There are things many women experience around midlife. You’re in a meeting where someone talks over you. You apply for job after job, and nobody gets back to you. You’re in a room full of people and you feel invisible. I know that feeling, and I’ve heard it described in different ways by almost every woman I spoke to in my PhD research.
If this resonates with you, you aren’t imagining it. It happens because there’s a narrative and assumption that after a certain age, our most useful years are behind us. That we are less creative, innovative, and driven, and that we’re ‘done’. After a while, you can start to believe this yourself, which means you don’t show up with confidence or feel you have anything to contribute. You almost become complicit in diminishing yourself, your abilities, and what you have to offer.
Marketing tells women that if they don’t look young, fresh, and vibrant, they aren’t worthy. Business culture tells them the same thing, just in different language. The result is a slow and steady erosion of confidence in women who often have more to offer in midlife than at any previous point in their lives.
Why business still worships the young founder
We are collectively obsessed with speed. We want to get things done quickly, take risks, and disrupt for the sake of being disruptive. These are valuable attributes, and I’m not dismissing them. But they’ve become so associated with youth that we’ve started to confuse energy with wisdom and novelty with value. The myth of the young founder who ‘moves fast and breaks things’ has shaped how we think about entrepreneurship and innovation at every level. But if you want to build something that is actually sustainable, something that lasts, that creates real impact, and that people trust, you need judgement. You need adaptability and the ability to build genuine relationships. Those things don’t come quickly. They come through years of getting it wrong, listening to feedback, and learning how to read a room. A lot of what makes a leader effective can’t be taught in a classroom. It only comes through lived experience.
What we lose when we dismiss experience
I don’t want to generalise as every person brings their own unique strengths and weaknesses regardless of age. But when I look at myself now compared to who I was in my thirties and forties, and when I think about the women I’ve interviewed for my research and worked alongside, it’s clear that there’s a certain kind of clarity that comes with age. You stop reacting to everything and start choosing your battles. You develop sharper perception, stronger judgment, and a clearer sense of where you can have the most impact. Many women become deeply emotionally intelligent as they get older, and are able to read situations and people, and build trust quickly.
These qualities are becoming more valuable as the world changes. As AI changes what work looks like, the attributes that will matter most are the uniquely human ones; relational intelligence, ethical judgement, and the ability to deal with complexity. These are not qualities that can be automated, and they are qualities that women with decades of experience often have in abundance. When businesses overlook that, they’re missing out on both individual talent and a huge amount of collective wisdom.
What would help? We need spaces where experience is seen as an asset, not something to minimise. We need more intergenerational conversations, more visibility for women at this stage of life, and communities built on collaboration rather than competition. Not spaces where women over 50 are singled out as “inspirational” – that kind of framing, however well-meaning, still marks us as exceptions. It should be the norm. There is a great deal of untapped potential here, and we are all losing out until we find better ways to access it.
Ageing and irrelevance are not the same thing
Ageing is inevitable. Each year, I get older, that’s just a fact. But becoming irrelevant is a choice, and in many cases, it’s a choice made for women by a culture that stops seeing them. Staying relevant sometimes requires a kind of rebelliousness. It means pushing back, being curious, and trying new things, even when you might get them wrong. I think of someone like David Attenborough who is insightful, impactful, and continuing to evolve well beyond midlife because he combines deep experience with ongoing learning. He never stopped being curious.
That combination of experience and curiosity is something many women over 50 embody, even when they’re not given credit for it. You also have to be comfortable making a fool of yourself sometimes. You have to try things out, be okay with not getting it right immediately, and laugh at yourself when you don’t.
Midlife isn’t the beginning of decline, it’s the beginning of clarity
Something changes for many women around midlife. There are hormonal changes, changing responsibilities, and a different relationship with time. This often happens alongside a growing refusal to live up to other people’s expectations any longer.
The assumption I want to challenge most is that ambition has an expiry date for women. It doesn’t. But it can feel that way when you’ve spent a lifetime being driven by external approval. From an early age, many women learn to measure their worth through the eyes of others; through grades, praise, the right job title, or the right image. That conditioning doesn’t disappear overnight.
For decades, I thought ambition and success meant competing, achieving, and chasing external validation. Now I’m older, that ambition hasn’t disappeared, it’s just matured. It has become less about impressing and more about contributing. Less about status and more about meaning. From the outside, that can look like slowing down. But from the inside, it often feels like a new beginning.
In my own case, this was what led to the founding of Beyond Money. I began to really understand that business can be so much more than profit and when it is, everybody benefits. And if I needed a reminder that personal growth, contribution, and innovation are not age-limited, I found it in completing my PhD in my seventies. I did it because I wasn’t done learning or contributing. I suspect I’m far from alone in that.
It’s time to change the narrative
The cultural assumption that innovation, creativity, and leadership belong mainly to the young is not just unhelpful, it is holding us back. It’s holding back the women who internalise it and the businesses that don’t tap into the depth of experience available to them. It’s also holding back the wider conversations we could be having about what good leadership actually looks like.
If you’re a woman over 50 reading this, I want you to know that the clarity, the judgment, and the relational intelligence you’ve developed aren’t the consolation prizes of getting older. They are hard-won and they are rare, so don’t apologise for them or minimise them, celebrate them. And show up.
If you work in business, hire people, or play a part in shaping culture in any way, ask yourself what stories you’re telling about age and value, and whether they are actually true. Because the world doesn’t need fewer experienced women in business. It needs a great deal more of them.
Maureen O’Callaghan is an expert in prosocial entrepreneurship, ethical leadership and sustainable business. As the founder of Beyond Money Education and Training CIC, her mission is to help business owners and those who support and educate them build sustainable, successful businesses which have a positive impact on people and the planet.
