Economist, author, and mom Corinne Low is not only living her best life after her marriage in December to wife Sondra Woodruff, she’s also a living example of the thesis from her forthcoming book, Having It All: What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and Getting the Most Out of Yours.

Women don’t need men to live their best lives, according to the Wharton professor.

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After a failed marriage to her son’s father, the economist dropped men from the data sets she used in her search for the perfect partner, a real-life result of the “heteropessimism” plaguing women. The term, coined in 2019, describes straight women’s disappointment with the opposite sex.

Low provides reams of anecdotal and statistical evidence showing that men are less mature, less educated, and less emotionally available than their female counterparts.  

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She also shows that even when men earn far less than their wives, their contribution to housework stays remarkably low. Unemployment can have adverse effects, too, making men with “nothing to do” nearly useless.

In fact, women’s time spent on housework actually fell after they divorced, while men’s rose, indicating that men really can perform basic chores but simply elect not to when there’s someone else around to do it.

For Low, “having it all” meant subtracting her male partner.

In several ways, the gap between men and women’s expectations has only widened in the last few years, with the rise of the “manosphere” on social media, the “trad wives” phenomenon, a natalist cult promoted by tech weirdos like Elon Musk, and the “incel” movement inspiring an anti-feminist backlash.

In Low and Woodruff’s housekeeping routine, meal-making and other chores for the family won’t be the “duty” of one spouse or the other.

“I’m not physically repulsed by men,” Low joked in an interview with The Cut. “I’m socially and politically repulsed.”

Fortunately, Low says she falls somewhere around the middle of the Kinsey scale — a measure of a person’s sexual orientation on a continuum — granting her more choices than other women.

“I know of few women who would say, ‘There’s no man out there I would want to marry,’” Low says. Rather, these women are “opting out of the options that are available” in order to live their best lives.

Many women are remaining single, according to the data, and making what Low describes as an evidence-based decision to pass on the current dating pool.

That’s taken to extremes in some quarters, like South Korea’s feminist 4B movement, which eschews any voluntary contact with men. Abandoning men, however, is not an option for most straight women, Low admits.

“I want them to set more boundaries, renegotiate things, reclaim their time, correct leisure inequality,” she says. “Not everyone needs to get divorced!”

But for many women, unhappiness can be traced to those data points, indicating men aren’t interested in a relationship that most women would term equitable. All Low can do — as she has with steady stream of straight female students flocking to her office asking if they should break up with boyfriends — is present them with the facts.

“Well, here’s what the data says,” she tells them.

Low says the current fetishization of traditional women’s roles is part of men’s grieving their loss of privilege. They could eventually reach acceptance, she says.

She and her wife aren’t waiting for that male come-to-Jesus moment, however.

On a recent evening, their eight-year-old son joined them in making the dinner salad, with pickled onions he’d prepared. Low says he’s currently in training to be a not-useless man.

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