There is a deeply disturbing paradox in the way older women are represented today. The louder the discourse about inclusivity 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 disappeared from public view. When women in their fifties or sixties do become visible, it is often with a body and a face that belongs to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, timeless, floating in time.
This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, because it has major implications for work, career and power. When women disappear As they grow older, they lose sight of access to role models, just when careers should be expanding and evolving. If you are expected to work for fifty years, but you only see the first twenty 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 looks like at 60.
When women in their fifties or sixties are made visible, it is often on the condition that they look ten or twenty years younger. As a result, women in their 60s are effectively invisible; they are only present when their age is erased. This limits ambition, encourages self-censorship and makes leadership or reinvention later in life seem abnormal rather than expected. It quietly redistributes power away from older women by making it harder to imagine, claim, and inhabit long careers.
There’s no point in blaming the women
Let’s be very clear: this is not about condemning women’s individual choices. Gray hair or dyed hair. Injections or not. Surgery or not. Filter or not. To suggest that women are responsible for their own invisibility because they “give in” to beauty standards would be both unfair and deeply naive. We do what we can, with the limitations and possibilities we have. We do what we can with the conflicting orders we receive.
The problem isn’t that women are trying to look younger. That is completely understandable. The problem is that older women are not there or are only tolerated if they don’t look old. The result is that the ‘normal faces’ of older women – to borrow the central idea – emerge a brilliant newsletter from author Caroline Criado Perez– have almost disappeared from our visual landscape. This disappearance is anything but coincidental.
It reflects the demographic power structure in which men are allowed to age as they move up the ladder, while women in the workplace are expected to stay in their place – submissive, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there to please the eye, regardless of their job and position.
A double disappearance: organizations and media
Sociologists have long documented the progressive invisibility of women in American organizations, and the numbers tell a familiar story. Across Fortune 500 companies, women now represent roughly 30% of executive leadership roles, but this progress has been uneven and heavily skewed toward younger cohorts. Women over fifty – and especially over sixty – are dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power, despite decades of accumulated experience.
This organizational invisibility reflects what is happening in the media. Research from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media shows consistency that women are both underrepresented and erased on screen by their age. Women over 50 account for a small share of speaking roles, even though they represent more than a third of the U.S. adult population. As women get older, they literally disappear from movies, television and advertising. And when they are allowed to reappear, it is often on the condition that their age is visually erased. In movies, TV and advertising, female bodies are only tolerated – even in leadership or expert roles – if they are filtered, smoothed, lifted and polished. We want female leaders, but not their concentration wrinkles, nor the visible traces of 25 years of work.
When aging becomes a “defect” that needs 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 meeting a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On screen it is exceptional. So we’ve lost our collective visual memory of what women in their forties, fifties or sixties actually look like. Perfectly normal features – expression lines, changes in skin texture, sagging – are now seen as signs of neglect and personal failure. The characteristics of a normal age have been reframed as defects.
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’ll usually get a smooth, pore-free face that could be 35, or a woman who looks closer to 70. The technology only reproduces and reinforces the biases of the image databases on which it is trained. AI doesn’t show us women at 50; it shows us what the internet thinks they should look like.
It is equally ubiquitous in corporate stock photography, in recruitment materials and in the visual representations of the business world more broadly. The ‘work world’, as it is depicted today, is populated by smooth, vaguely thirty-something faces, where age is erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s and 60s are largely absent, except when used to illustrate stories of career end, mentorship, or decline.
The enduring ‘double standard of aging’
This brings us back to a concept formulated by Susan Sontag more than 50 years ago: the double standard of aging. Men’s aging is associated with added value – authority, gravitas, experience, power – while women’s aging is depicted as decline. Nothing fundamental has changed. After age 45, women are expected to either fade into the background or put enormous effort into looking younger, but never show visible signs of aging without consequences. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, says a French journalist Sophie Dancourt memorably named the “monastery syndrome.”: an unspoken order to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility and sexualized visibility are perceived to be over.
This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where women’s careers are still defined by narrow and ruthless standards of desirability. Aging men are cast as mentors, leaders or lovers; Older women are quietly being written out unless they meet increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The result is not only professional marginalization, but also a cultural message that equates the value of women with youth – and treats aging as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be lived.
That’s exactly what makes it the ‘Last Fuckable Day’ sketch from Inside Amy Schumerso powerful. Schumer unexpectedly encounters her show business heroes – Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Patricia Arquette – as they celebrate a darkly comic milestone: the age when women are no longer considered desirable or castable. The sketch was made 10 years ago and doesn’t 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 is so important at work
The lack 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 very destabilizing.
Secondly, it reinforces discrimination. When women over 45 are rarely seen in leadership, those who succeed are seen as exceptions rather than the norm. This fuels stereotypes about ‘atypical’ careers and legitimizes poor hiring, promotion and training decisions.
Third, it creates collective anxiety around aging. When the only acceptable image of professional success is youth, growing older becomes something to fear. This fear affects all women, not just those who are older.
Finally, organizations lose. Women over 45 represent a tremendous amount of experience, skills and leadership potential. Treating them as outdated is economically irrational.
It’s about diversity
Calling for more older female role models does not mean dictating to women how to age. There shouldn’t be a new rule – whether to go gray or not, whether to reject or embrace aesthetic medicine. The goal is not to replace one standard with another, but to leave room for choice.
What we urgently need is more diversity in the ways of aging. Wrinkled faces and smooth faces. Gray hair and dyed hair. Bodies that represent time in different ways. Making this diversity visible increases what is socially conceivable.
Every woman who chooses – when she can, when she wants – to show her real, aging face broadens the spectrum of the visible. She sends a simple but powerful message: I am here. I’m growing older in my own way. And I am important.
In doing so, she not only challenges today’s stereotypes, but also helps shape the images, data sets and representations that will train tomorrow’s technologies and imaginations.
Older female role models at work are not a niche need. They are a prerequisite for fairer careers, healthier organizations and a society that can finally accept women’s lives at their full potential – not just in their youth.
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