An open letter to employers: why aren’t you hiring women like us?
Dear employers,
I have a question.
Why aren’t you hiring more women in their 40s and 50s?
Because I look around at the women I know and work with and I see an extraordinary amount of experience, knowledge and ability. I see women who have spent 20 or 30 years working, managing people, solving problems, dealing with difficult situations, juggling competing priorities and adapting to enormous changes in the workplace.
I see women who have raised families, cared for parents, navigated divorce, redundancy, bereavement and all sorts of other things life has thrown at them, often while continuing to work. I see women who know how to communicate with people. Who can read a room. Who know when something needs sorting out and, more importantly, how to sort it out.
And yet many of these women tell me the same thing: They feel invisible to employers.
What exactly are you looking for?
If you're looking for someone who can learn, why assume that means someone younger?
Women in midlife have spent their entire careers learning. Think how much the workplace has changed during that time. Technology, social media, remote working, AI, new industries, new ways of communicating. We've adapted because we've had to.
If you're looking for resilience, we've got that too.
If you need someone who can deal with people, manage competing demands, take responsibility, work independently and keep their head when things don't go to plan, there's a pretty good chance we've spent decades doing exactly that.
And our skills don't just come from our jobs.
One of the things I talk about a lot is the value of the skills we develop outside work. Caring for somebody, raising children, volunteering, organising a community group, managing a household through a crisis. These things require patience, negotiation, organisation, empathy, resourcefulness and good judgement. They don't appear neatly under a job title on a CV but that doesn't make them any less valuable.
Perhaps the problem is what experience looks like
I wonder whether we're still too wedded to a very narrow idea of the ideal candidate. Someone whose CV follows a nice straight line. Someone who has done almost exactly the same job before. Someone whose career hasn't been interrupted by caring responsibilities or a few years doing something different. But people's lives aren't that tidy. Particularly women's.
A woman might have stepped away from a senior role to care for children or elderly parents. She might have gone freelance because traditional working hours didn't fit her life. She might have taken a lower-paid job for a few years because she needed flexibility.
None of that wipes out everything she knew before. And it certainly doesn't mean she has stopped learning.
We might not want what we wanted at 30
This is another assumption worth challenging. Not every woman in her 50s is looking for the next rung on the corporate ladder. Some of us have climbed enough ladders. We may want interesting work. Work that uses our brains and our experience. Work where we can contribute and make a difference. We may also want flexibility. We may want four days rather than five, a hybrid role, project work or something that allows us to have a life alongside our job.
That shouldn't make us less attractive as employees.
In fact, perhaps employers need to start asking a different question. Not "Will this person fit the way we've always done this job?" But "What could this person bring to our organisation, and how could we make that work?"
And please stop assuming we're on our way out
A woman of 50 could easily have another 15 or 20 years of working life ahead of her. That's not somebody winding down. That's potentially years of experience, contribution and knowledge walking through your door. But only if you open it.
So, employers, perhaps it's time to look again. Look beyond age. Look beyond the perfectly linear CV. Look beyond whether someone has followed the conventional career path. Ask what she's learned. Ask what she's good at. Ask what she could bring.
And perhaps, rather than wondering whether a midlife woman will fit your job, ask whether your job could be designed to make better use of everything she has to offer. Because there is an enormous amount of talent out here. It would be a terrible waste not to use it.
Sam Patel
I work with women in their 40s and 50s who are thinking differently about what they want from work and exploring what could come next. Because work should fit your life - not the other way around.
