For women in the workplace, the years between 40 and 60 are a minefield: RUTH SUNDERLAND
Midlife is the time when many people hit their stride in their career… if by people we mean men.
For women in the workplace, the years between 40 and 60 are a minefield.
While men are clambering up the ladders, their female colleagues are caught up in the serpentine twists of balancing career and family.
This is not new, but women’s progress at work has fallen for the first time in a decade, in a worrying development highlighted by The Economist.
The reversal, the magazine says, is at every level, from part-time work to women’s share of senior executive positions.
The gender pay gap is expanding across the developed world and, in the UK, it has widened for women in their 40s.
Gap: The gender pay gap is expanding across the developed world
This is blamed on the ‘motherhood penalty’, which is certainly a major part of it.
However, there are pernicious, long-standing prejudices against midlife women at work that are not connected to child-bearing status.
Culturally, women are seen as less authoritative, are given less respect and are deemed to have low status even when this is not the case.
Frequently, these prejudices are unconscious: a man last week lectured me on gender bias in the media, while making assumptions about women’s professional status and authority that were themselves unthinkingly sexist.
Even relatively minor behaviour can have a cumulative effect. A study published recently in the Harvard Business Review into interruptions found that women are more likely to be cut off before being given a chance to express an idea.
If they are allowed to finish, their contribution is more likely to be claimed by, or attributed to, someone else.
It may appear a trivial irritation, but it sends a signal that women are less worth hearing, and a message to women to keep quiet.
At the top, highly qualified women are, to paraphrase former Meta chief Sheryl Sandberg, ‘leaning out’.
Sandberg’s Lean In organisation has been tracking female ambition for more than a decade with consultants McKinsey.
Their latest findings show that for the first time, women’s ambitions are shrinking, perhaps because of sheer discouragement as companies’ commitment to gender equality is fading.
The study is based on corporate America, where President Donald Trump has made known his distaste for diversity and equality programmes, and businesses have acted accordingly, but what happens in the US tends to spread to UK plc.
As if the midlife woman at work did not have enough to vex her, along comes AI, with a whole new cluster of perils.
Female-dominated jobs, including admin and business support, are more likely to be disrupted by the technology – 29 per cent are heavily exposed to automation compared with 16 per cent of ‘male’ roles, according to the International Labour Organisation.
Large language models are trained on historical data, which reproduces stereotypical gender roles.
When I asked AI to give me examples of ‘older’ male and female leaders, the men it suggested were in their 70s and up, while the women were in their 50s.
Kate Alessi, the boss of Google UK – herself a rare woman at the top of tech – points out that older women are also likely to be left behind for pay rises and promotions by AI ‘super-users’, who are predominantly young, urban and male.
Only 4 per cent of women over 55 are advanced users while nearly a quarter say they wouldn’t know where to begin.
This is due to a lack of confidence, not a lack of ability. If we are not careful, the old glass ceiling for women at work will be replaced by a new silicon one.
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