Before Emily Oster became a go-to parenting expert, she was an econ professor waiting on a tenure decision at the University of Chicago. While waiting, she published Expecting Better, a book that moms-to-be consider to be a parenting Bible. She got rejected for tenure, then spent over a decade believing the book was a “professional mistake”. Parents everywhere beg to differ. Listen as Emily shares how she moved past the disappointment – and why it actually turned out to be the best thing for her career.
In this episode of 9 to 5ish, Emily shares:
Her weekly mileage as a marathoner (our legs are shaking)
Why she refers to herself as a “vagina economist”
How her kids react when she tells them she’s a “parenting expert”
Why she doesn’t shy away from disagreements around her research
Who’ll benefit most from ParentData’s newest vertical
On When She Knew She Was a Data-Person
Emily: I looked back recently, you sort of look back at things from your past and you wonder, like, can I see something from what I was like as a kid that would tell me who I would become? When I was nine or ten, I started a newspaper on my block. My father has every issue of this newspaper, he scanned it and he put it on his website…I'm basically editing a newspaper for the people on my block, much of which is about how many boys and girls, there's pie charts – I mean, it's not subtle.
On Revisiting Old Work When Presented with New Info
Emily: In this particular case, it was a paper I had written that got a lot of attention and then there was some new data that made it pretty clear that the thing that I had argued was not right…I'm glad that I learned that lesson before any of this other more public facing work, because I think the lesson of, if something changes and it turns out that you need to change what you have said and you need to say, “I wasn't right,” there's a lot of value in doing that. There isn’t a lot of shame in doing it. Sometimes new things happen, and I think the main thing I learned is this is crucial for people's trust.
On Her Peers Doubting Her Passion for Research Around Parenting
Emily: When I wrote Expecting Better, people were very skeptical. But partly it was a skepticism of, this is kind of a weird thing to do. To write a book about pregnancy. I remember sitting down with a guy, an economist who just at first he was like, “I just want to understand, why would you do something like this?” It was sort of in a very genuine way…But subsequent to that, in the last decade, there are many more male and female economists who I think have done work in this space, whether it's how you run your life or whether it's about family. So there's been more of a push towards this idea and how much of that is my influence and how much of that is just people realizing there's more of an openness and various different reasons.
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