Difficult women: Exhausted by bias, a revolution rises
Tired of being written out of their own narrative, difficult women get comfortable holding the reins of power.
While unemployment rates have improved since the beginning of the pandemic, an AARP study from September 2021 revealed a sobering reality: nearly 70 percent of women over 40 who were still looking for new jobs had been out of work for at least six months.
That’s an astonishing number of women left to rely upon unemployment payments and stimulus checks which barely put their “ends” in the same room – let alone help make them meet.
Unsurprisingly, that number impacts BIPOC women over 40 significantly more—job losses for Black, Latinx, and Asian women totaled 57 percent, compared to 13 percent for white women.
As women 40+ seek to salvage or shift career paths, many find themselves grappling with a falsehood that needs to be dispelled — a deception that has created communal anxiety among women for decades: The myth of the Late Bloomer.
Many of us over 30 have heard some variation of this fallacy for much of our adulthood. Most commonly, we’re told that if a woman reaches a certain age without having a socially acceptable level of achievement, she becomes less desirable – and less employable.
If she’s over 30 and still seeking what brings her joy, she’s done something wrong.
If she didn’t make the cut for a “30 Under 30” accolade, she just hasn’t aimed high enough yet. If she makes a drastic change decades into her career trajectory, those prior years were apparently wasted time.
To start, the idea that anyone should have life entirely figured out by age 30 is fairly ridiculous. Feel free to confirm this with any woman over 30.
Over 40? You’re invisible: The myth of the late bloomer
Sadly, businesses and employers very often reinforce this notion. As the Washington Post reported in October 2021: “in the age of covid, older female workers have become even more vulnerable to job losses and age discrimination.”
Back in 2017 — well before a global health crisis changed the world landscape — writer Sally Koslow penned an opinion piece for The New York Times titled “Hire Women Your Mom’s Age.”
Among her most salient points: working later in life is where many women find their calling. Unfortunately, that’s also the time when employers are often seeking younger talent.
And in the 2021 Fortune piece “Age discrimination is a problem. Botox isn’t the solution,” Susan Weinstock, Vice President of financial resilience programming at AARP, shared: “Right now we have more job openings than people to fill them and yet people are feeling age discrimination at the same time.”
TL;DR: Jobs are out there unless you’ve activated your over 40 invisibility cloak.
This lack of visibility has forced legions of women who are 40+ to pivot careers (because they’re overqualified for entry-level positions in their field) or to seek contract work and entrepreneurship (because employers can’t or won’t pay the salaries commensurate with their experience).
During this kind of tumultuous shift, a feeling that can be internalized is that of identifying as a “late bloomer.” Someone who didn’t fully realize their potential until after most other peers. I’d like to say for the record: there is no such thing.
When it comes to how we feed, shelter, clothe, educate, and otherwise provide for ourselves and our families, the phrase “late bloomer” does a great disservice to all the work we’ve done in our lives — and on ourselves — up to that point.
It negates the persistence required to consistently search for spaces where we feel empowered to pursue happiness. It erases all the years we spent learning, building, and growing.
Surely, we’ve been blooming in our lives for all those years prior.
How are we suddenly late?
Worst of all, it implies that we — Black women in particular — are not perennial: “lasting or existing for a long or apparently infinite time; enduring or continually recurring.”
If that is not the very definition of our existence, I don’t know what is.
If planted in the wrong place, you should definitely move
Ava DuVernay has famously shared that she didn’t pick up a camera until age 32. Her first milestone film, Selma, premiered when she was 42. The announcement that she would direct A Wrinkle in Time — making her the first Black woman director to helm a $100M film — came when she was 44. And now, at 49, DuVernay has one of the most successful (and enviable) track records for any director in her industry.
In 2018, she told Refinery29 “When people tell [my story], it’s about race and gender — ‘Black woman director’ — but my story’s also really about age.”
After making a name for herself in public relations, she chose to pursue her greatest fulfillment: storytelling and filmmaking. And she did so without regard for whether she was “too old” to do so (and also without having attended film school).
So please take note, women over 30: there is truly no such thing as a Late Bloomer when it comes to living your fullest, most authentic, and joy-filled life.
The years you spend on the journey to where you belong are not wasted. We should all be so fortunate as to live multiple versions of who we are in one lifetime.
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DuVernay’s advice: “Whatever path you’re on right now is not necessarily the path you have to stay on. You can also pivot, and you can also move, and age doesn’t make a difference. It’s about putting one step in front of another… forward movement to where you wanna be.”
I’m aware that during a time when so many circumstances remain outside of our control, putting one step in front of the other to achieve that forward movement can feel daunting, but it’s necessary.
I’m a woman who’s chosen to make an art of the pivot — I embrace that my career path is relatively non-traditional.
I’ve lived my dreams in each moment I had them. At every step, I learned what I love and what I don’t. And when I didn’t love something, I simply continued to pivot.
It’s among the reasons I also denounce the phrase “bloom where you are planted.”
If you’re “planted” in the wrong place you should definitely move. As a wise meme once said: “You are not a tree.”
Regardless of your chronological age, you can choose to reject the Late Bloomer myth, especially when employment options for women 40+ are either nonexistent or nowhere near what we deserve. Yes, it can be terrifying to realize that an industry in which you invested multiple years no longer wants to invest in you.
And so we pivot — even as the pandemic continues to throw our worlds off balance, we can take steps to navigate toward the versions of ourselves we want to be right now.
No late fees apply.
