An age-old issue that needs addressing now
Women have maintained a dignified silence about workplace discrimination – and that has to end
If the engine on your plane suddenly explodes in mid-air, you want the best possible guy at the controls. When that nightmare happened to Southwest Airlines Flight 1380 in April 2018, passengers got lucky. They had the best guy to bring them safely home.
That guy just happened to be a middle-aged woman. Tammie Jo Shults is mother of two and a retired Navy fighter pilot. She was 56 at the time. 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 an exceptional pilot, Tammie Jo is said by her family to be “a very caring, giving person who takes care of lots of people”.
No surprises there, eh? Tammie Jo Shults is a member of what sociologists call the Sandwich Generation, typically in their forties and fifties, who are still responsible for bringing up their own teenagers while increasingly caring for elderly parents. And that’s just the stuff they need to take care of in addition to the day job.
Outrageously, Tammie Jo also belongs to the group that is most discriminated against when it comes to getting a job. Research by the US organisation the National Bureau of Economic Results has shown that the CVS of older women get fewer responses than those of older men and of younger applicants of either sex. It turns out that menopausal women get hit with a double whammy: they suffer from both age and sex discrimination.
Ageism is “the last taboo”. Women have kept a dignified, anxious silence about it, perhaps hoping that men wouldn’t notice how hideously old and gnarled we are and fire us. Well, not any more. At last year’s Golden Globes, the brilliant cast of the drama series Big Little Lies was led by 50-year-old Nicole Kidman, who made a defiant speech insisting that midlife female experience would no longer be marginalised. Actresses in their prime are calling time on that ugly Hollywood habit of either banishing women over the age of 37 or generously allowing them to play the dipsomaniac, librarian mother-in-law of an actor their own age.
While I was researching How Hard Can It Be?, my novel about Kate Reddy, aged forty-nine and a half, who urgently needs to resume her career, I was shocked to find out that two of my friends were lying about their age at work. Both incredibly accomplished, gorgeous women in their fifties, they were scared to own up in case colleagues young enough to be their children thought they were “past it”.
The truth is middle-aged women, who have ridden the rapids of family life and multi-tasked for 20 years, make some of the best employees. Very little fazes us. As one CEO in financial services told me: “Of course I can handle difficult clients. I’m the mother of 16-year-old twins for heaven’s sake. I can handle anything.”
More and more clever companies are running Returner programmes that give them access to a talent pool of high-calibre, motivated women who have taken an extended career break and are eager to get back to the workplace. My fictional Kate Reddy does just that and she triumphs. Not despite her age, but because of it.
In 2019, it’s high time that ageism became a thing of the past and Sandwich Woman got the break she so richly deserves.
A 1903 issue of Cosmopolitan described a woman of 50 as “having a distinctive charm and beauty, ripe views, disciplined intellect, and having cultivated manifold gifts”. Spot on. Not to mention the ability to make an emergency landing when your engine just blew up and still get home to put dinner on the table. Just like Tammie Jo Shults.