Ageing is taking a toll on women, especially in the job market, if figures from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) are anything to go by.
Last year, there were 162,000 unemployed women over 50 – a 45% increase since 2010. This was the highest number since the ONS began collecting such data in 1992.
A growing number of highly qualified, professional women in their forties and fifties are struggling to get foothold in the job market. Take for instance the case of Belinda Aaron. She is 47. She was a business development executive in Manchester. She left her job in 2014 after some issues related to bullying and harassment by a colleague. She has 25 years of experience. But today she is jobless. In the last one year, Belinda Aaron has had 70 of her job applications rejected.
“I just thought that having always found work easily, I would simply get another job. It wasn't naivety. It was a view based on my previous experience,” she says.
The worst is today she is not wanted even for below par jobs. She even applied for a job with a salary less than a third of what she had drawn earlier – but there also she was unsuccessful. The HR informed her that there were over 169 applications for the post and she was unsuccessful this time.
Many take career breaks to look after children or elderly parents, but after that to get a foot in the employment door is difficult. The bitter colloquial term is “finished at 50”.
“There's a real need for an adult apprenticeship initiative or some form of adult intern programme. There's so much that could be done for women in my situation – even just an area at the job centre dedicated to middle-aged professionals. We could help each other with training on software packages or exchange contacts,” says Belinda.
Women have to be savvy about getting noticed, be it through social media, blogs or being visible at networking events. “One lady I know was made redundant from a bank. So she became almost a social media master and built up her profile by writing a number of thought-leadership pieces, blogs and comments, to the extent where her content was so well respected she ended up getting offered roles as a consequence of her articles,” says Michael Barrington, chief executive of recruitment firm Barrington Hibbert Associates.
