Light up the group chat, ask about midlife

I was catching up with fellow mid-lifer Gretchen Rubin on my podcast this week when she said this:

“I have been going through the empty nest phase of life, which I'm rebranding as the open door phase of life.”

I’m not an empty-nester yet. Our family is still very much in school-drop off and “dad-dresses-up-as-santa” phase. But I’m so glad I heard this when I did. An “open door phase” feels infinitely more fulfilling than an “empty nest.” More on the podcast here.

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Now for an experiment.

Text your friends in their 40s and ask they how they feel about midlife.

Watch the group chat light up. And (with everyone’s permission!!) send me the screenshots. I may reach out to share your screenshot, anonymizing names of course. Just reply to this email.

For a lot of women, this time of their lives sits somewhere between anxiety, rage, and ennui. We’re packing lunches for the kids and picking out a nursing home for mom. We’re realizing that the big promotion is never coming—or worse, languishing for years on the job market. We’re sweating through our pajamas at night, crying in our cars during the day, and breaking out like we’re back in high school.

Midlife hit me like a ton of bricks. I was mourning all the ways I had taken my twenties and thirties for granted—exhibiting the classic signs of a full-blown midlife crisis (except maybe the flashy classic car).

But, looking around at all of the women I knew who were struggling, I started to feel a sense of déjà vu. I had spent years building a movement to support moms in America, and I was intimately familiar with something called the motherhood penalty. It recognized that moms weren’t alone in their struggles, or at fault for them. Rather, the whole system was stacked against them, and they were paying the literal price for it.

Midlife, I realized, wasn’t so different. The problem isn’t that millions of women are having their own, individual midlife crises. It’s that there’s a big, structural crisis going on, affecting millions of women, and no one has the language to talk about it.

I call that big crisis the “midlife penalty.” Because until we name it, we’ll never be able to change it.

The Midlife Penalty

Much like the motherhood penalty, the midlife penalty is an actual cost women bear as they get older—because as women age, the wage gap widens. In fact, women ages 45-64 experience a whopping $16,490 earnings gap compared with white men—roughly four times that of women ages 15-24.

That’s not surprising when you consider how women are systematically disadvantaged in the workplace. We’re too young until we’re too old—not taken seriously in the early stages of our careers, not supported with child care or paid leave if we become mothers, and then, once we think we’re finally through the woods, we’re “past our prime.” Meanwhile, the demands at home can feel unrelenting. Millions are caring for both parents and kids as part of the “sandwich generation,” labor that can go woefully unrecognized. It’s no wonder older women are grossly underrepresented in senior leadership.

And it’s hard to show up fully both at work and at home when your hormones are running wild. Our health continues to be understudied, with less than 5% of global research and development funding going towards women, and less than 1% of NIH funding going towards menopause. As a result, we still don’t fully understand how gender and menopause influence other age-related health issues, like heart attacks and Alzheimer’s disease—leaving older women to suffer from them disproportionately. Unsurprisingly, these care disparities and health risks are only exacerbated for women of color.

What’s in a name?

It’s one thing to absorb these stunning facts on their own; it’s another to understand them as part of a bigger picture. Language holds power: with a name, we can understand these struggles not as the result of individual failures, but structural ones.

Throughout history, we’ve seen how transformative naming a problem can be for women’s movements. Just think about when Betty Friedan articulated, ironically, “the problem that has no name” in her landmark book The Feminine Mystique. She galvanized a generation of discontented housewives-turned-early feminists, inspiring them to see their own experiences as part of a broader narrative.

We’ve seen this more recently, too. Until a few years ago, blame for sexual harassment and assault was, almost without fail, placed on individual women: What was she wearing? What was she drinking? But, with thanks to Tarana Burke’s #MeToo movement, we can now articulate the structural problems—in our legal system, in our education of young men, in our culture writ large—that perpetuated this cycle of violence. In the years since #MeToo, our government has passed more than 80 workplace anti-harassment bills, and we’ve changed the way consent is taught and talked about in schools.

Like the motherhood penalty, identifying the midlife penalty won’t make its consequences any less painful—at least, not yet. But, as we’ve seen, naming it is a necessary first step.

What’s there to do?

To address the midlife penalty, I’m certainly not going to tell you to power pose your way to a promotion or spend thousands on perimenopause pills. That’s part of how we got here—believing we could fix systemic problems by fixing ourselves.

Instead, we need to create real support systems for older women. At a minimum, companies should be regularly promoting and retaining women in leadership roles at the same rate as men. They could also consider offering menopause and caregiving benefits to help women in midlife stay in the workforce—and help recuperate the $1.8 million per year menopause costs in lost working hours.

Outside of corporate America, we need greater funding for long-neglected research into menopause and other women’s health issues, so that we can treat the literal, physical symptoms that are holding us back. And—maybe most important of all—we need a broader shift in our culture. We need to fundamentally change the way we see older women in our lives, to listen to them, and to hold their stories closely and with care.

People always talk about women’s lives as governed by the dreaded “biological clock.” Implicit in that is a myth that once we hit midlife, our time is up—that there’s nothing left to live for. But it’s an illusion—a vanishing act of epically sexist and ageist proportions. As difficult as midlife can be, it also comes with great joys and freedoms: wisdom, confidence, peace with our lot in life. If, one day, women can enjoy a midlife without the midlife penalty, we can fully step into the power we’ve always had.

While you’re here…

• My podcast was nominated for a Webby-award! We’re so honored to be nominated alongside such incredible hosts (hi Mel Robbins!). If you can spare a minute to vote, I’d so appreciate it.

• I can’t stop thinking about Meetali Jain. She represents Megan Garcia, who is suing Character A.I. Her son committed suicide after interacting with an AI girlfriend on the platform. It’s a heartbreaking story—and a wake-up call. We’re letting AI into the most intimate corners of our kids’ lives, without safeguards, without transparency, and without asking the hard questions. What does consent look like in a relationship with a bot? Where’s the line between simulation and manipulation? We don’t have answers yet—but we need them. Fast.
  

• Everyone should consider watching Adolescence on Netflix—whether you’re a parent of school-aged kids or not. I’d love to hear what you think about the show, about boyhood, about masculinity. As always, just reply to this email. I might feature a comment or two in my next Substack.

• I just got our puppy Stevie onto a new diet—Just food for dogs. She’s a big fan. I’m still figuring out my own midlife nutrition plan, but at least one of us is thriving!

Until next time,

Reshma