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Older, Wiser, Unwanted: Why No One Wants to Hire GenX Women · Another Bloody Podcast

• 0:01
  Hi, I'm Heather.
• 0:02
  And I'm Lisa.
• 0:03
  And this is Another Bloody Podcast, where we talk about women's healthcare from a different angle, one that leverages our decades of experience as journalists and our personal health journeys.
• 0:13
  From brain fog to vagina drama, and every taboo subject in between, think of us as the friends who say out loud all the things your doctor should have mentioned but somehow didn't.
• 0:24
  Join us now for a public conversation about our private parts.
• 0:33
  Are we ready? I think so.
• 0:36
  Last week, we brought you our conversation with Rhode Island State Senator Lori Orzo and Representative Karen Alzate, the two women who made Rhode Island the first state in the country to legally protect menopausal workers.
• 0:50
  If you haven't listened to that episode yet, go back and listen, because everything we're doing today builds directly on what they told us.
• 0:59
  So here's what stuck with me from those conversations.
• Senator Orzo told us she was ready to resign as executive director of an organization that she'd led for years, not because she wanted to, but because she couldn't sleep, she couldn't think clearly, and was having heart palpitations that were so severe that she thought something was seriously wrong with her.
• She didn't know it was menopause.
• In fact, nobody, not even her doctors, gave her that word to describe her symptoms.
• And Representative Alzate told us about watching that same brilliant, hardworking woman, someone who was at the absolute peak of her career, get ready to walk away from a job that she loved because nobody had given her the language or the accommodations to stay.
• That's not a fluke, that's a pattern, and today we're pulling back the lens to look at just how big that pattern really is.
• We're talking about why women leave the workforce in midlife, not just from menopause, though that's a huge piece of it, but from this whole tangle of structural and physiological forces that all seem to converge right around the same years.
• The broken rung that never lets women catch up after the first missed promotion, the burnout that hits senior women harder than anyone else in the building, the flexibility stigma that punishes women for the same remote work that costs men nothing, and yes, the menopause penalty, the real measurable earnings hit that Stanford researchers found happening to women at the exact moment they should be hitting their peak earning years.
• 2:37
  Senator Orzo and Representative Alzate gave us the policy story.
• 2:43
  The bill, the fight, the hot flashes are not a fireable offense headline.
• 2:48
  But today we wanna give you the bigger picture, the data, the dollars, and the decades of women who've been quietly disappearing from the workforce right when they had the most to offer.
• 2:58
  Let's get into it so in my preparation for this episode, I relied on an old standby, a report that I read every year which is from leanin.org
• 3:13
  and McKinsey.
• 3:15
  It's called the Women in the Workplace report.
• 3:18
  This most recent one was published in 2025.
• It's their 11th annual report, and it includes data from more than 120 companies and 9,000 employees.
• So while Senator Orzo and Representative Alzate focused mainly on menopause as a barrier to, uh, women in midlife progressing in their careers, there are some forces that start much, much earlier than that, and I feel like it's worthwhile to at least briefly talk about those forces.
• So I'm gonna go through what I found, and then we can jump into the menopause piece.
• So something really interesting in this year's report is that for the first time in the study's 11-year history, women are citing that they are less likely than men to want a promotion.
• So only 80% of women said that they want a promotion versus 86% of men.
• And interestingly, that gap is the widest among entry-level workers and women at senior levels.
• Um, however, the report found that this ambition gap, so to speak, closes when women receive the same level of sponsorship and management support as men do, which suggests that access to support and mentorship is a huge factor in whether a woman desires to advance in her career.
• Um, this is something that I have thought about quite a bit.
• There is- A saying that I heard, I did not make this up, but and it may be a sports phrase, I'm not sure.
• But I remember reading once someone say "You can't be it if you can't see it."
• And I think- Right that is a really fundamental problem that women face in the workforce.
• If you don't have a mentor or a sponsor who has the job that you want someday, you cannot picture yourself in that role.
• Right.
• And so this issue of women dropping out of the workforce in mid-life has a real trickle-down effect that may seem invisible to some people, but you have to think about it as- modeling behavior, right? Um, if there are no s- women in the C-suite in your organization, then how could you even imagine that you could be in the C-suite someday? Right, it's kind of simple math, but I do- I just don't think it crosses a lot of people's minds.
• Yeah.
• Yeah, absolutely.
• I just wanna dovetail on, you know, what you're talking about from from the Lean In study and the, with McKinsey partnership.
• And that's a WebMD study that found that 34% of women in leadership had considered leaving the workforce in those menopause years, and one in four had turned down promotions due to menopause.
• And also that, you know, by the time you get to senior levels of, of management and leadership in organizations, when you start out, there's almost equal numbers of men and women entering any sector almost, nearly every sector.
• And often the young women entering those sectors actually have better credentialing than- Mm-hmm the men entering them.
• And then you see that they do very well and women actually outperform men on job performance reviews, but they start to differentiate almost immediately during the first promotion.
• Mm-hmm.
• So it'll take women longer to get that first promotion, but they still...
• It'll take them a little longer, but they're still sort of comparable in numbers.
• And then the higher up that org chart you get, the more the women start to fall off and the men start to dominate, till you have 25% of C-suite roles going to women.
• And let's face it, we know that that's often, like, the HR role or they're- Mm-hmm these very gendered roles.
• And then only 4% of CEOs in the US are women, so that's the senior level.
• When I was interviewing Laurie Orso, it occurred to me, you know, one of the things she touched upon but that I really wanted to dive into a little more was just what you were saying.
• If there's not a mentor, if you don't have allies and sponsors, and those are the people that are in the room when promotional decisions are being made, right? And they tend to be above you.
• Mm-hmm.
• They're arguing on your behalf.
• Now, if the people in that room, the higher up you get, are more and more male, how many people are left to argue that you can handle that role, right? And that's why when older women, women in their 40s and 50s, even into their 60s- Say, "Well, I was gonna work till I was 68," or, "I was gonna work until I was 65, but I'm gonna leave because it's...
• I'm not being supported."
• Mm-hmm.
• That it doesn't just affect them, but it actually affects the women 10, 20 years younger than them in that same organization.
• Exactly.
• And back to what you were saying about women losing ground very early in their career, the Women in the Workplace study found for the 11th consecutive year- Mm that, uh women lose that ground at their very first opportunity for a promotion at the manager level.
• Yeah.
• So only 93% of women are promoted to a manager role compared for every 100 men.
• Okay.
• And that's what in the biz they call the, m- the broken rung.
• So the ladder starts collapsing, you know- A lit- little by little starting at the, pretty much at the bottom Right, and this is despite the fact that many studies have found that at that level women are getting better performance reviews than the men that are getting the promotions over them, because they're either shouldering more of the grunt work and they're being seen as, "Well, they're really valuable in this role, in this specialist role.
• I can't afford to make them a manager."
• You know? Mm-hmm.
• There's, there's a lot of things that kind of play a role in all of this.
• And then when you get to the senior level what McKinsey found was that burnout is a huge issue.
• So now when you're getting into women in their, maybe late 30s, 40s, 50s, you're talking about women who typically in addition to these careers have some kind of caregiving responsibility, either children and elderly parents or one or the other.
• Okay.
• And their research said that 6 in 10 senior level women report frequent burnout compared with five in 10 men at that level, and roughly 4 in 10 employees overall, and that senior women are more likely than others to believe that their gender will hinder their future advancement and are very, very worried about job security.
• And the women who report that they've lost interest in further promotions are frequently citing that part of why their interest has waned is because they've been passed over for promotions already.
• They don't see any realistic path forward, and they believe that the leaders above them also are burned out and unhappy, and so they're modeling a behavior that is making these women think "Why bother? Do I want this for my life?" That comes back to work-life balance too, right? So there's a lot of good research that shows that when senior leadership models healthy work-life balance for their employees, it helps with retention.
• Um, but it actually does not hinder, and often helps productivity and profitability.
• And I just wanna just go back for just a second, and I wanna toot our horns.
• Because- so Heather and I have both, done our fair share of healthcare-driven service journalism over the years.
• Um, so we've both written about healthcare topics before we started this podcast, but our most recent area of expertise, I feel like we can really shoulder the mantle of declaring ourselves expert in this realm, is that between us we have almost 15 years of essentially covering the employment sector beat- Yeah in various ways.
• So we've written a lot about the workplace, a lot about the employment sector, and we even worked together on a women in the workplace vertical.
• So website, um, where we did a lot of interviewing and research on topics related to women in the workplace.
• So this information and this realm of research is it's kind of second nature to us.
• And also, we've both faced, what's called gender ageism.
• We have both faced this form of discrimination in our own career paths.
• So if we sound super confident today, It's 'cause we are standing in our fucking truth here.
• Yes.
• Okay.
• A couple more facts, and then I'm gonna give you the floor.
• Okay.
• But another thing that hinders women, and I think we know this anecdotally, and everyone really became aware of this during the pandemic, is that women in particular have always desired flexibility in the workforce.
• Year after year, the leanin.org
• study has found that that is one of, if not the top concern of women.
• And that goes back to the caregiving piece.
• So if you are a working mom and, or a, a working woman who is caring for a parent or another relative- Oftentimes you need flexibility to go to the school play, or do pickup, or take your mom to the doctor.
• And, um, I think that while the pandemic was incredibly difficult on women in particular, it really illuminated for a lot of people how flexibility, whether that means working from home or flexible hours, can help the wheels of life turn more smoothly.
• And this year, in 2026, one in four companies either scaled back or completely discontinued remote hybrid work options, and more than one in eight limited flexible hours.
• And this disproportionately affects women, which is reflected in this report.
• And I think part of that is patriarchy demands that it is the job of the mother to do more than the father, and it is the job of the daughter is expected to do more than the sons.
• And in some cultures, it's even more prominent.
• So I know, for example, that my husband was involved for a long time in a DEI committee at a large media company, and it was national, so there were people on this committee from coast to coast.
• And one thing they said to the folks who were running this program, including my husband, was, "You have to keep in mind that especially for women of color, there is an expectation that..."
• And sometimes it's as specific as the youngest unwed daughter, it's her job.
• Or the oldest daughter.
• Like, it can change from culture to culture, but to be aware that this can be particularly burdensome for women of color who are trying to penetrate into maybe sectors like media, where they haven't traditionally been welcomed, to understand they might have a lot more on y- their plate than they are presenting to you.
• Be aware of this.
• Be ready to support it.
• And that brings me to my final point that I gleaned from the 2025 report, is that, The McKinsey study found that there is a pretty staggering eroding corporate commitment to diversity.
• Mm-hmm.
• Yeah.
• In 2021, 90% of companies reported diversity as a high priority.
• In 2025, only 67% of companies reported it being a high priority, which is a huge drop.
• About one in five companies have scaled back or eliminated bias training.
• And pulling back in that way removes the supports that women were relying on, i.e.
• sponsorship, fair review practices, flexibility in their work life that were in place in order to keep women in the pipeline through midlife and their senior years.
• So All of this stuff is combining to make it even more difficult for women to not only grow their careers, but even just stick with them at the level that they achieved by the time they hit midlife.
• Yeah, exactly.
• And who's gonna stop them? Because we're cutting back on all the regulation and all of the backstops that were designed to make sure employers were not engaging in ageism, were not engaging in sexism.
• So who's gonna stop them? They ought to stop of their own, because there's plenty of research out there, including from Stanford University Center on Longevity and also longstanding research from McKinsey and AARP and other organizations that show that when you have older wo- workers as part of your staff, the entire staff is more productive.
• Older workers do not in fact struggle more with new technology than their younger peers.
• They job hop less, And just having them on staff makes other people job hop a little bit less.
• Hmm.
• So if you have older workers on staff, you're gonna have a lot less employee churn, which is so costly because the cost of onboarding, the cost of retraining, you want retention, and one of the best ways to do that is to make sure that you have a representative number of older workers on staff.
• It ups productivity when you have older workers on staff, and in some sectors like finance, there's direct correlations between the numbers of older folks you have on your staff and your profit margins.
• So all of the excuses that employers give for why they don't wanna h- hire older people, it's all bullshit.
• There's plenty of research that shows- Yeah that none of it is true.
• In fact, the opposite is true.
• But- Well, there's been a- it doesn't stop them.
• No.
• There's been a ton of research just about how diversity in a more general sense- Mm-hmm whether it be racial diversity, gender diversity, age diversity, almost across the board improves company's productivity So if your goal is simply the bottom line and not being a good person or being fair, There's still an argument to hire older women, check, check- Absolutely.
• Yeah in the diversity box because we do bring something to the table that a room full of 35-year-old white men won't.
• Yeah, absolutely.
• Diverse teams are better at creative problem-solving and, job satisfaction has been shown to be higher.
• Like you say, the more diverse the workplace is, generally speaking, employees are happier in that workplace.
• They're less likely to leave.
• They'll stay longer.
• There's a lot of really good reasons to focus on diversity, but particularly older women who have negotiated probably many different types of workplace environments who bring that wisdom, particularly their interpersonal relationship wisdom to the workplace.
• But this same study from Stanford found really alarming biases from hiring managers, and because they told everyone they would have complete anonymity, they didn't hold back, and these hiring managers said things that, you know, if they were on record, they would be illegal.
• But obviously they're thinking about them when they're making hiring decisions.
• So they would say things like, "We try not to hire women in their 40s and 50s because they're going to have menopause, and menopause comes with all these disruptions and all of these complications."
• Um, women who are in their midlife are harder to manage, so we're seen as, I don't know, angry and difficult to make comply.
• It's just...
• Some of the quotes they quoted from these anonymous hiring managers that were part of this large study, and some of it was, it was your worst nightmare that you suspected.
• And just for some context, the numbers that I found About 54 million American women were projected to be in menopause in 2025.
• So think about that number as it applies to the workforce.
• And roughly 85% of those women report experiencing menopause symptoms, which, as you said, typically begin sometime between 45 and 55.
• And the average duration of symptoms is about seven and a half years.
• So this is, like, not a tiny problem.
• No.
• And it's so inevitable.
• All women are going to experience it.
• Employers really have no excuse for not having policies in place for accommodation.
• And that was what was encouraging about talking to Senator Urso and Representative Alzatti was that they were...
• it was a very common sense kind of solution that was hard-baked into their legislation, which was this is a life event that is very similar to pregnancy and childbirth, and it should be accommodated.
• And if it is, as with childbirth and pregnancy when it is accommodated, you'll be able to keep employees longer, they'll be more successful in your workplace, and they'll help your organization be more successful.
• It's not helping you to, stall women's careers.
• It's not helping you to have a workplace that looks like, Mad Men from the 1950s.
• There's so much evidence that those workplaces do not do well.
• And back to McKinsey, McKinsey for years now has been tracking like, the Fortune 500, the Fortune 50.
• They've even done it in tiers, and they've shown that the...
• They've done it by quarters, right? So the 25% of companies that were the most diverse always outperform.
• We're talking money, dollars and cents.
• They outperform in profitability the 25% of those same tier of companies that are the least diverse.
• Always.
• Mm-hmm.
• They haven't had a year yet where that wasn't the truth.
• You know, it just makes no sense.
• I guess what leadership in a lot of these companies who are deprioritizing diversity are looking at are statistics.
• So I came across one from the AARP, which I hope no recruiter or HR person ever sees, too late I'm sure.
• But we'll tell them about it.
• Yeah.
• Um, so AARP did a global study that estimated that worldwide, so this is not exclusive to the US, productivity losses from menopausal symptoms were estimated to be about $150 billion, with related healthcare costs exceeding $600 billion.
• So these numbers probably, I'm guessing, stick in the minds of leaders who say "Why bother with this demographic? Because we don't wanna foot the bill for this medical thing."
• Mm.
• And there's no, there's no equivalent for men.
• You know, first of all, I think if you were talking about business leaders who are either unwittingly or purposefully biased I think you're giving them the benefit of the doubt that they did any research.
• Um, but I think you could also say that's because those numbers point toward what happens when you don't support those women, and they leave the workplace with all their wisdom, with all their experience and sector knowledge," right? So I think that's gonna be part of that, that cost.
• So what else do we wanna say about this? Maybe we wanna end with telling women that if you are like me, and maybe for the first time in your life you were feeling sort of Not like the bright, shiny young puppy, the cute little puppy at work.
• You're not imagining it.
• Right.
• I, I, I'm actually just qu- I'm kind of paraphrasing from Marc Maron interviewed Julie Delpy- Oh and he was asking her- Mm love her, and he was asking her about, you know, h- what's it like now for you to pitch, like, projects, right? And get projects green-lit.
• And she's like, "It's impossible for me now because I'm not a cute little puppy anymore."
• Julie Delpy is the beautiful French actress from Before Midnight.
• Yes.
• Yeah.
• Yes.
• And she has...
• Actually, you would love this show, and I cannot think of the name of it.
• I'll put it in the show notes.
• But she did a show about women in, like, their late 40s and 50s, and she actually took on a lot of this in the, the narrative of the show.
• Um, but, if you are hitting that point in your career and you're s- sort of like me, you're like, I finally have, you know, a wealth of knowledge and experience of this, and now I have some new skills I picked up recently and, and some fun tech stuff that I want to employ in my next career, you know, in my next rung of my career," and nobody's buying what you're selling.
• And I think it's, here's the data, here's the dis- statistics, here's even what HR managers say when people, they don't think they're gonna be held account for what they're saying.
• You're not imagining it.
• You are facing discrimination.
• You should be mad about it, and it's not you.
• I think another thing, and this is completely anecdotal and just from my experience- the one beautiful part of aging for me is that on many levels I just feel so much more comfortable in my skin.
• I kind of hate that expression, but yeah.
• I feel confident in my opinions.
• I know what I know.
• I know what I don't know.
• And I sometimes wonder whether the confidence that comes with aging is another invisible threat to men in the workplace.
• There is this topic that I wanna do and just a couple weeks ago Tressie McMillan Cottom wrote a piece for The New York Times about embracing the crone and the crone energy.
• And she talks about how this is an archetype that exists in all cultures, is powerful, is feared, and is really in some ways hated and purposely undermined, especially when we're in a period of real toxicity, as we are now.
• Mm-hmm.
• We're in a period of extreme backlash- Yeah toward women.
• And so I think even more than usual, older women with our confidence, you know, we're being seen as a threat, so we have to be kept blocked out of the conversation.
• If we're out protesting, we have to be belittled.
• And I think that it's coming through in the job market, in the workplace.
• It's probably always been bad, but it feels like it's particularly bad right now.
• I agree.
• And it's just really important to talk about it.
• Yeah we're gonna drop a whole bunch of source material in our show notes so you can go back and read any of this stuff that you're interested in.
• But one stat that I found was that 72% of menopausal women reported having at least one time hiding their menopause symptoms at work, and that only 31% of women felt comfortable discussing it in the workplace.
• So that means, like so many of the topics we cover, there's this shroud of shame about these very natural things that happen to every woman's body, and I just feel like- Talking about it is the best revenge sometimes.
• And the people who don't wanna hear about it make me wanna talk about it more Absolutely.
• Yeah, that's...
• I, I do think it's bubbling up.
• You're seeing the conversation, and you're seeing women from a lot of different backgrounds and even across the political spectrum kind of insisting no, I'm not going away just because I'm a woman in my 50s."
• You can't make me.
• Great talk as always, and we will see you all next week.
• Bye.
• Okay.
• Bye.
• More information about the sources we used for this episode can be found in the show notes and at our website, anotherbloodypodcast.com.
• If you have comments about this episode, stories you wanna share, or future topics to suggest, please DM us on Instagram at anotherbloody_pod or send us a note on our website.
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• Finally, please keep in mind that the content presented on this podcast is intended for informational and entertainment purposes only and should not be regarded as a substitute for medical advice.
• And please take care of yourselves