Is it odd to choose one’s life partner based on an equation predicting the chances of you both having a content and equitable life together? Well, that’s what economist Corinne Low did. Last week, she told the Sunday Times that after divorcing her husband in her late thirties and wanting another child, she followed the data, which indicated she would have the best chances with a woman. “Dating women was an efficient decision,” she said. “I didn’t have time to filter through [men]. I needed to take another draw from the distribution, as economists say, as productively as possible.” So she became a lesbian.

Her new book, What Data Tells Us About Women’s Lives and How to Get the Most Out of Yours, reveals a calculating, utilitarian attitude towards relationships. When she was married to the father of her first child, she was doing too much, while also pursuing a career in academia. Specifically, she was very unhappy about how the domestic responsibilities were divvied up. So she left him. For a woman named Sondra Woodruff.

I can’t imagine how Woodruff feels about the kind of “romantic” statements Low makes about their relationship. She does acknowledge that she has an amazing, partner but adds: “I absolutely could’ve found that in a man, but it might have taken me longer.” Talking about how men need to step up to the mark to become worthy husbands and partner material, she says: “We need real consequences, real competitive pressure, to correct that balance.”

And she has a point: if we chose our partners based on the amount of housework and childcare they are likely to do, then all women would be lesbians. As the feminist author Beatrix Campbell wrote in her book End of Equality, between the Sixties and the 2000s the amount of domestic work carried out by men in the home increased by approximately one minute per day, per year. In 1975, men did around 20 minutes of domestic chores per day; by 2004 this had risen to 53 minutes. Research focusing on how the Covid lockdowns affected chore allocation has shown that women did much more of the cooking and laundry than men, even when both were home.

So far, fair enough. The problem is that Low sounds like a character invented by AI. The fact that she rates herself 2.5 on the Kinsey scale — 0 being exclusively heterosexual, and 6 being exclusively homosexual — does suggest that her orientation is more heterosexual than same-sex attracted. But, clearly, her approach to the world is deeply utilitarian, reductive and numbers-based. So much so, that she describes feelings as “just one data point”. She swore to “make only rational decisions of the brain, rather than the heart”.

She does not readily mention that she loves her partner, although being charitable we can assume she does. What she does say is that she thinks marriage is a very effective strategy for facilitating investments in children’s human capital.

There may be some subconscious conniving afoot as women — and men, for that matter — choose a mate with whom they wish to reproduce, but is it really as calculated as this, outside of a family dynasty or deeply religious conservative grouping? In one way I can’t help feeling quite proud, as a lesbian, that a predominantly heterosexual woman can realise she’s way better off raising her kids with a woman. But in another way, this efficiency-driven choice seems so very convenient for her and reduces sexuality to a mere choice of utility which, as we’ve seen through the rise of gender ideology over the past decade, it most definitely isn’t.

I’ve heard stories from straight couples who’ve chosen to have kids about how their relationship has turned into a bit of a business partnership. The job is to bring up children, and one is more of a CEO and the other is an employee. It all sounds a bit joyless when considering the loveliness of children and how much joy they can bring.

Hopefully, Low will get a lot of traction from her remarks about the economics of relationships, and be able to flog her book off the back of it. But I can’t help wondering: should she have married her publisher instead?

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Julie Bindel is an investigative journalist, author, and feminist campaigner. Her latest book is Lesbians: Where are we now? She also writes on Substack.

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