Women over 50 - the most underused asset in the labour market.
I read this while drinking my morning coffee and I haven't stopped thinking about it. I feel happy, furious, provocative and calm. How’s that possible? Well, follow me here and you’ll find out if you agree.
Laëtitia Vitaud
Image from www.laetitiavitaud.com
Women are among the most underused sources of resilience, intelligence, and practical capability in the labor market.
First a shout out and thank you to linkedIn thought leaders Eleanor Mills, Sophie Edmond and Amanda Coles for picking this up on LinkedIn! Online magazine Fast Company published a piece this week by writer, speaker and expert on future work, Laëtitia Vitaud, that finally says out loud what many of us have known for a long time.
Women over 50 are not a liability. They are the most underused strategic asset in the labour market today!
Laëtitia makes a case that I think every leader, and every woman over 50, needs to read.
For years, organisations have chased youth. Invested in "high potentials." Competed for digital natives. Built entire talent strategies around the “next generation”.
And yet? Those high potentials often move on before the ink is dry on their development plans. Loyalty is no longer a given. I am GenX and we have a different profile entirely - one that's been mostly invisible in this conversation.
The world we're navigating now -
AI disruption, political instability, economic anxiety, climate change - demands something very specific from the people leading through it.
Not speed. Not novelty.
Image by: Pexels: Cottonbro.4098169
We need maturity, resilience. The ability to learn, unlearn, and relearn.
The author argues that women over 50 have been quietly developing exactly these capacities for decades. Not in spite of their non-linear careers but because of them. The pivots, the interruptions, the reinventions. That's not a gap in a CV. That's lived experience through change. I am one of these women.
And emotional intelligence? The kind that holds teams together, reads what's unsaid, and keeps human systems functioning? That deepens with time. AI cannot replicate it.
There's also a market intelligence argument here that should be obvious by now. Consumers are also ageing. Economic decisions are increasingly made by midlife and older adults - particularly women. And yet this group is almost entirely absent from leadership rooms and innovation teams.
That, she writes, is not just an equity problem. It's an intelligence problem.
She ends with a thought from writer Ursula K. Le Guin - that if humanity needed to send one representative to meet extraterrestrials, it should be an old woman. Because she alone has lived through the full arc of human experience: youth, change, loss, and reinvention.
I think that says everything.
The link to the full article is in the comments. Read it. Share it with someone who needs to hear it.
And if you're a woman over 50 - do you recognise yourself in this? I'd really like to hear from you.
