Allison Pearson
Over-50s women should rule the workplace
If an engine on your plane explodes in mid-air, shooting shrapnel into the aircraft, you need the right kind of guy to bring you safely home. Back in April, when that happened to Southwest Flight 1380 over the United States, passengers got lucky. They had the best kind of guy at the controls. It just happened to be a middle-aged woman.
Tammie Jo Shults, a 56-year-old mother-of-two and a retired Navy fighter pilot, became a national heroine. During the catastrophe, her conversation with the control tower (“We have part of the aircraft missing, so we’re going to need to slow down a bit”) was almost comically calm. As well as being a superb pilot, Tammie Jo was praised by relatives for being “a very caring, giving person”.
I wasn’t at all surprised when I read that. Tammie Jo is a member of what has been called the Sandwich Generation, women typically in their 40s or 50s who are responsible for bringing up their children while helping to take care of their elderly parents, in addition to explaining to their husbands where their socks live. Such women do so much multitasking that landing a damaged aircraft and getting home in time to put dinner on the table is an average day.
Most of my friends are Sandwich Women, and they are among the most capable human beings you could hope to meet. How depressing to learn that, when it comes to employment, they are also the most discriminated against.
According to a report published yesterday by the Commons Women and Equalities Committee, one million over-50s are lost to the workplace because age-discrimination legislation isn’t being enforced. Older men certainly suffer from biased attitudes in recruitment. At a recent bookshop event, a tearful reader told me that she had found her 54-year-old husband, who lost his tech job a year ago, bent over the bath dyeing his hair black.
But the report indicates that women “face particular difficulties” trying to find work after they turn 50, because it’s women who “still do the majority of caring for children and other family members”.
Ironic, isn’t it? Increasingly, women have postponed starting a family till an age when it’s more convenient for their work. However, if they have babies in their 30s, that means their offspring are still tricky teenagers when they’re riding the rapids of menopause, while their parents (who are living longer) will be more dependent on them. Then, when they try to get back into the workplace after fulfilling a hugely valuable caring role for society, they are penalised for being too old. Seriously, Marjorie, it’s enough to make you run amok with a Morphy Richards electric carver.
As Baroness Altmann points out: “As soon as you hit the menopause, you are seen as past it.
That is simply not true
– many women get going in their 50s.” Absolutely right.
Once the Calpol Years are a distant memory, mothers have a huge amount to contribute. And, yet, according to a study by the US National Bureau of Economic Research, the CVS of older women get fewer replies than those of older men and of younger applicants of either sex. It turns out women after menopause get hit with a double whammy: they suffer from both age and sex discrimination.
It was partly anger at this gross unfairness that inspired my new novel,
How Hard Can It Be? At the age of 49 and a half, having taken seven years out to look after her sick mother and young children, while trying to keep up a portfolio career, Kate Reddy can’t persuade anyone to give her the main-breadwinner job that she needs. In despair, she knocks seven years off her age and concocts a CV in which she “repackages” all the skills acquired “as a wife, mother, daughter, loyal friend, school governor, Household Servant and General Dogsbody”.
Thus, Kate writes: “I have balanced the complex needs of different individuals and developed routines while learning to prioritise multiple tasks and meet strict deadlines.” Of course she has. She’s a mother!
The life experience an older woman can bring to a job is invaluable. Not long ago, The Spectator raised eyebrows when it awarded an internship to Katherine Forster, aged 48. It was a great appointment. Instead of a wet-behind-the-ears graduate, the magazine got a grown-up who had “subsumed” herself in her children for 15 years and was now hungry to pursue her dreams. Motherhood, being unpaid, holds no commercial value, but it sure as hell teaches you how to be an effective operator. When a banker friend of mine was asked why she dealt so well with difficult clients, she shrugged: “I’m the mother of 15-yearold twins. No client can faze me.”
The maternal ability to multitask gets a big laugh in The Incredibles 2 when Helen Parr (aka superhero Elastigirl) is on a motorbike chasing a runaway train and receives a call from her son: “Mum, where are my trainers?” In this wonderful new Pixar film, Helen, who has been content to look after the three Incredible children, is wooed back to crime-fighting by a billionaire who believes that a female superhero is better for public relations. That same thought has occurred to many major companies, which are now reaping the benefit of Women Returners programmes, offering mothers the chance to get up to speed and make a career comeback.
“Helen is such a phenomenal character. She clearly represents the way so many women feel, that no matter what you are doing, society says you’re doing it wrong,” said actress Holly Hunter, 60, who voices her. “It’s fun to see Elastigirl on a chase. There’s a real appetite for seeing women kicking butt like that.”
There certainly is. Buttkickers R Us! Ageism is not only illegal, it’s downright stupid and unproductive. Whether it’s Elastigirl or real-life superhero Tammie Jo Shults, middle-aged women are proving they have what it takes to come back and save the world.
Allison Pearson’s How Hard Can It Be? is out in paperback (Harpercollins, £8.99)