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.
To be common is to be an everyday person. It’s to do the things that you are expected to do, whether that’s what your parents want for you, or your employer, or your spouse, et cetera. But if you want to be more than you are, more than you think you can be, then you need to recognize and learn from your mistakes to lead a life of excellence.
For the past five years, Ryan Richardson has relived that terrible night. The car door ripping open. The crushing blow to the head. The hands yanking him from the vehicle. His girlfriend Ali’s piercing scream as she is taken. With no trace of Ali or the car, a cloud of suspicion hangs over Ryan. But with no proof and a good lawyer, he’s never charged, though that doesn’t matter to the podcasters and internet trolls. Now, Ryan has changed his last name, and entered law school. He’s put his past behind him. Until, on a summer trip abroad to Italy with his law-school classmates, Ryan gets a call from his father: Ali’s car has finally been found, submerged in a lake in his hometown. Inside are two dead men and a cryptic note with five words written on the envelope in Ali’s handwriting: If something happens to me… Then, halfway around the world, the unthinkable happens: Ryan sees the man who has haunted his dreams since that night. As Ryan races from the rolling hills of Tuscany, to a rural village in the UK, to the glittering streets of Paris in search of the truth, he has no idea that his salvation may lie with a young sheriff’s deputy in Kansas working her first case, and a mobster in Philadelphia who’s experienced tragedy of his own.
Women are often socialized to prioritize the needs of others, leaving little time for themselves. In this book, women are equipped with 101 practical and encouraging self-care activities—organized around the five pillars of self-care—to help them care for, replenish, and reconnect with themselves and live a more joyful life.
What if the first true crime story you ever wrote (ABANDONED PRAYERS) had loose ends that haunted you for more than thirty years?