“Botox Your CV”? I Have a Problem With That

2 days ago

5 min read

There’s a strange collision happening for women in midlife right now.

At the very point in our lives when many of us are starting to question what we want from the next chapter, the world of work itself is changing at an extraordinary pace.

AI is replacing some jobs, changing others and reshaping entire industries. Technology is increasingly influencing who gets through the recruitment gate, while age and gender bias remain very real concerns. And women in their 40s, 50s and beyond are trying to work out how they fit into all of this.

In fact, women are being told they need to make themselves look younger on paper.

“Botox your old lady's CV,” they’re told.

Strip it back to the last seven or ten years. Remove the dates that reveal your age. Leave out decades of experience because they might make you look “too old.”

Think about how reductive that is.

A woman arrives at 50 with decades of hard-won experience, knowledge, relationships, mistakes, successes and wisdom — and the advice is essentially: hide most of it. Make yourself smaller, younger and make yourself easier for the system to digest.

I have a problem with that.

The woman isn’t the problem. We need to be asking some serious questions about the system.

And then there are the stories we tell ourselves

Because alongside the very real external challenges women face, something else happens.

We start internalising them.

Who’s going to hire me at my age?

I’ve probably left it too late.

I’ll have to start all over again.

Maybe I should just be grateful I have a job.

I see this all the time in my work as a career coach.

Women come to me knowing something isn’t right anymore. Maybe they’ve outgrown their role or that the work that suited them ten or twenty years ago doesn’t fit the person they are today. Some have been unhappy for years. Or some have a persistent feeling that they want something more.

So they do what we’ve been conditioned to do when we’re thinking about changing jobs.

They look at the job boards. They scroll through SEEK or LinkedIn. Nothing jumps out at them or feels particularly exciting.

And they think, “Oh well, I’ll just suck it up and stay here. I'm lucky to even have a job.”

So they close the browser and go back to work. Sometimes for another month. Sometimes for another five years.

They stay. They play small. And sometimes they become too frightened to even explore what else might be possible.

That bothers me enormously.

Because midlife can be an incredible time to take stock

By the time we reach our 40s and 50s, we have accumulated decades of life and work experience. We know things.

By the time we get to midlife, we’ve lived a bit! We’ve dealt with difficult people, navigated change, raised families, solved problems, made mistakes and learned a heck of a lot along the way.

We know ourselves better. And we care a whole lot less about what other people think.

And for many women, some of the relentless intensity of the earlier years begins to ease. Children may become more independent. We might finally start getting a little more time and headspace back for ourselves.

And that can open up a whole new set of questions.

What do I want now?

What matters to me now?

How do I want to spend my time?

What kind of work do I want to be doing?

What do I want the next 20, 30 or 40 years of my life to look like?

For women who have spent years sometimes decades thinking about what everybody else needs, even the question What do I want? can be surprisingly difficult to answer.

Kids. Partners. Parents. Work. Teams. Families. The endless logistics of keeping everything moving.

We become incredibly good at knowing what everybody else needs that somewhere along the way, we can lose touch with what we need.

And perhaps for the first time in a very long time, the next chapter gets to include you.

At 50, you could have decades ahead of you

This is something I think we lose sight of when we talk about women, ageing and work.

A woman turning 50 could potentially have another 30 or 40 years of life ahead of her. That is an enormous amount of life and an enormous amount of potential.

There is time to learn something new, to change direction, to build something. There is time to contribute differently and to use everything you’ve learned in ways you perhaps haven’t even imagined yet.

I have countless stories from my work of women who have done exactly that.

Women who have changed industries, stepped into leadership, started businesses, retrained, rediscovered long-forgotten interests and created working lives that fit who they are now.

Often, it started with curiosity. Giving themselves permission to explore, follow a few clues and see where they led.

Before you decide it’s impossible, do some digging

One of the things that frustrates me most in my work is seeing women rule themselves out before they’ve even explored what might be possible.

They tell me they’re too old. That they’d have to start again at the bottom. That nobody will hire them without experience in a different industry.

And my response is usually: How do you know?

Go and find out.

Talk to people. Ask questions. Look at where your skills could transfer. Follow the things that spark your interest, even if you have no idea where they’ll lead.

And please don’t let a scroll through the job boards be your entire career research! There is a whole world of work out there that you won’t find by scrolling through job ads.

Give yourself permission to explore and follow the clues. Question some of the assumptions you’ve absorbed about age, work and what you’re “allowed” to want.

Because you don’t have to know exactly what comes next in order to start exploring it.

What if some of your most meaningful work is still ahead of you?

Imagine what might open up if you really allowed yourself to believe that.

Because while there are very real challenges facing women in the workplace at midlife, I also see enormous possibility at this stage of life.

It’s one of the reasons four of us created BECOMING: The Next Chapter Is Yours.

BECOMING brings together four different parts of the midlife experience — identity, hormone health, career, and style and self-expression — because this transition is about so much more than what job you do next.

It’s an opportunity to ask:

Who am I now?

What do I need?

What do I want?

How do I want to show up in the world?

And what am I becoming next?

Maybe your next chapter starts right here — with giving yourself permission to imagine it.