International Women’s Day 2025: Five Actions You Can Take to Reach Over-50s Female Talent

55/Redefined

A shocking 80% of women have experienced gendered ageism; for women aged 59-64, it is 88%.
The 8th of March is International Women’s Day and this year’s theme is ‘Accelerate Action’. With research showing it will take until 2158 to reach full gender parity; we want to focus on the huge talent pool of over-50s women in and outside the workplace.

Mandy Garner

Mandy Garner is a freelance journalist and editor. She was the former managing editor of WM People and is a communications officer at the University of Cambridge. She has experience working in a range of roles, including senior broadcast journalist at the BBC, former features editor of Times Higher Education and researcher for the writers organisation International PEN.

Invisible Potential

Research by Noon, a platform for midlife women, found over half of women aged 45+ feel invisible and unvalued by society. Yet older women have never been more represented in the workplace. Are employers making the most of their potential?

For Lucy Ryan, author of ‘Revolting Women: Why midlife women are walking out, and what to do about it’, employers are often failing to understand the needs of this demographic despite the huge business benefits to be reaped from often small changes.

“70% of women want to power up their careers after 50 and have bags of experience to do so. What they lack is opportunity, role models and a workplace culture that includes them.” - Lucy Ryan, Author of ‘Revolting Women: Why midlife women are walking out, and what to do about it’

Why Mid-Life Women Leave the Workplace

Ryan says that a lot of the conversation about midlife women has focused on menopause when there is so much else going on in women’s lives. She pinpoints three main reasons women are leaving the workforce in middle age:

The maintenance of power, through exclusion, bias and inflexibility. Over-50s account for more than one third of the UK workforce, yet women in their 50s still face the biggest gender pay gap.
The collision of midlife changes - over half of midlife women have survived divorce, bereavement, redundancy, coping with elderly parents and teens in trouble, health issues, financial crises and more - making them incredibly resilient.
For the positive reason that they are rejecting the ageist and sexist structures that have kept them down and, if they can’t move up in their organisations, they are setting up on their own - for every woman made a director, two women leave. The number of women executives has been stuck at 14% for the last 8 years according to the FTSE leaders Review.

Best-selling author and journalist Eleanor Mills agrees. She set up Noon after being made redundant as she approached her 50th birthday. She now has hundreds of followers around the world and works with a range of employers to help them understand this overlooked talent pool.

Noon partners with 55/Redefined on jobs and careers advice. Mills told our Age Pioneers Summit in January that research by Ryan shows 70% of women want to power up their careers after 50 and have bags of experience to do so. What they lack, she said, is opportunity, role models and a workplace culture that includes them.

Why Over-50s Women Are Critical for Business Growth

As well as having lots of experience to offer, midlife women make the majority of consumer decisions meaning they tend to have a good pulse on what the market wants. Research also shows that they are often highly creative and good at managing complex changes, an essential skill in today’s workplace.

If they are forced to take career breaks when they hit life cycle pinch points, it can take years to get back to where they were, if they ever do. Returner programmes across the workforce attest to the fact that reaching out to women who have dropped out can bring countless dividends. Case study after case study shows the value added that returners, who tend to be predominantly women, bring to the workforce.

They include Asha Patel who took a 10-year career break and is now Internal Service Manager across the Pensions & Savings team at Phoenix Group. “They made me feel like I was still a valuable employee,” she says. “That has allowed me to grow.”

But what if women didn’t have to drop out in the first place? And how can we stop them dropping out later in life too?

Capturing This Hidden Talent Pool

55/Redefined is working with employers to look at the intersectional issues that contribute to age inclusion. It begins with listening to your workforce. That can mean tapping into what they are thinking through regular workforce surveys, encouraging age inclusion employee resource groups that overlap with other ERGs, reverse mentoring and regular midlife check-ins.

For Ryan, “it starts with organisations wanting to lift the lid and explore what is going on”. She adds: “The saddest interviews I did were with women who said I would have stayed if someone had just had a conversation with me and given me a moment to breathe. One woman said I just needed five weeks and I would have been okay.”

Returner programmes across the workforce attest to the fact that reaching out to women who have dropped out can bring countless dividends. Case study after case study shows the value added that returners, who tend to be predominantly women, bring to the workforce.

So what are five things you can do to reach out to this talent pool?

Listen, don’t make assumptions, for instance, set up an age inclusion resource group
Empower 50+ workers to have the space to think about next steps in their career
Ensure a flexible culture that can adapt to the different needs of your employees. Flexibility is 16x more important to UK women aged 40-60 than title
Support returners
Foreground positive role models and ensure your leadership teams reflects this. Women have been entering the professions in the same numbers as men since the mid 1990s but the top echelons are still stubbornly male; across all sectors, from academia to politics, business to law firms, only approximately 15-20% of top management jobs go to women.

Additional Help

55/Redefined are the most trusted global platform for over-50s and those looking to engage with them. We offer a range of products to enable you to build a comprehensive solution to attract, engage and grow and retain over-50s workers.

We here to guide you on your age inclusion journey, whether that's just beginning or well-established. Send a message to our friendly team and we'll be in touch.