Why we need more older female role models at work

There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion and diversity becomes, the fewer women we see who actually look like women over 45. Women who age “normally”—who live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible age—have almost vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time.

This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, for it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lose access to role models at exactly the moment when careers are supposed to stretch and evolve. If you are expected to work for 50 years but can only see the first 20 years of that life represented—in leadership, in organizations, in the media—then most of your working life remains unimaginable. There is no shared script for what professional authority, ambition, or success look like at 60.

When women in their 50s or 60s are made visible, it is often on the condition that they look 10 or 20 years younger. As a result, women in their 60s are effectively invisible—present only if their age is erased. This narrows ambition, encourages self-censorship, and makes later-life leadership or reinvention seem abnormal rather than expected. It quietly redistributes power away from aging women by making long careers harder to imagine, claim, and inhabit.

There’s no point in blaming the women

Let us be absolutely clear: This is not about condemning women’s individual choices. Gray hair or dyed hair. Injections or not. Surgery or not. Filters or not. To suggest that women are responsible for their own invisibility because they “give in” to beauty standards would be both unjust and profoundly naive. We do what we can with the constraints and possibilities we have. We do what we can with the contradictory injunctions we receive.

The problem is not that women try to look younger. That’s perfectly understandable. The problem is that older women are either not there or only tolerated if they do not look old. As a result, the “normal faces” of aging women—to borrow the central idea of a brilliant newsletter by author Caroline Criado Perez—have almost disappeared from our visual landscape. This disappearance is anything but accidental.

It reflects the demographic structure of power in which men are allowed to age as they move up the ladder, while women in the workspace are expected to remain in their place—submissive, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there to please the eye, whatever their job and position.

A double disappearance: organizations and media

Sociologists have long documented the progressive invisibilization of women in U.S. organizations, and the numbers tell a familiar story. In Fortune 500 companies, women now make up roughly 30% of executive leadership roles, but this progress is uneven and heavily skewed toward younger cohorts. Women over 50—and especially over 60—are dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power, despite decades of accumulated experience. 

This organizational invisibility mirrors what happens in the media. Research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media consistently shows that women are both underrepresented and age-erased on both the big and small screen. Women over 50 account for a small fraction of speaking roles, even though they represent more than a third of the U.S. adult population. As women age, they quite literally vanish from movies, television, and advertising. And when they are allowed to reappear, it is often on the condition that their age be visually erased. Across film, TV, and ads, female bodies are tolerated—even in leadership or expert roles—only if they are filtered, smoothed, lifted, and polished. We want women leaders, but not their wrinkles of concentration nor the visible marks of 25 years of work.

When aging becomes a “defect” to be corrected

Criado Perez describes how she started “collecting” images of actresses whose faces have not been artificially rejuvenated—Emma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Kate Winslet—because encountering a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On-screen, it’s exceptional. Thus, we have lost our collective visual memory of what women in their 40s, 50s, or 60s actually look like. Perfectly normal features—lines of expression, changes in skin texture, sagging—are now perceived as signs of neglect and personal failure. The traits of a normal age have been reframed as flaws.

New generative AI tools are making this visual amnesia even worse. Ask an image generator to show you a 50-year-old woman, and you will usually get either a smoothed, poreless face that could be 35—or a woman who looks closer to 70. The technology merely reproduces and amplifies the biases of the image databases it is trained on. AI does not show us women of 50; it shows us what the internet imagines they should look like.

It is just as pervasive in corporate stock photography, in recruitment materials, and in the visual representations of the business world more broadly. The “world of work,” as it is depicted today, is populated by smooth, vaguely thirtysomething faces, where age is either erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s or 60s are largely absent—except when they are used to illustrate end-of-career narratives, mentorship, or decline.

The enduring “double standard of aging”

This brings us back to a concept articulated more than 50 years ago by Susan Sontag: the double standard of aging. Male aging is associated with added value—authority, gravitas, experience, power—while female aging is framed as decline. Nothing fundamental has changed. After 45, women are expected either to fade into the background or to invest enormous energy into looking younger, but never to show visible signs of aging without consequence. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, what French journalist Sophie Dancourt has memorably called the “convent syndrome”: an unspoken injunction to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility, and sexualized visibility are presumed to be over.

This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where women’s careers are still shaped by narrow and unforgiving norms of desirability. Aging men are cast as mentors, leaders, or lovers; aging women are quietly written out, unless they conform to increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The result is not only professional marginalization, but also a cultural message that equates women’s worth with youth—and treats aging as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be lived.

That is precisely what makes the sketch “Last Fuckable Day,” from Inside Amy Schumer, so powerful. Schumer unexpectedly runs into her show-business heroes—Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette—who are celebrating a darkly comic milestone: the age at which women are deemed no longer desirable or castable. Made 10 years ago, the sketch does not feel dated at all. It turns ageist erasure into a sharp piece of feminist satire—one that feels even more relevant today than when it first aired.

Why this matters so much at work

The absence of older female role models is extremely costly. First, it deprives younger women of projection. How can you imagine a long, evolving career when most, if not all, visible success stories stop at 40? In a world where working lives are getting longer, this lack of role models is deeply destabilizing.

Second, it reinforces discrimination. When women over 45 are rarely seen in leadership, those who succeed are perceived as exceptions rather than as the norm. This fuels stereotypes about “atypical” careers and legitimizes bad decisions in hiring, promotion, and training.

Third, it creates collective anxiety around aging. When the only acceptable image of professional success is youth, aging becomes something to fear. This anxiety affects all women—not just those who are already older.

Finally, organizations lose out. Women over 45 represent a massive pool of experience, skills, and leadership potential. Treating them as obsolete is economically irrational.

It’s about diversity

Calling for more older female role models does not mean prescribing how women should age. There should be no new rule—whether to go gray or not, to reject aesthetic medicine or embrace it. The aim is not to replace one norm with another, but to leave room for choice.

What we desperately need is more diversity of the ways of aging. Wrinkled faces and smooth ones. Gray hair and dyed hair. Bodies that show time in different ways. Making this diversity visible expands what is socially imaginable.

Every woman who chooses—when she can, when she wants—to show her real, aging face widens the spectrum of the visible. She sends a simple but powerful message: I am here. I am aging in my own way. And I matter.

In doing so, she not only challenges stereotypes today—she also helps shape the images, datasets, and representations that will train the technologies and imaginations of tomorrow.

Older female role models at work are not a niche demand. They are a condition for fairer careers, healthier organizations, and a society that can finally accept women’s lives in their full length—not just in their youth.