Media’s midlife women crisis

I feel as if I’m only just getting started. Except I can’t get started.”

Author, journalist, visual artist, and campaigner Stacey Duguid is articulating the impossible bind facing midlife women as they navigate the cruelty of the 2026 job market.

She shared on Instagram: “The ‘have it all’ generation is now the ‘explain your gap on your CV’ generation.”

Duguid has successfully smashed the silence and misplaced shame that all too often accompanies the soul-crushing experience of gendered ageism. She shared her honest experience applying for jobs over the past 16 months, receiving almost no replies or interviews. Her courageous honesty opened the floodgates on a sea of stories from other midlife women sharing their own demoralising experiences.

Their words are powerful, especially in revealing what hiring managers say about women in their forties and older. ‘Overqualified and she knows it’, ‘She’ll never adapt’, ‘Too expensive’, ‘Not a cultural fit.’ Just a sprinkling of the baked-in bias women face.

In a media ecosystem in which working mothers are the ultimate creative unicorn, Duguid is a unicorn with wings. Travelling from a shop assistant at Harvey Nichols to much-coveted editorial roles at Elle, Harrods and Net-a-Porter. Yet in a youth-obsessed industry, this experience simply does not pay. Like far too many brilliantly talented women before her, Duguid broke the mould and defied the odds, only to be diminished and dismissed by suffocating ageist stereotypes.

The mid-life career cliff

The brutal reality for women in the media industry is that just when their earnings should be accelerating, they face a career cliff. The gender pay gap is accelerating for women in their forties. The motherhood penalty shows no signs of abating.

ONS analysis has shown that, five years after the birth of a first child, women’s earnings are on average 42% lower than they would have been without having a child.

Meanwhile, the cost of entry for the creative industries for women continues to rise. Not content with impossible-to-achieve and eye-wateringly costly beauty treatments, women with experience are now being urged to ‘botox their CVs’. To erase our experience as effortlessly as we eradicate our frown lines.

Duguid, who has decades of hard-won experience, has removed her date of birth and her surname. The pernicious truth for female journalists is that while we revere men with an opinion, put them on a pedestal and pay them accordingly. For women, the price of entry appears to be bearing your soul, for as Duguid explains, ‘£200 and four-month payment terms’.

Fractured financial futures

The cost of this unrelenting ageism and misogyny is too high a price to pay. Just as women out of work are facing a financial black hole, the pressure to be forever young threatens to push many women into the black.

Mid-life women should not filter the truth. For while I will never judge a woman for navigating the seemingly unending treadmill of ever-rising beauty standards, I will never stay silent while young women sacrifice their financial freedom for facial fillers.

AI exacerbates bias

Imagine if the media industry shifted just a shred of the scrutiny facing women’s appearances to their experiences of job seeking.

Duguid shares that brands like British Airways, Hello magazine and Nyetimber simply ghosted applications. The dudes waxing lyrical on our industry stages about the AI revolution rarely mention this colossal death of basic manners. The personal cost is difficult to fathom.

Duguid’s honesty highlights the inherent inhumanity of automated recruitment, which uses AI to filter out candidates and decide who receives a response at all. She is calling on the Government to tighten the regulation of the recruitment industry to address the unregulated use of AI tools.

Tools which exacerbate existing bias against women in their 40s and 50s. Women who are more likely to have taken career breaks or worked part-time due to caring responsibilities.

Far from seeing these moments as career-enhancing gifts, algorithms treat these patterns as indicators of lower productivity or commitment. This approach means women may be screened out of higher-paying roles.

To challenge this toxic status quo, Duguid has launched a petition urging the Government to tighten regulation of the recruitment industry, as well as launching The Encore, a platform designed to drive structural change within government, business and society.

Forging a new path

It is a structural change that is well overdue in an industry which continues to treat women as if they have an expiry date.

For the generation of women who grew up with Cosmopolitan‘s promise that they could ‘have it all’ ringing in their ears, the industry they helped build, which is now denying them their next chapter, is the ultimate betrayal.

Recruitment practices demand that women iron out and erase their grit, graft, and wisdom, which work for neither employees nor employers.

If we collectively consent to bend and break to fit the stereotype of what feeds the algorithm, our industry will become bland and boring. We desperately need women’s wisdom to turn the tide on barbaric beauty standards that risk leaving young girls robbed of the space for self-actualisation.

As Duguid’s courage shows, the way we use words has power. But for women, the price of speaking their truth continues to rise.

Nicola Kemp has spent over two decades writing about diversity, equality and inclusion in media. She is now editorial director at Creativebrief and writes for The Media Leader each month.