How older women can tackle age bias and redefine their careers

By Mika Brzezinski with Ginny Brzezinski

Age discrimination happens for all, but studies show—and we all know deep down—that women get hit harder than men. Certain industries are worse than others, of course—advertising, media . . . anything with an emphasis on youth or glamour. Television, as I will attest, can be brutal.

And of course technology has disrupted industries across the board and forced increasing numbers of midlife women to rethink their options. Lesley Jane Seymour, former editor-in-chief of More, Marie Claire, and Redbook, is a two-time reinventer and the founder of CoveyClub, an online and offline community for women who are forty-plus. She offered this observation: “When I went into publishing, a lot of people spent their entire careers at one magazine. If you had told me in my twenties that magazines would be a thing of the past by the time I was in my fifties, I would have laughed in your face. In a bazillion years nobody would have guessed.”

My friend Tina Brown, former editor-in-chief of Vanity Fair and the New Yorker, recounted a story of a friend in her fifties who lost her job after being at the top of the magazine industry. “Women are told they cannot be employed at fifty-five. It is brutal.”

According to the Harvard Business Review, the tsunami of corporate restructurings is expected to continue at an equal or faster pace in the next few years in response to market changes, leaving ever more pink-slipped job destruction in its wake.

My friend Liz Bentley is a leadership coach to top companies and talent. She says that in many cases men seem to have protections that women don’t have. “I go into companies, and there are men who are in their eighties and still on the payroll making some money, whether they are adding value or not, and the same company is firing women at fifty because they are not relevant anymore. I’ve been in plenty of companies where the attitude is ‘Y’know, he’s not effective anymore, but he’s Jim.’ If Jim’s name was Sally, she wouldn’t be there. The second she wasn’t effective, she would have been tossed. So while we do see the world changing, many men have incredible protection when it comes to income that women don’t have.”

Yikes.

Ageism—and, particularly, gendered ageism—may be illegal, but it is hard to prove and, unfortunately, a fact of life. Not only are older workers more vulnerable to job loss in the first place, but employers are also reluctant to hire older workers because they consider their salaries too expensive or believe they will cost more in health benefits. Employers also worry about the cost of training older workers and not being able to recoup those costs because they assume those workers won’t stay as long as they near retirement age. And then there’s the perception that workers in their fifties and beyond are just slow and tech troglodytes. Why hire someone who might be a drain on resources when you can hire younger workers (aka “digital natives”) for less money?

Looking for a job when you’re over fifty and female can feel like a liability. I laughed at Ginny when she told me she took her birth year off her Facebook page and her graduation year off her résumé. It wasn’t vanity, she told me; it was an act of economic self-preservation. In a 2019 survey Know Your Value conducted with NBC we asked women if they felt compelled to lie about their age or maybe just fudge it a little either at work or during job searches. We found that 20 percent of them felt they needed to conceal their age. And it’s not just us: a 2019 AP-NORC Center poll found that nearly eight in ten women aged fifty and older feel that their age is a hindrance when job seeking. For men, that number is 70 percent.

And yet older workers are a growing part of the workforce. Since 2005 older workers—defined by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics as fifty-five and older—have made up a larger share of the labor force than those aged sixteen to twenty-four. For most of them, early retirement just isn’t an option. According to that same AP-NORC Center poll, nearly half of American adults expect—because they want or need—to work beyond sixty-five. In 1995 that number was only 14 percent. Yet too many are shown the door before they are ready to leave. An Urban Institute analysis showed that the number of “forced retirements” for the sixty-five-and-up age group has increased from 33 percent in 1998 to 55 percent in 2014, while over that same time period satisfaction with “retirement” has dropped. In other words, most women (and men) today don’t want and/or can’t afford to retire at sixty-something.

The longer we want to work, the more we are likely to run into age bias—especially women. That needs to change.

Let’s change the narrative and reimagine the possibilities of mid- to late-career reinvention. We want to find new opportunities and new context in a world of work that doesn’t have a roadmap for women who want or need to work beyond the traditional retirement age. We want to make changes that will help us work better, longer.

We need to create our own comebacks, because the fact is that our numbers are growing: older women are playing a much bigger role in today’s labor force. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, women over fifty-five are the fastest growing age/gender workforce category—3.6 million women over fifty-five will be added to the US workforce by 2026. In contrast, the number of men over fifty-five working is projected to decline by 3 percent.

I’d like to think about midlife as a time to assess and adjust. “Fifty really is halftime,” my friend Stephanie Carter told me. “Why do you have this ritual of half time? To think about how you played the first half and apply that to your second half.” Stephanie is reinventing after a successful career in venture capital. She’s starting a media company for women our age who she thinks are, in a way, pioneers. “In every vein of our lives, health and wellness, investments, we are seeing that long-held assumptions [about how to structure the second half of our lives] are probably not true, and we’re the first generation that can recognize and make active choices around that.” Leadership coach Liz Bentley agrees: “The thirties are when you are having your babies, the forties are when you are raising your babies, and the fifties through seventies can be your greatest earning years.” So let’s start making those active choices and take control of the rest of our working lives—now.

A big part of this is mindset—you’re pushing back against a long-standing ageist narrative and blazing a new trail, so restarting or reinventing your career at midlife may require an attitude adjustment not just by society but within yourself as well. Ginny reached out to her Facebook community and asked them what they thought about this time in our lives. How did they feel about “midlife”? She got a huge response—from both women and men. Some said they could care less, that mid-life is just a fact—this age (forty-five to fifty) is midlife (if we’re lucky!). Some agreed that the word midlife has negative connotations, mainly because of its association with the word “crisis,” but that they felt positively about this time of life. Some suggested new terms: halftime, intermission, the wise years, experienced, mid-career, middle age, primetime.

They defined this time as “the assessment years.” They felt self-actualized and “adult” in a way that younger people either aren’t or don’t consider themselves to be. Others argued that midlife suggests potential because “if you’re only halfway through your life, think what opportunities and adventures lie ahead.” Nobody wanted to call it a “crisis”—as one friend said, these are the “Best badass years of your life. All the wisdom with the body and mind to use it!”

CoveyClub’s Seymour agrees, saying that the young don’t hold the monopoly on “having potential.” “I believe we have enormous potential—plus the knowledge and savvy and perhaps, finally, the funds—to reinvent ourselves. We have the potential to go back to school to pursue new adult dreams. We have the potential to change direction to rethink our relationships with our mates, with our homes, with our communities. We have great potential to contribute in a new way to the corporations we work for or to the world around us. We have the potential to transform from great parents into great coaches and friends for our kids. Potential is a mindset. Midlife is the time you get to reset your clock, reset your needs and your wishes, to give the finger to what society says . . . about everything. This is your time.”

Yes.

It will take all of us to change minds about ageism in the workplace. Women need to speak up about the issue and help combat it by hiring older women. It’s up to us to make ourselves visible and relevant. And not just for us—it’s for today’s thirty-something women too. As journalist and author Sally Koslow observes, “Today’s thirty- and forty-somethings can’t ‘lean in’ forever. If they don’t address embedded ageism, they’ll blink, pass fifty, and possibly see their success evaporate faster than a boss can say, ‘Sorry, we’re going in another direction’—a younger direction.”

Together, by our intention and our example, we will change the face of work. As more of us work, achieve, and succeed well into our fifties, sixties, and even seventies, we will change attitudes. I know I plan to keep working for decades. My eighty-eight-year-old mother is still wielding her chainsaw, creating soaring sculptures out of massive logs. I have tried to get her to slow down—after all, it’s a chainsaw! But work—in her case, art—is where she gets her superpowers.

Ginny and I wanted to know: How do some women get the courage to reinvent a career when all the signs around them seem to say, “It can’t be done,” “It’s too risky,” “You’re past your prime,” “You’re doomed to fail”? How do you say, “Yes, I can—and I will.” What is the difference between someone who feels paralyzed by an adverse job situation and someone who turns a bad situation into an opportunity? What is the impetus deep inside that turns them from being crushed to crushing it? How do we tap into our power? What is the key to getting unstuck?

And how do I get some of that?

Mika Brzezinski and Ginny Brzezinski are co-authors of "Comeback Careers: Rethink, Refresh, Reinvent Your Success--At 40, 50, and Beyond," from which this article has been adapted.