The Woman With Too Much Experience

By Marj

Last week I wrote about the strange feeling of becoming invisible in midlife.

The workplace may be where many women feel it most acutely.

There's a peculiar moment that happens to many women in midlife.

After decades of building expertise, developing judgement and accumulating experience, you discover that none of those things guarantee opportunity.

In fact, sometimes they seem to work against you.

We are told that experience matters.

That organisations value wisdom.

That leadership is built over time.

Yet many women find themselves reaching midlife only to discover that the market has developed a surprisingly complicated relationship with experience.

Particularly female experience.

Somewhere along the way, "experienced" became a compliment and a warning.

Too experienced.

Too senior.

Too established.

Too expensive.

Too qualified.

Too much.

Women who have spent twenty or thirty years building careers often find themselves facing a strange contradiction.

They are simultaneously told they are exactly the kind of leaders organisations need while being quietly overlooked in favour of someone newer, younger or perceived to have greater future potential.

Potential.

It's a fascinating word.

Potential is often celebrated long before achievement.

Long before results.

Long before experience.

A thirty-year-old is described as having enormous potential.

A fifty-five-year-old is expected to justify their relevance.

The maths has never quite made sense to me.

Particularly because midlife women are often carrying an extraordinary amount of capability.

Strategic judgement.

Commercial experience.

Leadership scars.

Resilience.

Pattern recognition.

The ability to spot problems before they arrive.

The ability to stay calm when they do.

These things are not theoretical.

They're earned.

Yet many women find themselves trying to explain gaps that aren't really gaps at all.

A portfolio career.

Consulting.

Advisory work.

Caring responsibilities.

Board positions.

Project work.

Periods spent deliberately stepping sideways rather than upwards.

Years filled with contribution that somehow fail to fit neatly into traditional career narratives.

The reality is that careers are no longer linear.

Perhaps they never were.

Especially for women.

Many of us have built careers around children, parents, partners, relocations, health, opportunities and changing priorities.

We've adapted repeatedly.

We've reinvented ourselves more times than we can count.

And yet the hiring process often behaves as though the ideal career path still resembles a neat ladder with no interruptions and no detours.

Life, unfortunately, rarely cooperates.

Neither do women.

The women I know in midlife are not winding down.

They're not lacking ambition.

They're not looking for somewhere comfortable to wait out the rest of their careers.

Most of them still have enormous energy.

Enormous curiosity.

Enormous value to contribute.

What they lack is not capability.

It's visibility.

It's opportunity.

It's someone willing to look beyond a CV and recognise what decades of experience actually represent.

Because experience isn't simply knowledge.

It's judgement.

And judgement is becoming one of the rarest leadership qualities of all.

Perhaps the question isn't whether midlife women still have something to offer.

Perhaps the question is why organisations continue overlooking one of the richest talent pools available to them.

The woman with too much experience doesn't need less of it.

The world simply needs to remember how valuable it is.

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