that's why I wrote this book, was literally to share this data with the world, because it really changed the way I looked at things. So the two big structural forces are one, gender roles have converged in the workplace, but they haven't converged at home. So when you look at women's time use, it's changed tremendously over the past 70 years, going back to 1950 and men's time use actually hasn't changed at all. Men do about the same amount of housework as they did in like 1975 and then the second major force is that parenting time has increased massively, and mothers today spend twice as much time with our children as mothers a generation ago. And so when you put that all together, that we're pursuing these careers that are becoming more intense, that we're still the primary home for. Producers, and that we're not getting help from our partners with housework and the work of living, and that we're trying to spend twice as much time with our kids, it just doesn't add up, and that's why we feel like we're failing.

Tim Houlihan  10:11  
So why is that not the failing part? But why is it that the structural components are literally conspiring against us?

Speaker 1  10:19  
Yeah, so I don't know for the first one, you know, I ask that question all the time in sort of, why have we had this incomplete gender revolution? And I think the best I can say from what the evidence shows me, some of my research shows me is that I think it's because women entering the workforce wasn't driven as much by a true change in gender or societal roles, as we think it was. A lot of it was actually driven by easier divorce. And this is very unromantic, but basically, when divorce became easier, a lot of women who had invested in being full time homemakers were really financially devastated by then being, you know, left and left without a career when they were in their 40s and 50s, and they told their daughters, you have to always protect your ability to support yourself. And so there's a very good paper by Mary Ann Bronson that's called degrees are forever that shows that actually, when we see women now surpassing men in college education, that that trend follows the rollout of unilateral divorce, that as divorce became easier, that was when women started getting their degrees. And so if that's really the source of women going into the workforce, you can understand that maybe the underlying structure of families didn't change as much as we think. And maybe that's part of why men really haven't kind of woken up and changed their roles. And then for the second force, this idea about spending more time with our children, I think that's for a wonderful reason. It's because we now have a field of developmental psychology, and we actually understand that investing, one on one, connected caregiver time with our children is crucial for their human capital development. It's crucial for like, literally, the money that they will earn later on in life, being held and talked to from infancy, right? But it means that child rearing today looks totally different than it did a generation ago. Parents a generation ago were not extended breastfeeding and baby wearing, and they weren't pumping when they went back to work, they weren't sitting on the floor with their toddlers, and they weren't sitting at the kitchen table with their school age kids, and they weren't driving to travel soccer games on the weekend. Every parent listening probably knows they have this, you know, like elaborate bedtime routine, and sometimes it's joyful and you're sharing, you know, wins and disappointments from the day, and sometimes it's frustrating because your kid just won't go to bed. Well, I grew up in the 80s, my bedtime routine was, go to bed. Parenting has changed and and I think people don't realize, and that's again, why I wanted to share this data with people that that is it's a beautiful affirmative choice to try to give our kids as much as we can, to prepare them for the complex world that they're facing, and it's tremendously costly in terms of our time. It's

Kurt Nelson  13:13  
interesting that you brought up the those two pieces, right? I mean, I obviously the research points there, but it it hit home in kind of a my own sense, right? I was, it's interesting on the first part, because as a young high schooler in the 80s and and then, you know, entering into the workforce in the 90s, there was, at least in my head, this expectation that my role was going to be very different than my father's role in the family, right? That that there was going to be, it was, it was the Dustin Hoffman movies, you know, the different pieces of that. That was kind of the thought that was there. And if I was to be really honest and looking, you know, I might have increased this much over what my father probably did, but my wife is doing, you know, the vast majority of different things, and actually doing even more things, because my wife took over all the financial, you know, components of paying the bills and doing everything else, which was what, you know, if I looked at the breakout of where my parents were. My dad did all that financial stuff, worked on the cars, but mom did everything else, right? And that is an interesting piece, because it would have, I would have assumed that we would have moved more towards that equal component of of housework, of all of the daily duties that we do and living, but that isn't the case. And sorry, that was just a little meat,

Speaker 1  14:49  
I'll point out. And thank you for I love the honest assessment. You know that honest accounting, which is something I encourage people to do in the book, but that's also the case for women of you know. Our generation is that they thought that they were going to kind of continue the progress in the workforce that their own mothers had made. And in fact, this generation is the first generation that is less likely to be working full time than they thought they were going to be when they were, you know, in school, and kind of envisioning their future life. And I think the reason is because the parenting world that they're now raising their kids in is one that involves a lot more of their time, a lot greater time investments, than the one that they envisioned based on how they were raised.

Tim Houlihan  15:36  
Well, in terms of agency, to some degree. Aren't we choosing this? Are we, individually, as parents, in in our relationship with our kids? We choosing to make these investments and that we want to have these greater investments, and we want to have the the career at work, and we want to have more time at home with the kids?

Speaker 1  15:58  
Yeah, 100% like I said, I think it's an affirmative choice that people are making, because they're in my economist turn they they see a return on that investment, right? So they're responding to where there's a return on the investment. And if you don't know that there's a correlation between the hours you spend talking to an infant and what their outcomes are going to be later in life, then, of course, you're going to throw the infant in the crib and toss a bottle at them, right? But if you know that there's that, you know that correlation Well, now you say, well, there is a return to my time investment, and that's competitive with my time investment at work. And we know that it's women kind of experiencing a return, because it's actually the women who are the least constrained who do more of spending their own time with their kids. So as women earn more, they spend more time with their kids. That doesn't make any sense if you think of the opportunity cost of the fact that, wait, they're earning more in the labor market and they're spending more time with their kids, but it's because they are less constrained. And so time with our children is actually a luxury good, that as we have more resources, we choose to do more of it, because we recognize how powerful that's going to be for them later in life. Now that doesn't mean that I you know, part of the lesson in the book is, if we want to get out of that feeling of like, okay, I'm drowning in time commitments, it means I think we do have to make some critical choices about that time and which uses of time are the highest investment. But that's right, and that's why I think I try to get away from this framework that the way we as women should measure our success is just by career success, and that the purpose of our life should be kind of leaning into the office, because there are other important things for us to do with our time. And so if we're making the choice that brings us the most utility and happiness and deep fulfillment over our lifetime, then you know that should also be celebrated. And so you know, it's not my book isn't about leaning in. It's about kind of maximizing in all areas of your life and balancing between them.

Kurt Nelson  18:02  
I Hey, grooves. We want to take a moment away from our conversation to thank you for listening to behavioral grooves if you enjoy the conversations we're having and want to help us keep the groove going, here are a few simple ways that you can support the show.

Tim Houlihan  18:16  
First off, subscribing to our sub stack is a great way to stay connected with us between episodes. The weekly newsletter provides you with cool insights that are beyond the episodes, and they get delivered straight to your inbox. And

Kurt Nelson  18:29  
if you haven't already leaving a review or a rating of the podcast on a platform like Apple or Spotify or YouTube, helps other curious minds discover us. And there's two great things about that. One, it gives us a boost. And two, it costs nothing

Tim Houlihan  18:45  
and it only takes a second, but it makes a huge difference for us. Plus, we love hearing from you, so don't be shy. Leave us a review or give us a quick thumbs

Kurt Nelson  18:55  
up. We're coming up on 500 episodes, and we're doing this because we love the conversations we have with our guests. Yeah,

Tim Houlihan  19:01  
we also want to do it because we love bringing you insightful behavior, changing content every week, and we hope that some of those insights will help you find your groove.

Kurt Nelson  19:13  
So Corinne, I love this conversation. I love where this is going, and it's really interesting. And know that this is a podcast, so I'm going to be asking your opinion, and it might be backed up by research, but it might just be your opinion on this. And feel free, you're not, you're not being in an academic component here, but there's an aspect of this, and I'm curious about this because we're, you're talking about the economics of this, and understanding there's a payoff at the end, and various different things. I'm wondering if, if the change in behavior, and the change that that we're seeing in spending more time with kids, in, you know, having some of the all of those other factors that are going is driven by social norms and driven by kind of the X. Expectations, not necessarily understanding that there is the that, hey, if I spend more time with my child, it leads to better outcomes for my child at the end. But it's just like, This is what all my friends are doing. This is what I need to do. I know for like you talked about your bedtime routine in the 80s. I know, like my parents, I think mid to one sporting event that I ever did, right? And I am going to, like, you know, we had back to back volleyball games yesterday and the day before, and it's like, we're in and there's at 330 so I'm taking off of work to go, to go, you know, get to the it's, it's crazy and, but that's, and we're doing it because everybody else's parents are doing it, and it's kind of the expectation, and I feel like I'd be letting my child down, because, not because they expect me there, but because every other parent is there, and where are you? So just thought your thoughts on that?

Speaker 1  20:56  
Yeah, so there's there's some of both. So there's also another theory about this increased time with our kids, and that's the people who first documented that we were spending so much more time with our kids, our economists, Valerie and Gary Ramey, and they called it the rugrat race, and they said, what's happening is that, you know, we're all kind of competing for limited slots in these good colleges, and so we're having like an arms race where we're actually investing too much in our kids, because we're just trying to beat the other parents and how much they've invested in their kids, right? And in economics terms, that would be inefficient, right? But I think that there's, there's some of both. So I think, I do think people kind of make rational decisions. And what I mean by that, it doesn't, it doesn't look as technical as the way an economist sees it, like maximizing an equation. But I mean by that is the mom reads the article that says, hey, you need to speak 10,000 words a day to your kid to make sure that their brain develops properly. And she says, Okay, I got to make sure I speak 10,000 words a day to my kid. That means I can't put them in front of the TV. That means I can't do this, right? So that's the piece that I think is you're responding to the actual incentives of like I'm getting a return. There's this other piece that could be the rugrat race, right? This inefficient, like, we're kind of vying for supremacy versus other other people's kids. And then there's also this other piece of it that is this other kind of social pressure, which I think women are also susceptible to, which is, like, I need my kid to have these hallmarks, these like signifiers of like this picture perfect childhood. And that's those hand decorated birthday cupcakes and the homemade baby food. And it's, you know, me driving them myself to everything that they go to, right? And those are the places where I ask like people to kind of take a look at how they're spending their time, and saying, Are you getting that return, or is this something that you've kind of been made to feel like you have to do? Because actually, I don't think it's going to matter for your kids long term outcomes, whether their birthday cupcakes were hand decorated or whether you picked them up at the store, right? But we still feel that same compulsion to like, oh, I have to do this, because that's what it means to be a good parent, and those are the things that I want us to say no to. So that's the fat I think we can trim amid this reality that there actually is this other time that really is valuable that we do need to put in.

Kurt Nelson  23:13  
It's really interesting. We talked with Tim, is it Mike Norton, who talked about rituals, yeah. And one of the interesting pieces that he talked about from rituals is, is he gave this example of this, this guy who got up every morning, and he crafted this coffee really, doing all you know, again, making this perfect brewing it just right, and bringing it up to his wife every morning. And for him, it was this ritual, but for his wife, it was a cup of coffee, and it couldn't have cared less about the amount of effort and care and different pieces he put in. She just wanted the caffeine. Unlike you, right? But you know it's like, wanted the one of the caffeine, and it sounds to a certain degree, if you replace, you know that making the coffee with, you know, decorating the cupcakes, the kid isn't putting the same into right, the value so it would I get that right? Yeah, my

Speaker 1  24:16  
kid thinks the store bought cupcakes tastes better, okay, my kid tells me that the other kids, okay. Technicolor frosting. Yes, my moms

Tim Houlihan  24:28  
are just kind of dull and messy.

Speaker 1  24:34  
So absolutely, and I think that's why, you know, I think one of the things that really matters to our kids is us being present and relaxed and not snapping at them all the time, and when I'm trying to do 3000 things that don't add up, I'm less able to be that parent that my kid is actually going to enjoy connecting with, right and. That's how I kind of tried to give mom permission to get out of that guilt spiral of like, I have to do this and this and this for my kid. And I'm like, but are you doing that at the expense of being able to sit down and really listen to them when they tell you 10,000 random facts or things about their day, right? Or at the expense of being able to sit down and play a board game with them, because you're so busy and depleted and stressed out, and so that's where I think we have to make hard choices amid this knowledge that our time is important, right? We have to decide where it's most important. And I'm going to push us to go a little bit beyond even the birthday cupcakes with that thinking of where is it most important, which is that we as parents are pushed to do anything possible, and I think especially moms, we are pushed to do anything possible that has any possible benefit to our children. Okay, but the rest of society does not operate that way. So a news story that came out recently was that the bat population collapsed, and because of a fungus, and when the bat population collapsed, farmers had to use more pesticides, and this resulted in a huge increase in infant mortality, okay, but importantly, that increase in the use of pesticides was within regulatory limits of how much these pesticides are allowed to be used. The regulatory limits are set by society in a way that says we know a certain number of kids are going to die from this, but that's just the trade off that we're willing to make. The same with air pollution, the same with speed limits, the same with how many speed bumps you have in school zones, right? All of these things literally determine whether our kids live or die. But society is willing to take risks. Society is willing to make trade offs, but you as a mom are not supposed to make any trade offs. And I want to give that lecture to the moms who are doing something like, let's say breastfeeding doesn't work out for you, but you've heard, oh, but your child might have one more IQ point if you if they get breast milk instead of formula. So now you have to pump exclusively, and you know, so now you're both pumping, and then you still have to give bottles to your baby, right? And for a lot of moms, that's very psychologically draining. I know people who really have had a hard time with that, but they said they had the guilt to say, like, I've been told that this is what's best for my kid, right? And so I say this thing that sounds completely crazy coming from an economist like me, but is, even when something is evidence based, it still doesn't mean that you have to do it. You still have to do a cost benefit analysis

Tim Houlihan  27:34  
for your specific situation. Yeah. So in the book, you write about Gary Becker, the the economist that earned Nobel Prize in 1992 he had this model of marriage, or he developed this model that was that said marriage is economically sound because you've got one provider, typically a husband who's going to go out, and his role, his job, is to be the, be the, you know, Financial provider, and then the the wife, typically, right? 1992 it was, you know, that person is going to be the, you know, fulfill a whole variety of other duties. So, so to what degree is that? Is it outdated? Is it about privilege and or is it aspirational? How do you? How do you, how do you think about that?

Speaker 1  28:21  
Corinne, well, first of all, that model only works if you have 100% secure marriage contract is it's not that you can't get divorced, but it's that if you want to get divorced, you have to buy the other person out the same way you have to buy them out of a business partnership. And that's actually how marriage used to work. So when you had mutual consent to divorce, if one person, if a one person, I won't say who fell in love with their secretary, right? They had to literally write a check to get out of that marriage. Well, once you have that, either party can walk away. Of course, there's some benefits to that for women, and that was what was touted. Is okay, it'll allow him to leave, you know, abusive marriages. But there's this downside that says you could specialize in something that is a public good, the children they're shared by both people. Well, your husband was specializing in something that's a private good, his own human capital, his own career that he takes with him out the door if he leaves that marriage, and that's a really bad deal. And so that perfect specialization model does not work in our kind of new reality, right? But then the other thing that Gary Becker says is that he says that this specialization is going to be based on kind of who has the higher productivity in each domain. And of course, if we rewind a lot to when the United States was a more heavily kind of manufacturing and physical labor based economy, then it makes sense that men have a an advantage in market work. Okay, right? Whitman nowadays are kind of equally competitive in most of the sectors that make up our economy, right? Do we have a service based economy and knowledge based economy? And women can play the same roles as men? So I. Wondered, well, then why don't we see men kind of stepping in and specializing in more of this home production role? And when I look at the data, even when a woman is the primary breadwinner, so even when she's the higher earner in the household, she still does almost twice as much cooking and cleaning as her lower earning male partner. So she has the advantage in labor market production. Why isn't he doing the home production? And I then, you know, tried to rack my brain. They said, Okay, well, is it that men kind of haven't learned how to do this, so they're less productive? And so then, you know, maybe it's not efficient for him to do

Tim Houlihan  30:38  
it. It's really hard. It's really hard to learn how to clean the house.

Speaker 1  30:41  
Oh yeah, the dishes is really, really hard, but, but the data does not support that, because one of the things I see is that when men become unemployed, and then, you know, their time is actually very cheap for the household. So even if it takes him an hour watching YouTube to boil spaghetti, that's still more efficient than her doing it, right? What I see is that when he becomes unemployed, his time on that housework goes up minuscule, and his time on leisure skyrockets instead. So he just does nothing with his time, rather than step into this gender non concordant role of doing the housework, which is what I ended up concluding, is that gender roles are a hell of a drug it.

Kurt Nelson  31:21  
So you basically, basically, we're just lazy, you know, it's, but it is. It's, and I'm sorry I'm kind of fumbling over my words here, but there's a, you know, it's this, this idea of those social norms that we talked about earlier, the status quo component of being, all right? Well, this is the way that it has been. So this is, you know, even if I know it's a better economic model, you know, we're still drawn to keeping things the way they are. What other factors, I mean, you talk about the gender roles and how hard they are to break, but what were some of the factors that you found that are making that so difficult for men to go, you know what? I need to actually just change this, and I need to, you know, pick up the slack and get off my butt.

Speaker 1  32:13  
I think it's partly that perception of, like, Where does your self worth come from, right? And so if you say, like, I'm doing a good job, if I am, like, working and providing for my family, then you might kind of keep pursuing that against, like, logical sense. And what I mean by that, I'll share another data point, which is some people ask me, because every time I present this data, I get some like, yes, buts from the men in the audience. You're like, No, this is why, or whatever. So one of the things people say is, well, maybe it's that men have inflexible jobs. They have to work 40 hours a week. It's hard for them to kind of cut down and, you know, step up instead in the home domain. So I looked at people who were hourly workers. They were earning like a wage. And I have couples where they both are so picture like she's a nurse and he's a truck driver, and so they are each paid for the number of hours that they work. And I see that even when her wage is more than twice his hourly wage, okay, not only does he do less than half of the cooking and cleaning, okay, but he still works more hours than her. So when she has double, more than double the hourly wage, she still works fewer hours. He still works more hours. So it's like as though, by just showing up and clocking in the 40 hours a week, he gets to feel like he's fulfilling that social role of breadwinner, even though his earnings are going to be half of hers. And if he would pick the kids up from daycare so she could pick up a shift as a nurse, they would be richer. The whole household would be better off, right? And so that's what leads me to believe that it is this, you know, sense of self worth, and that's where the kind of behavioral economics comes in, is that we're not perfectly rationalizing, because if we were that distribution in that household makes no sense. I

Kurt Nelson  34:01  
That's fascinating. I'm wondering. And again, apologize, kind of going off script here for for Tim, but there is, is there? Have you seen in any of your research or any of the data, those men who, and I know a few of them who have chosen to be stay at home dads, and that has become their kind of persona that they they have chosen to be out of work. It isn't they're not an unemployed they. They've chosen their wife was doing much better than them, and in my experience with them, they do do much more of the work, but it's an n of three, right? So, yeah, take that into account. But I'm wondering again to your point, is they have then switched over their their self identity, from being a worker to being the, you know, stay at home parent and taking on that role any. Research that you've seen from that, or any thoughts on that?

Speaker 1  35:02  
Yeah, the n is small enough that it's actually very hard to see those individuals and yes, yes, even if I look at people who, like I said, are unemployed, where the wife is the sole breadwinner, I think that the the man still kind of thinks, but I'm going to get a job, or I'm going to do this thing, and so I don't need to kind of fully switch over my role in society or the role that I play at home. And I do think those are a lot of the marriages that then end up kind of Rocky, right? Because if she's like, wait, I have my own paycheck. And the paper that I study this in, I call winning the bread and baking it too, right? I'm also baking it. Why? Like, this doesn't this doesn't make sense, and this is one of the reasons. Also, I think marriage is declining, particularly in kind of sub groups, or sub marriage markets, where women tend to out earn men, because then they're saying, Okay, I have my own ability to pay my bills, so you're not bringing a paycheck to the table. What else are you bringing to the table? And I think you're exactly right. I think that that shift has to be kind of more complete, that you start to have this self image of the way I'm contributing, is through being a dad, and is through doing all of these things, and you have to then be able to see your wife's career as a joint investment. And that's a hard one too, right? Like, if you've been told to think of, okay, your job, your individual you know, achievement in life is what matters, and then to see like, oh, actually investing in my wife making partner at this law firm, that's for the good of all of us as a family. So I think that is really hard, but I think that's that type of flexibility is, I think what's going to help men be happier for the next 50 years? Because, as I said, I think they're kind of losing their relevance in certain marriage markets, because the women are saying this isn't adding up. Why would I want to take on the extra work of sharing a household with somebody who it's not even that he's not going to do the kids laundry. It's that I'm going to do his laundry. And the data also shows that. So what I see in the data is that men on net create more work for her rather than sharing the work. That's not, that's not you guys. Okay, I'm not talking about you, but I'm saying on average, that's what the data shows, because I see that women's time cooking and cleaning goes down after divorce. So when you go from two adults in the household to one, she spends less time cooking and cleaning because he wasn't sharing the workload. He was actually creating additional workload, right? So she's asking at the outset, if I have my own paycheck, and if the guy I'm going to marry does not earn more than me, then how is he adding to this equation? And I think that might have something to do with the decline of marriage and decline in fertility that we're seeing because we are seeing it more for sub populations, where women tend to out earn men, and so that's why, I think you know it's going to be good for men to learn to be more competitive in different domains that you know you have the flexibility. Maybe you start out as equal earners, but you get laid off. Well, your marriage is going to be longer lasting if now you can bring different skills to the table, other ways to support the partnership, even if it's not the paycheck.

Tim Houlihan  38:23  
I I'm so glad that you, you went there, that you, you actually brought that up this house. How single moms end up spending less time on cooking and cleaning than married moms? That that's important. It reminds me of a conversation, conversations we've had in the past with like Linda Babcock and Allison for Gail economists who are brilliant researchers that pointing out all these troubles is basically not for more criticism of women. It's about men. You need to lean in, right?

Speaker 1  38:55  
Yeah, that's the new lean in revolution that we need. Right? Is men leaning in at home. And I think there you have to change social norms. There's a study out of Spain that gives me a little bit of hope, which is that when Spain had a reform that made some of its paternity leave, they had parental leave that either party could take, and then they changed, and more of Europe is going in this direction where some of it was earmarked paternity leave, and if the dad didn't take it, then you didn't get this benefit. And when they made that reform, the researchers then actually followed the kids who were born just before and after the threshold, and they find that the kids whose dads took paternity leave had more gender equal views. They were less likely to be doing gendered chores in the household, to have them divided along those like, you know, she washes dishes, he takes out the trash lines, and they were more likely to say that dads should work part time and be involved in child rearing, and more likely to say that moms could work full time.

Kurt Nelson  39:51  
I mean, even if we think that you bring up a really good point there, this idea of paternity leave versus maternity leave, and in the US. Particularly, I mean, paternity lead is very well, you tell me. I mean, you probably have more of this, this, the research on this, but I think it is, it's it's getting better, but it isn't nearly what maternity leave is. Is that? Is that correct?

Speaker 1  40:15  
Yeah, that's right. I mean, I think very high powered firms do offer parental leave that kind of both parties can take, but the data just shows that women take much more leave, and then for the majority of American workers, they don't have access to kind of any paid parental leave. And so that means that where they for it's kind of non negotiable for mom, because she literally has to recover from childbirth and she has to breastfeed, and so she's going to be the one to take it. You can't afford to have both people take it unpaid. You

Kurt Nelson  40:46  
coined the term collateralized marriage and talk about marriage contract with financial collateral. Can you talk a little bit about what that is and why that's important?

Speaker 1  40:56  
Yes. So as I said, I'm not a romantic, I'm an economist, and so I have this, this way of looking at marriage, partly as a business contract, because it that's, you know, that's what it is. It is a contract. And we think about it as economists. We think that this is, you know, it's about giving you the security to make investments that might be good for the unit and for the family, but they might not be kind of individually optimal if you weren't in this contract. And that's the same way a business partnership works, right? When you sign a business partnership, it allows us to, for example, share IP where, if we didn't have that agreement, that we were going to work together, it would be really risky to share it, because the other person could just, you know, run away with it, right? So the marriage contract, that old Gary Becker marriage contract, was one person saying, Okay, I'm gonna do something that, if doesn't make any sense from an individual standpoint, which is to not work right? And I'm gonna invest in the house, I'm gonna invest in the kids. And really, by doing that, you're investing in the other person's human capital, the other person's career, because you're freeing up their time to make those investments. And that only works if it's guaranteed that we're going to kind of share the spoils of those investments. But now you introduce easy divorce, and that starts to break down. And so where does collateral come in? Well, in the US and in many other countries, assets that are accumulated over the length of the marriage are divided at the time of divorce. So especially something like a home. You can kind of imagine, there's this great quote that I use from a comedian that is, instead of getting married again, I'm just going to find a woman I don't like and give her a house. That shows you how kind of foundational this idea that like she gets the house is to like our pop culture idea of what divorce is, so that what, what that is, though, is it's marital collateral. And the reason it's important is because, in terms of his human capital, the ability, like, let's say he made partner at that law firm, the ability to keep earning at a certain level, that's never going to be divided by the courts, you might get alimony or child support, but that's temporary. He has that ability for a lifetime to keep earning at that level, and that's never going to be divided, whereas something physical, like a house is actually going to be divided. And so what we see in our research is that people who are more likely to own homes, and we use some variation that comes from housing prices the year they got married in their locality. So when housing prices were favorable and they were able to buy homes, the people who are more likely to own homes have a more traditional specialization division of labor in their households. He works more hours and earns more money. She works fewer hours and she puts those hours into home production, which I can measure with the American Tim you survey. So when they own a home, she literally puts more hours into the kids, and we actually see the kids doing better in school. Those those investments pay off. And so what that tells us is that, you know, as much as I have this the dismal science as people call it, economists, as much as I have a dismal view of marriage, it tells us that, well, in the data, people are actually behaving this way, that they know which side their butt is bread, their bread is buttered on. They know that, you know, if they have the security of home ownership, it's okay to take more of a risk of stepping away from the labor market. And if they don't have that security, then it's not

Tim Houlihan  44:22  
so Corinne, what are the book is about, again, pointing pointing the finger at the structural changes the structural

Unknown Speaker  44:29  
it's about pointing the finger at men.

Tim Houlihan  44:37  
What are the things that we should be thinking about? Or let me ask it this way, how can we go about making those structural changes in our

Speaker 1  44:45  
world? Well, I think some of it has to do with the workforce. So some of it is that the way we've set up these modern careers, they just don't make any sense for kind of dual breadwinner households, and the majority of households are. To earn our household. So this model of like, oh, there's a guy who has a wife at home taking care of everything that doesn't exist for our male employees anymore either. And so, you know, I think just rethinking some of this bleed of careers into all hours of the day. And I think the encouraging news there is, I don't think it's going to be as costly as firms think, because firms think that what women want is flexibility, and they want to work from home, and those things are things that they don't think are compatible with being profit maximizing. That's not what the data shows. The data actually shows that women don't want flexibility. They want boundaries, that when you offer them a job that has flexible hours or work from home. They're not willing to give up very much pay to have that versus the kind of standard nine to five, but they are willing to give up a lot of pay to avoid a job where the manager sets your work hours and tells you, you know, today it's 6am to 2pm and you know, tomorrow it's, you know, 2pm to 9pm and we can see this by Revealed Preference too, in some of the data of what professions women choose. Nursing is a profession that's very inflexible, and in fact, sometimes has overnight shifts right in the office. The things that people tell us, Oh, women don't want to do this, and it's 86% female. Why? Because it's very structured, because you know when you're on and you know when you're off, and even if you need to get called in, you have a specific shift that you're on call for. And I think we could learn from that in other careers. I think we could use the power of technology to say, Okay, we know that these evening hours are most costly. We're going to have a rule that in office, work ends at 5pm if there's more work to be done, you log back in after eight. And that was how, for me, an academic career was compatible with having children. Is that from five to eight, I was doing dinner and bedtime, and then I opened up my laptop after bedtime, when time is cheaper, and women are telling us their time is cheaper than because when women are self employed, we see them working during those hours and then on call shifts, you know, at the law firm, you could specify this associate is on call on Monday, this one's on call on Tuesday, this one's on call on Thursday. Instead of it just being any hour your phone might ring, and then you have to hop back into the office so we can be driven by the data and kind of reshaping modern careers. That's one. The second structural thing I think we need to change is investing in different roles for men. So that means home economics courses for men. It means the role models of like the Dustin Hoffman, right? We need to see more of those movies of you know, dads are taking on these roles, and they're socially respected for it. They're getting some kind of those reputational returns for doing that, and we need to probably subsidize it, because, you know, it's it by having things like, you know, paid paternity leave, but you know, just also other ways that you kind of incentivize men kind of taking on some of those roles. Unlike, you know, our current tax code, which very much does incentivize, you know, kind of one primary career and one second earner.

Kurt Nelson  48:03  
Yeah, thank you. Let's take it down from the structural component. And if we have listeners out there who are going, Oh, this is me, both you know me, as I've already mentioned, I'm going, Oh crap. I i need to do more and and for women who are out there going, damn it, I am doing, you know, twice the amount of cooking and laundry and cleaning and all of those. What are suggestions? And you know, this is again, getting into behavior change. But you know, is there anything that you've seen that works better, or is it just having that drag out argument?

Speaker 1  48:49  
Yeah, well, I think my most actionable suggestion is to follow my example. I got divorced and I married a woman, so that has worked out great for me, but since that's not in the cards for everyone, you know, I do have other suggestions for the women who say, like, oh, unfortunately, you know, I'm very heterosexual, or, you know, I have already have a husband, I'd like to keep this marriage going. How can we make it work? I think you need data to be able to make decisions, and so I really recommend people track their time. And if you pre order the book, I will send you my beautiful time tracking spreadsheet where you can do this. So you can literally in 15 minute increments, which is the same way the American Tim you survey works. You track who's doing what. Because the problem is, I think dads often think I do about half, but they mean half of the stuff that they that is right in front of their face. They mean, I do half the school drop offs, but they don't realize by the time you get to drop off. Mom already had to shop for seasonally appropriate clothes. She had to make sure that the fridge was full of snacks. She had to set up after school care. She had to make sure that pickup was coordinated. And by the way, even when she's at work, she's putting in a grocery delivery order really fast and sky. Doing a play date on her phone while the Zoom call is going on.

Tim Houlihan  50:03  
So dad did the drop off. Yes, so that's

Speaker 1  50:06  
why they've got to track your time. Because you need to surface that, right? You need to have the data that actually shows like, Oh, wow. I didn't realize we were as imbalanced as I thought. And the other thing that that helps surface is because in some couples, you know, maybe 5050, in, you know, housework or childcare isn't realistic, because maybe somebody's job is more demanding. What I want them to look at is the inequality in leisure time, because if her contributions are really being valued as CO equal to the hours he's putting in at the office, then she should also be able to take two hours off on the weekend to, you know, go to yoga or go to the gym or spend time with her friends, rather than it being like, Oh, he had a long day at the office. He's the one who kind of sits down in front of the TV, or he's the one who takes off on the weekend to golf or play basketball, but when you track the time, you see she's not getting that leisure time. And I hear those stories all the time. There's a one in the book that always infuriates people. Where I had talked to the husband and he's like, Oh, it's so important for me to swim for an hour every day for my mental health. And then I talked to the wife, and she said, I haven't been for a run in four years since our son was born, and that's inequality and leisure time, and you're going to surface it when you when you track your time, and it's going to help you say, you know, okay, even if we do have some differences in how we spend our time, is there some fundamental equality in the relationship?

Tim Houlihan  51:27  
Yeah, you know, here at behavioral grooves headquarters, we like to talk about finding your groove. And just curious, Kurin, how do you find your groove? Well,

Speaker 1  51:40  
I think this is another kind of trick from the book, but I think one of the things is I like, I have to put first what matters to me most, right? And so I think the opposite of finding a groove is you just catch all the balls that are inbound, right? Like you just, you know, are constantly playing defense, but you don't actually take any proactive ownership of like, how you want to spend your time. And then, if you do that every single week, you will get to the end of every week and not have met any of your goals, right? You won't have done any of the things that bring you joy or pleasure. So I tell people to pay themselves first with time, which is, you know the things that you value most, prioritize those on your calendar and let the other things claim the kind of crumbs that are left over. And so that's been, you know, a trick I've been using since grad school to say, and you know, back then, it was like, hey, I need to complete my dissertation and not just pay attention to all these Co Op, co authored projects where there's a million emails in my inbox, right? So I would literally block out the time. It would be like, this is time for working on my dissertation. And I would treat it like it was a meeting. You can't schedule anything during that time.

Kurt Nelson  52:49  
I love it. That is fantastic. So, all right, Kurt, I'm going to ask you the music question, because I'm like, Tim is backing off there. I can see it. Imagine. This. Imagine that you are one of the your priorities to go spend a year on a desert island. You get to be there. Everything is taken care of. You don't have a worry in the world. But the only kind of really limitation is that you have a listening device, but the listening device is structured so that it only have two artists and their entire catalog. But you don't get, like, a you don't get the Spotify playlist, right? You get you get this, this artist and this band, and that's it. You get everything they've ever done. Who would you choose?

Speaker 1  53:39  
Wow, that's so cruel. I was like, waiting for the number. I knew there was going to be a number, and I was like, hoping for like, five, you know, like, you can't even be well rounded

Kurt Nelson  53:49  
with two. No, this is the this is are you? This makes it hard, right? So, are you

Tim Houlihan  53:55  
variety seeking? Are you novelty seeking? Yeah.

Speaker 1  53:57  
And so that's why I think one of my artists, I think I would choose the Beatles because they've just done so many different things, and they have such a big catalog that I think it would be able to fill some of my different music needs, whereas, you know, there's some stuff that I like more, but then it might just be like in too narrow of a range for that, you know, year on the desert island. So I think I'm going to go with the Beatles and then, and then I think I'm going to have to go with grunge on the other side. And I'm like, I want to say Nirvana, but there just aren't enough albums. So I think I'm gonna have to do Pearl Jam, because they are still producing albums. And so I went to a concert recently, and I was like, I don't know any of these songs, which, at the time, was very disappointing, but on the desert island. You know, that's going to be great, because there's going to be novelty coming from one of my favorite artists. And then I can also revisit the hits

Kurt Nelson  54:48  
you could have done, David Grohl and you could have gotten

Unknown Speaker  54:54  
and Foo Fighters, if I do Dave Grohl,

Kurt Nelson  54:57  
he was, he was part, right? Yeah. Gotta work the system, right, but I do like Pearl Jam. That's, that's really, yeah,

Tim Houlihan  55:05  
yeah, all the eddy better stuff, though, that's, that's pretty great stuff. Okay, that's fantastic. Well, with that, Kurt, thank you so much for being a guest on behavioral grooves today.

Unknown Speaker  55:17  
Thanks so much for having me. This was a lot of fun. You Tim,

Kurt Nelson  55:26  
welcome to our grooving session where Tim and I share ideas on what we've learned from our discussion with Corinne. Have a free flowing conversation and groove on whatever else comes into our lazy male brains. There we go. Lazy bodies. Isn't that it, or is it not even lazy? What would it be? What, what? How would you describe what we do? Just the it's

Tim Houlihan  55:47  
almost like idiocy, like you don't, like you don't even know. It's, you know, I think she made the comment of something like, you know, men tended to report that they did almost 100% of all the things that they were aware of, but they weren't aware of all the things that are getting done.

Kurt Nelson  56:06  
Oh, my God, that it just this episode hit so hard for me, it was a light bulb came on. And again, we've had these conversations with other people, not necessarily about, you know, this in particular, in the way, but just the way that Corinne talked about it, it just it, the the data that she brought in. And I'm like, going, Oh, crap,

Tim Houlihan  56:31  
did it spur some conversation between you and your beloved?

Kurt Nelson  56:38  
We haven't had that whole sit down yet, but, you know, this episode hasn't aired. He hasn't listened to it. So once it does, I'm sure we will be having that right? I'm trying to live in la la land for a little bit longer. Good luck. No, that's not true. I don't I do. It's there is an aspect of this though that, and I don't think this is what Corinne is trying to do, but there was an aspect that it hit me, and it did feel like my stomach sank. It's like, oh yeah, crap, I'm not doing this. And again, there are pieces of this where I think, and again, this could be this whole bias, as we just talked about. I know 100% of the things that I do, right? But looking at household chores and various different things like that, it's probably not 5050 but it's a lot closer. But where Corinne started talking about, like, scheduling all of the kids activities, kids activities, working with their getting all the school stuff set up, you know, doctors appointments, it's all of that stuff. And then my wife, Erin, does all of the household finances. She's done those for 27 years or 28 years, however long we've been married, right? And it's, it's like, you take that into account. And then even, like scheduling our social life. I mean, most of the things that we do as a family, the vacations that we do, the the evenings out, I do 10 20% of that. So

Tim Houlihan  58:17  
just for the sake of full disclosure, when you take a vacation, you're gonna rely on a professional trip planner. And Erin happens to be a professional trip planner, so in

Kurt Nelson  58:31  
her past life, yes, she does. It's not planner. So

Tim Houlihan  58:34  
it's not like it's misplaced or you're burdening her with something that she doesn't know anything about. But that's true.

Kurt Nelson  58:41  
Yeah, good rationalization, Tim, thanks. I'll use that in our conversation. Hey. But Tim said,

Tim Houlihan  58:47  
Don't do dare bring me up. The story here is, is the big aha, right? That I love the way Kurt frames this is that this gender revolution, we're we're not even half finished. No, we're not there, like whatever was started with, you know, suffragettes back in the early 19 teens, with getting to vote through the 1970s of women's liberation were, we still have a long way to go. That's, yeah, that's the

Kurt Nelson  59:15  
deal, right? Yeah. And so again, I love again, bringing in some research, right? The there was an American Time Use Survey where 60% women are 60% more likely than men to report time stress and role overload, right? And I think that is just really interesting. And then the piece that we mentioned up at the beginning, and Corinne talked about is that moms today spend twice as much time with their kids as mothers did a generation ago. So that good life that we all look back on and different things. You know what I mean? I know this for myself. It's like I. I'm home, and my mom was a stay at home mom, but it was like, she'd kick me out of the house and go outside and play, you know, and she wasn't out there going to the park with me. It was get outside and play. Go, go, bring up the neighbor kid. You guys go ride your bikes and do whatever else you do, and I'll see you in time for dinner.

Tim Houlihan  1:00:19  
Yeah. That's right, that's right. I think Christina bichieri, who we adore, and who has been on us so many times, because she's a brilliant sociologist, talks about this as social norm inertia, right? That there are certain things that are just crusty and sticky and they just hang on and they don't change. And this is one of those things that we're having a really hard time as a as a global, you know, culture, as a species, to let go of, that it's okay when we enter into a relationship, to rethink about who does what and how they do, that

Kurt Nelson  1:00:59  
these gender roles are sticky in that social norm component. I think that is really very, very on target. Yeah, yeah.

Tim Houlihan  1:01:10  
Well, and it also gets to George akerlofs, you know, work on identity, you know, identity economics and how our behavior tends to align with this identity that we adopt. So the interesting thing is, I think that there and Corinne certainly speaks to optimistically, like we can get out of this by changing the way that we think about ourselves and about our relationship now, like you could, you can do this, Kurt, you can, you can,

Kurt Nelson  1:01:40  
I could be the social coordinator for our family, right? I could be the person who like schedules my kids, you know, yes, health and doctor appointments, yes, I yeah, I just have to. It's like, No, I just never done that. So why would I even think about doing that? Goes back to what you said at the beginning, right? So I think that's really important.

Tim Houlihan  1:02:04  
The other one, other thing that Kurt said that just really struck me was, when we're talking about these data points, that women's hours of paid work have doubled since 1965 men's hours of unpaid work have basically stayed the same, yeah, unpaid household work, that unpaid household work stayed the same. And that's as of Pew Research in 2023 that's not, that's not 30 years ago. This is very current research saying women are spending more time on paid and unpaid work. This gets back to Linda Babcock, oh, my God. You know, talk about these entrenched social norms and and here we are with men going, Oh, things are pretty good.

Kurt Nelson  1:02:49  
Why change, right? Why change? Things are good, you know, hey, we get, we get extra income coming in, and I'm still doing the same work I used to do,

Tim Houlihan  1:02:58  
except, except my wife is, you know, like She's so busy she doesn't have time to spend with the kids. Look at the data, the moms are spending more times with kids today than they were a generation ago.

Kurt Nelson  1:03:09  
She doesn't have time to spend with me. That's what it is. Oh yeah. This

Tim Houlihan  1:03:14  
is the, this is the having it almost the

Kurt Nelson  1:03:16  
having it almost. What a great way of framing that, right? It's, we're having it, almost having it all right? That idea of, you know, that what, I think it was an ad from the 70s or 80s, right? It's like, fried up in the bang bacon and, you know? And it's having it all, basically, have it all right, yeah. And this idea of having it all, I think, is pervasive, and it comes to social norms, which are driven by some of the media, but also the expectations that people have of what they should be doing, given their gender, given their role in this society. And I think that having it all is like, I don't know if it's the right, right thing to be thinking about Right,

Tim Houlihan  1:04:03  
exactly, and yet, at the same time, we're going to strive right. Ari Kurt glensky is work on striving for significance. We know that we are going to strive for something. The question is this, what should we be striving for? And I know that it sounds so counterintuitive, maybe striving for mediocrity would actually be better than striving for excellence in everything we we went Tim,

Kurt Nelson  1:04:29  
we have this. Do we have this down? We can strive for mediocrity. We do, at least on this podcast. For that, that's for damn sure. So you're no and all all silliness aside, there is something it's the satisficing idea versus maximizing. It's like, where do we get it? Where it's good enough, and do we need to put that extra time and energy in to get the extra 10% 5% 2% whatever that would be. And. Do we need to do that? I'm always constantly that's like, do we have to show up for every volleyball game that Elise plays? You know? Is it going to material impact her life that we missed one or two? You know? I don't think so.

Tim Houlihan  1:05:23  
Yeah, well, okay, so let me, let me play this out. As a leader. You're a manager in an organization. You've got people who are reporting to you. To what degree are you thinking about what those people's personal lives might be like? To what degree are you thinking that the women might be stacking up another whole, full time job at home, when they leave the office, when they when they get off that last zoom call, they might be dashing the kids around to volleyball or and planning the next three outings and summer camp and who, where are they going on Spring Break and all those

Kurt Nelson  1:06:01  
kinds of things, doing the household finances and, you know, making sure that, you know, the bed sheets are washed. Hey, I do my own laundry, but you know, when was the last time I actually stripped the bed off and did any of that? Right? So, right, right.

Tim Houlihan  1:06:20  
Well, and if you're a female leader, you know, are you giving credit to the women who are working for you?

Kurt Nelson  1:06:27  
Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point. It's we know that, as much as we'd like to separate work from our life, that most people don't do that, nor should you actually probably do that? I mean, you're not two different people. I don't show up at work as you know, Kurt worker guy and then, like, switch that off and become Kurt Family Guy. When I leave, there's, there's lots of pieces. So we know that emotions are contagious. We know that, you know if you're tired or exhausted because you had to stay up and, you know, help with homework or do other things with your kids, or whatever it is that parlays over into the work that you're doing and the way that you end work and the emotion that you have at work parlays itself back into Your family life and so as a leader, that's important, and you should try to understand that. Try to be aware of where your team is and what are the constraints or the elements that are impacting how they show up and how your work is impacting how they show up in their in their other way, yeah, authentically.

Tim Houlihan  1:07:42  
I mean, you're talking about psychological safety, right? And having enough eq as a leader to be aware of that. But it's also an aspect of intersectionality, of what, how do we allow people to bring their full selves to the table so that they can and not just, not just sing Kumbaya, but object and be honest and and thoughtful and contribute to what's going on

Kurt Nelson  1:08:09  
well. And again, just looking at this from a leadership perspective, I think that's great. But again, as leadership, one of the things we always talk about is, is like you can't manage what you don't measure. We can go about how well that is in truth and various different things. But there's, there's aspects of that, right? I think what Karine bring brings to this is that we need to reveal the invisible work. And so oftentimes, like the very first part that you said, I think up at the beginning of this was, you know, men say, think 100% they recognize 100% of the work that they do, but they just don't recognize all the work that gets done, right? And so it's, it's revealing all of the work that happens in a household, all of the work that happens at work. Again, it's the do, not the DNP, the not promotable, not the DN, not promotable work. And PW, right? That Linda Babcock talks about, yeah, this idea of women tend to take more of those on inside of an organization. They're also tending to take on a bunch of this stuff in the household as well. And it's just not fair. So, yeah,

Tim Houlihan  1:09:14  
yeah. Well, do you have anything else?

Kurt Nelson  1:09:16  
Kurt, I think that I do, because I think that we need to let our listeners know that they should join our Facebook group. Yes, yes, yes. Because, because, not only does our Facebook group kind of highlight some of the pieces that we might talk about in these shows, it also does this really key thing of providing thought provoking groove questions almost every weekday. So things like, how do you tend to show up when nobody's watching, right? Or who influences your aspirations most you or the people around you? And it gets us to start thinking about these things and have conversations about the. As with others in the group. And these are fantastic, and we often build off of these interviews that we do. And so I'm sure there will be some groove questions about household work and the splitting of those chores and revealing the on the invisible work that people do.

Tim Houlihan  1:10:21  
So, yeah, so go to the Facebook behavioral grooves community page and and sign up, and it doesn't cost anything, and it's it's fun, it's free, and, yeah, all those kinds of things. And could I also just say, if you would just be willing to leave a review. Leaving leaving a review maybe takes 60 seconds, but you could just leave a rating. Rating can take less than five seconds to scroll down to the bottom of your listening app and see the stars and just hit the stars, and you could be done. And it goes. It's so important for us when it comes to the algorithms that lead new listeners to behavioral grooves. So you could really do us a solid by

Kurt Nelson  1:11:08  
and, yeah, and if you don't want to leave us a review on your podcast, go out to YouTube and leave us a review on YouTube. It's super simple out there. Everybody knows how to do that. Thumbs up and just listen to it. You know, the more views that we get on YouTube for people who don't know, you probably don't care, but the way that many people are finding podcasts of the state these days is not through a podcast service, it is through YouTube. And again, the algorithms will reward those that have reviews or have listens or views. So please go out to the YouTube search for behavioral grooves. We got shorts. We got our full episodes. You get to see Tim and me, which I'm sure is probably the reason why we don't have that many views there. But you know, you get to see our guests as well, so it's a really fun way of interacting with behavioral grooves.

Tim Houlihan  1:12:05  
So, truly, truly. So we hope that you use these great ideas this week, take in some of corinne's really thoughtful and data informed ideas and use them this week as you go out and find your groove you.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai