Applying economic principles to the fields of happiness and optimization, Femonomics will help women finally address the challenges they specifically face in order to design lives that go beyond the work-life binary to create true joy, balance, and fulfillment.
FEMONOMICS
Winning the Bread and Baking It Too
by Corinne Low
Flatiron, TBD
(via Park & Fine Literary and Media)
In FEMONOMICS, Corinne Low examines the hidden economic trade-offs and trade-ups women face in balancing career and family, and the research-backed ways they can enjoy a better deal at work, in life, and at home. Where behavioral psychologists (mostly male) have previously dominated the categories of happiness and optimization, Corinne applies economic principles like personal utility function (how we individually maximize profit and joy) and constrained optimization (making the best choice within external limits) to address uniquely female concerns (like the cost of a biological clock) and arm women with the tools they need to ask for more: from their partners, from their bosses, and from the system itself.
Because Corinne researches the key decisions that shape women’s lives, she finds herself most often answering surprisingly everyday (and existential!) questions from students during office hours, colleagues at conferences, and journalists behind the scenes. Questions like:
- Should I break up with my boyfriend?
- What kind of career gives me the life I want?
- How should I pick a partner?
- What kind of parent do I want to be?
- When should I consider freezing my eggs?
- Why should I fight to get the house in the divorce?
This book is not about optimizing. Women are optimized. It is about designing a life outside of a work-life binary that readers can actually enjoy.
Corinne Low’s course, The Economics of Diversity and Discrimination, is one of the highest rated courses at Wharton. Her research on the economics of gender has been published in top journals such as the American Economic Review, Nature, and Harvard Business Review and featured in popular media including Forbes, Vanity Fair, The LA Times, and NPR. She has spoken at Oxford, the London School of Economics, Stanford, Brookings, Uber, Google, and more.