I’m quite the pessimist when it comes to the impact of AI on work and on our cognition. I also know the AI gender gap well: who builds these tools, whose knowledge they encode, whose jobs they eliminate first. There’s plenty to be worried about, and I’ve written about a lot of it.

But this week I (cautiously) want to open a door to an unexpected positive possibility. My latest piece for Fast Company looks at a mechanism that almost nobody is talking about: the way AI, as an unintended side effect, could actually reduce the gender pay gap in the highest-paying professions… because of what happens to the structure of work when expertise gets standardized. The concept at the center of it is what economists call “greedy jobs” 👇

The conversation about AI and work revolves mostly around jobs being destroyed or new ones emerging, around the workers benefiting and those likely to be left behind. All these debates are legitimate. But there are so many other aspects and consequences that are rarely addressed.

For one, AI has a women problem and more of them opt out. The data that trains the technology reflects centuries of male-dominated knowledge production, erasing women’s experiences and perspectives from the models that are now reshaping how we work. The jobs it is eliminating fastest are disproportionately held by women: administrative roles, data processing, customer service, the vast army of routine cognitive work that the female workforce has long depended on. And the people building these systems and making the design choices that will shape labor markets for decades are, overwhelmingly, men.

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All of this is true. And it matters enormously. But there is a second story about AI and gender that almost nobody is telling, that may run in the opposite direction for other women whose jobs are transformed. Interestingly, AI could reduce the gender pay gap in the highest-paying professions … as an unintended consequence of what automation does to the jobs that pay the most.

The mechanism is less intuitive than it sounds, and it involves a concept that economists like Claudia Goldin call greedy jobs.

The architecture of inequality

Why does the gender pay gap persist in the first place? There are several standard explanations: women choose (freely or not) lower-paying fields, they take more career breaks, they don’t negotiate as successfully… Over the past few years some of these explanations have been challenged by researchers who highlight another, more profound reason: full-time jobs and in particular the best-paid amond them aren’t designed for people with caregiving responsibilities. As a result, these people have less access to them.

Indeed, the best-paid jobs in developed economies share a set of characteristics: they reward long hours disproportionately, they require permanent availability, and they penalize any deviation from constant presence (presenteeism). In finance, law, consulting, and senior management, the relationship between hours and earnings is not linear. Work 20% more and you might earn 40% more. The pay structure is stacked toward those who can give everything, all the time, indefinitely.

Claudia Goldin, who won the 2023 Nobel Prize in Economics, went on a crusade against the so-called greedy jobs. And her central insight is confirmed by a systematic review of 48 empirical studies published in De Economist in 2025, a Dutch academic journal of economics. It constitutes the primary driver of the remaining gender pay gap in high-income countries. The highest-paying jobs were built around a worker who has, historically, almost always been a man who could rely on someone else to care for their families. That’s a very big reason for the pay gap.

In a greedy job, you cannot easily be replaced by a colleague for a day, or a week, or a month. Thus your value is tied up in being the specific person who knows this client, this deal, this case. When a firm cannot swap one worker for another, providing flexibility comes at a productivity cost which gets passed on, in the form of a wage penalty, to whoever requests it. Mothers, overwhelmingly.

The one counterexample in the research is pharmacy. In the early 1970s, it was a male-dominated profession with a large gender pay gap. Today it is one of the most gender-equal occupations in the American (and European) labor market. What changed was technology: digital patient records made it easy for one pharmacist to pick up where another left off. Workers became kind of interchangeable. The premium for constant individual availability disappeared and with it the greedy structure of the pharmacist job. Then women flooded in.

What automation could do

Now consider what AI could be doing to the highest-paying professions. Legal research, which once required a junior associate to spend sixty billable hours in a document room, can now be done in minutes. Financial modeling that justified analyst face-time is increasingly automated. Diagnostic reasoning in medicine, pattern recognition in consulting, contract review in corporate law… a lot of the cognitive tasks that made certain professionals irreplaceable are being systematically standardized and transferred to software.

This is usually seen as a threat (which it very well may be). Firms want to extract more output with fewer people. The displacement risk is real. But there is also another consequence. When AI standardizes the knowledge associated with a high-status job, when it makes it possible for a client’s history, preferences, and context to be instantly accessible to any competent professional rather than locked inside one specific person’s head, it increases worker substitutability. It makes greedy jobs less greedy. And when jobs become less greedy, the pay penalty for reduced availability shrinks, and women’s labor market outcomes improve.

Let’s not be unreasonably optimistic

The relationship between automation and gender equality is not straightforwardly positive, and several things could overwhelm the substitutability effect. First, the jobs most exposed to AI-driven standardization are not uniformly distributed across genders. Women are already overrepresented in routine cognitive roles — administrative work, data processing, customer service — that are being automated fastest. The substitutability argument applies specifically to high-status, high-paying greedy jobs. For women in lower-paid work, automation is more likely to mean displacement than liberation.

Second, firms may respond to increased substitutability not by making jobs more flexible, but by intensifying demands in other ways, expecting workers to cover more ground precisely because any one of them can now be more easily replaced. The same technology that makes a lawyer substitutable also makes her more easily monitored, more easily compared, and potentially more easily discarded.

Third, the motherhood penalty is not only a function of job design. It is reinforced by social norms that still dictate that when care needs to be done, women adapt and men don’t. Even if AI reduces the structural penalty for reduced availability, those norms will continue to shape how women and men respond to parenthood — unless they change in parallel.

A narrow opening

For a specific subset of highly paid, highly greedy professions — law, finance, consulting, medicine — AI-driven standardization creates a genuine opportunity to reduce the gender pay gap. Because it can do to knowledge work what database systems did to pharmacy: it can loosen the grip of any single individual, make expertise more portable, and reduce the premium for being constantly, irreplaceably available. The pharmacy case restructured one profession and the effects on women’s representation and earnings in that profession were profound.

As firms deploy AI across professional services, is anyone thinking about this deliberately? Job redesign should be on the agenda alongside productivity metrics. Will the reduction in individual irreplaceability that AI creates get channeled into more human structures or just into higher billable targets?

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The technology may create an interesting possibility. It does not guarantee the outcome. That part is still our collective choice.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Mères solos : les oubliées de l’égalité professionnelle

• « Pour la visibilité » : le travail gratuit des indépendants

• Survivre ne devrait pas coûter leur travail aux malades

• Les travailleurs de la mort, ces essentiels dont personne ne parle

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

🔔 If you enjoy my Laetitia@Work newsletters—especially those exploring gender-related issues—you might also like the French-language newsletter Vieilles en puissance. Twice a month, illustrator Caroline Taconet and I publish original pieces that explore the intersections of age, gender, money, and culture. Vieilles en puissance has a double meaning: women who hold power in old age, and women becoming old (old in the making). It reflects two hopes: that we’ll be lucky enough to grow old, and that we’ll discover our own form of power when we do. 💪

This is the 100th edition of Laetitia@Work 🎊 and I wanted to mark it with a piece that feels genuinely important to me. When I first came across the concept of the sticky floor, it was eye-opening. We’ve spent decades obsessed with the glass ceiling: counting women in boardrooms, tracking female CEOs, debating who gets a seat at the table. And yet the majority of women — and of people — are nowhere near the top of the pyramid. They’re at the bottom, in low-paid, low-mobility jobs that society depends on but refuses to properly value. That bottom is the infrastructure that makes everything above it possible. Focusing almost exclusively on elite careers means we’ve been having only a fraction of the conversation we need to have.

The sticky floor, i.e. the structural trap keeping so many women stuck in precarious, underpaid work, especially as they age, is where feminist economics needs to go next. It’s what I explored in this report (in French) for the Fondation des Femmes, and it’s what I wrote about for Fast Company, where this piece was first published. If we want to talk seriously about gender equality at work, we have to start at the base, not the apex. Because the base is what carries us all. I hope this resonates — and thank you, truly, for 100 editions of reading along. 👇

For decades, the conversation around gender equality at work has been dominated by one glittering metaphor: the glass ceiling. We count women in boardrooms, track female CEOs, and debate the glass cliff awaiting women promoted during crises. But for millions of women over 45, the problem isn’t getting to the top. It’s getting unstuck from the bottom.

While elite professional careers dominate headlines, the reality for much of the female workforce is the sticky floor: a structural trap that keeps women concentrated in low-paid, low-mobility jobs America depends on but refuses to properly value. And with age, the glue hardens. The intersection of sexism, ageism, and unpaid caregiving creates a cumulative vulnerability that threatens women’s financial security precisely when they should be consolidating it.

When midlife turns into economic decline

In theory, experience should increase a worker’s value. In practice, this is more often true for men than for women. Research shows that gender inequalities widen dramatically with age. In France, where I studied the sticky floor in a report for the Fondation des Femmes, we calculated that women between 45 and 65 lose roughly €157,000 in earnings over twenty years compared to men their age.

The same pattern exists in the United States. Highly educated professional women have made gains. But women without college degrees—especially Black and Hispanic women—remain heavily concentrated in low-paid “aging work”: home care, retail, hospitality, administrative support, and personal services.

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The sticky floor is not simply about earning less at one moment in time. It is a system of low lifetime mobility. By 55, many women have already absorbed decades of the motherhood penalty. Then comes the menopause penalty, followed by a pension shortfall.

America and Europe depend on work it refuses to value

The sectors growing fastest in the U.S.—elder care, healthcare support, and social assistance—are precisely where the sticky floor is strongest. These jobs are deemed essential. They are also systematically underpaid because they are associated with historically feminized labor: caring, cleaning, emotional regulation, coordination.

In these sectors, experience rarely translates into meaningful wage progression. A woman may spend twenty years as a home health aide and still earn close to entry-level pay. Professional careers reward seniority. Service work often punishes it—with more physical strain, unstable schedules, and burnout. Your back is broken before your experience is valued.

The care trap just never ends

The engine of the sticky floor is unpaid care work. The motherhood penalty is well documented. But the care penalty continues long after children grow up. Women between 45 and 65 often belong to the “sandwich generation,” supporting adult children while caring for aging parents, sick spouses and / or grandchildren.

Grandmotherhood itself remains a major blind spot in workplace discussions. Many women become grandmothers while still fully active professionally. In a country with insufficient childcare infrastructure, grandmothers often become the invisible shock absorbers of family life. They reduce hours, reject promotions, or move into more flexible—but lower-paid—jobs to provide unpaid care for their daughter to be able to work full-time.

Of course this work is performed out of love. But it comes with a brutal economic price tag. Women represent 60% of part-time workers in the United States, often not because they prefer reduced hours, but because it is the only way to manage caregiving responsibilities.

Part-time work creates a triple penalty:

• lower immediate income,

• fewer promotion opportunities,

• and permanently reduced retirement savings and Social Security benefits.

The consequences accumulate over decades.

The double jeopardy of aging

Ageism is not gender-neutral. Women suffer a “double standard of aging”: older men are often perceived as experienced and authoritative, while older women are more likely to be seen as obsolete, expensive, or less adaptable.

In many customer-facing jobs, women also face pressure to conceal visible signs of aging in ways men rarely do. The result is a form of double jeopardy: gender discrimination compounded by age discrimination. A woman over 50 who loses her job after a caregiving interruption, health issue, or layoff often discovers that the labor market no longer “sees” her.

The ultimate consequence of the sticky floor is a growing gray zone of women who are neither fully employed nor fully retired. This is called the “NER zone” for “Neither Employed nor Retired”. These women have often been pushed out of work by caregiving demands, health issues, or age discrimination but are still years away from pension eligibility. This won’t come as a surprise: a majority of people in this category are women.

This period is a form of economic purgatory that cements poverty later in life. Because their careers were fragmented by part-time work and unpaid caregiving, many lack the earnings history necessary for financial security in retirement.

Cleaning the sticky floor

The solution will not come from hustle culture or individual empowerment alone, though these may help individual women. But when a labor market systematically undervalues feminized work, telling women to “lean in” often simply produces more exhaustion.

The sticky floor requires structural solutions.

• Wage floors should be raised in feminized sectors like home care and elder care. If care work is essential, compensation should reflect its social value. Maybe the market sometimes corrects this when labour shortages become severe; but in many cases, the invisible hand does not reprice undervalued care work on its own.

• Retirement systems and households must recognize the economic dimension of caregiving. Social Security calculations should account for years spent caring for parents, spouses, or grandchildren.

• Employers need to rethink workplace design for an aging workforce. Universal Design—ergonomic flexibility, better acoustics, hybrid work, predictable scheduling—benefits everyone, but becomes essential as workforces age.

• Organizations must address the intersection of gender and age bias directly, especially in hiring and customer-facing roles.

• We need more ambitious models of part-time and hybrid work. Flexibility should not automatically mean career stagnation.

The demographic revolution is already on its way. Americans are living longer, working longer, and caring longer. They can no longer afford to treat midlife women as an invisible safety net for a failing care system—and as disposable talent once they pass 50. It is time to stop focusing only on the glass ceiling and start cleaning the sticky floor. Because if we don’t, we are weakening the future of work in its entirety.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Les travailleurs de la mort, ces essentiels dont personne ne parle

• Femmes et IA : retard inquiétant ou prudence justifiée ?

• Violence en cuisine

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

🔔 If you enjoy my Laetitia@Work newsletters—especially those exploring gender-related issues—you might also like the French-language newsletter Vieilles en puissance. Twice a month, illustrator Caroline Taconet and I publish original pieces that explore the intersections of age, gender, money, and culture. Vieilles en puissance has a double meaning: women who hold power in old age, and women becoming old (old in the making). It reflects two hopes: that we’ll be lucky enough to grow old, and that we’ll discover our own form of power when we do. 💪

We talk about age constantly — in politics, in hiring, in retirement debates — and yet we almost never ask what we actually mean by it. Workplaces that treat it as a single number could be making a costly mistake.

Age and work is a topic I keep coming back to, because the more I look at it, the more I see how much damage our lazy assumptions about age do — to individuals, teams, and organizations.

I am glad to share this piece, originally published in Fast Company 👇

We talk about age all the time — in politics, in leadership, in debates about retirement and the future of work. Yet we rarely stop to ask a simple question: what is it, exactly? Most of us rely on a single number, as if people were stamped with a vintage year like bottles of wine. But age is far from a fixed or universal metric. It is multidimensional, deeply unequal, and increasingly misleading when used as a shortcut for ability, potential, or readiness.

As people live longer, change careers more often, and experience work in different conditions, understanding what age actually measures is becoming essential for companies trying to build fairer workplaces and adapt to demographic shifts. The future of work will not be shaped by “older workers” alone. It will be shaped by widening age gaps. And by how organizations respond.

Chronological age: the number of years since birth

This most familiar kind of age governs everything from school entry and voting rights to retirement policies and workplace norms. Yet this way of organizing human life is a relatively recent bureaucratic invention, made possible by modern administrative systems.

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Chronological age made sense in standardized industrial societies, where careers were linear, life expectancy was shorter, and work was more uniform. Today, it is a blunt instrument. As a predictor of health, performance, motivation, or longevity, it performs poorly. Two people of the same age can have radically different capacities and trajectories, shaped by education, income, working conditions, stress, and life events.

But organizations still lean heavily on this number to make decisions about hiring, promotion, development, and exit. In a world of increasingly unequal aging, this reliance is becoming not just inaccurate but unfair.

Biological age: the condition of the body and brain

Advances in medicine and epidemiology show that people age at dramatically different speeds. Some 55-year-olds have the physiological profile of someone in their forties. Others show signs typically associated with much later life.

These differences are shaped by socioeconomic conditions, education, exposure to chronic stress, environmental factors, and levels of autonomy at work. Long hours, repetitive strain, shift work, and lack of control take a biological toll over time. That’s why for some workers longer careers are perfectly sustainable while for others, worn down by decades of strain, “working longer” can mean never enjoying a healthy retirement.

Biological age forces us to confront an uncomfortable truth: aging is not equal, and work is one of the most powerful drivers of that inequality.

Subjective age: all about self perception

Most adults report feeling younger than their chronological age, sometimes by a decade or more. And that’s great because feeling younger is often associated with better physical health, cognitive resilience, and emotional well-being.

But the gap matters. Feeling moderately younger can be energizing. Feeling dramatically younger can slip into denial, leading people to ignore health signals or overestimate physical limits. Subjective age shapes confidence, ambition, openness to learning, how people interpret feedback, and how they imagine their future.

Interestingly, as people age, their definition of what counts as “old” tends to move upward. It’s a reminder that age is psychological and cultural, constantly renegotiated.

Professional age: the number of years in a company or a craft

How long you have been doing a particular role, craft, or been working in an industry matters probably more than the birth date on your ID.

It’s increasingly common to be a beginner at 50, a mid-career experimenter at 60, or a seasoned expert at 30. People retrain, pivot industries, take career breaks, and reinvent themselves in ways that would have been rare a generation ago.

Alas many organizations still assume that chronological age and expertise rise together, which causes a mismatch between talent practices and reality. Experienced beginners are underestimated. Young experts are questioned.

The gaps between these different ages tend to grow

They grow between chronological and biological age, shaped by inequality and work conditions. Between chronological and subjective age, shaped by health, mindset, and culture. Between chronological and professional age, shaped by career transitions and lifelong learning.

Workplaces built on the assumption that age neatly tracks with ability, experience, or stamina are increasingly out of sync with society. As these gaps widen, age-based policies become less sustainable and more discriminatory. And they waste enormous amounts of human capital.

Make the workplace more age-agnostic

To address these issues, we need to move toward a more age-agnostic approach. For example:

1. Stop using age as a proxy for skill, adaptability, or potential. Move away from coded assumptions about being “too young” or “too old.” Base decisions on actual competencies, learning habits, motivation, and the cognitive and physical requirements of roles. Chronological age predicts little of this.

2. Redesign work for people who age differently. Introduce more flexibility in schedules and locations, invest in ergonomic improvements, rotate tasks to reduce physical strain, increase autonomy, and offer phased retirement or transitions into mentoring and knowledge-transfer roles. The goal is to reduce the biological cost of work.

3. Treat reskilling as a lifelong process. As career transitions become normal, invest in training without age limits. Support adult apprenticeships and coaching for second- and third-career moves. Fifty-year-old juniors may be one of the most underutilized talent pools.

4. Actively audit for hidden age bias. Scrutinize recruiting and promotion practices for coded language (“high-energy,” “digital native”) and reluctance to train older employees. Address ageism with explicit guidelines and accountability.

5. Promote intergenerational collaboration. Build mixed-age teams where experience and fresh perspectives reinforce each other through reverse mentoring, cross-generational projects, and shared problem-solving. Age diversity is also cognitive diversity.

Age is not a single measure. It is a constellation of biological, psychological, social, and professional realities that rarely align. The companies that will thrive in an aging, unequal, multi-stage career world are the ones that understand these gaps, reduce the inequalities behind them, and design systems that support people across long, varied working lives.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Violence en cuisine

• Santé genrée : le travail face aux corps réels

• Le bonus gap, l’angle mort des inégalités

• Looksmaxing, labeur sans rédemption

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

🔔 If you enjoy my Laetitia@Work newsletters—especially those exploring gender-related issues—you might also like the French-language newsletter Vieilles en puissance. Twice a month, illustrator Caroline Taconet and I publish original pieces that explore the intersections of age, gender, money, and culture. Vieilles en puissance has a double meaning: women who hold power in old age, and women becoming old (old in the making). It reflects two hopes: that we’ll be lucky enough to grow old, and that we’ll discover our own form of power when we do. 💪

AI is remaking culture as much as workflows. As AI mediates more of our thinking and collaboration, questions of recognition, trust, and accountability take center stage. There’s also a cultural gender gap that is rarely mentioned: the digital Matilda effect, which shows that women’s AI use is frequently discounted or misattributed.
Using Erin Meyer’s eight cultural dimensions, here are eight AI-driven shifts reshaping how we lead, speak, decide, and relate in business.

Below is the piece I wrote for Fast Company first. For those of you who haven’t read it yet, here it is👇.

For nearly four years now, the conversation about generative AI has revolved almost exclusively around productivity, threatened jobs, automatable tasks, efficiency, and competitiveness. But there is a largely underestimated dimension to this revolution: its cultural effects. AI is not just transforming how we work, it is transforming how we are together, how we trust each other, how we communicate and how we organize ourselves.

To measure this, it helps to borrow a framework from Erin Meyer, a professor at INSEAD whose book The Culture Map identifies eight dimensions along which the cultures of the world differ. Applied to AI, Meyer’s eight dimensions reveal a series of cultural shifts that are more profound than we know.

1. How We Communicate: AI Is Training Us to Say What We Mean

Generative AI demands clarity. An effective prompt is an explicit one. There’s no room for body language. This constraint is gradually reshaping how we communicate with each other too. Cultures that have traditionally relied on what is left unsaid — where reading between the lines or sensing the mood in the room is a valued skill — are being pushed toward greater explicitness. As AI mediates more exchanges, the richness of implicit communication erodes.

And there is the curious rehabilitation of the typo. For decades, a spelling mistake in a professional message was a sign of carelessness, even disrespect. Not anymore. A typo is increasingly read as proof that you wrote it yourself — that you took the time, that you cared enough to type it out without outsourcing the task. Imperfection has become a signal of authenticity.

2. How We Give Feedback: AI as a Cultural Mediator and Sugar-Coater

Large language models are not built to be brutal. They begin by finding something to praise, soften their critiques, and close on a constructive note. After thousands of interactions with tools that say “great question” before correcting your mistake, even cultures accustomed to blunt, direct feedback begin absorbing a more diplomatic register.

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But AI also has a more positive effect on collective evaluation: it excels at finding the common denominator. In a multicultural team where some members practice direct feedback and others avoid confrontation entirely, AI can serve as a neutral translator, reformulating, synthesizing, smoothing out cultural friction.

3. How We Persuade: It’s No Longer About the Argument, It’s About the Person Making It

AI produces inductive responses: examples, bullet points, concrete cases. This results-first logic is gradually permeating cultures that traditionally valued deductive reasoning, as in France, for example, where the art of the dissertation (thesis, antithesis, synthesis) was a deep cultural marker. Presentations are getting shorter and more pragmatic.

But the real shift goes beyond a simple victory of American-style storytelling over European-style argumentation. What is actually happening is that human embodiment is becoming the primary source of persuasion. When anyone can produce a well-structured argument in ten seconds, formal argumentative quality stops being differentiating. What convinces people is presence, authenticity, the personal commitment of the person speaking.

4. How We Lead: From the Lone Expert to the Collective Orchestrator

The flattening of knowledge access generated by AI undermines leadership models built on the hoarding of expertise. The manager whose authority derived from mastery of a technical domain sees that competitive advantage eroding.

Also, as AI becomes more pervasive, the very source of leadership becomes structurally more collective. AI models are trained on aggregated human work. They are, in a sense, the distillation of millions of anonymous contributions. To use AI is to mobilize a collective intelligence that no single person authored. This should dismantle the myth of the lone brilliant leader. Hence, the leadership of tomorrow may be more about collective discernment and knowing what to do with the output.

5. How We Decide: When the Algorithm Recommends, Do We Still Really Choose?

AI compresses decision-making time. In seconds, it produces an analysis, a comparison, a recommendation. And increasingly, we rely on algorithmic recommendations, like HR scoring systems, sales prioritization tools, project management assistants. Many decisions are made on our behalf. Often we endorse them without examining them.

In cultures that value collective consensus-building before any decision is made, this delegation can feel like a welcome relief. In cultures where strong unilateral decision-making is a mark of leadership, it produces a strange dispossession: the decisive executive finds himself rubber-stamping a recommendation he did not construct. Are we actually still deciding?

6. How We Trust: When All Outputs Look the Same, Relationships Become Everything

Here is perhaps the most paradoxical reversal. One might have expected AI to strengthen trust based on the quality of work, since now anyone can produce polished, well-structured deliverables. Instead, the opposite is happening. When all outputs look alike, they lose their power to distinguish. Cognitive trust erodes precisely because AI has made it commonplace. What becomes valuable is the affective, the personal relationship, the two-hour lunch, the intimate conversation. Receiving a proposal that is manifestly generated without human effort sends a signal: you were not worth my real attention.

As AI takes over routine interactions, what remains — genuine attention, real presence — acquires extraordinary value. We all crave sincere human contact. The affective dimension of trust is likely to become more precious than ever.

7. How We Disagree: The Risk of a World Where Everyone Agrees

AI models avoid confrontation by design. They don’t flatly contradict: they “offer a complementary perspective,” they “acknowledge the nuance.” This algorithmically engineered softness, repeated at massive scale, may be reshaping the norms of disagreement.

In cultures already inclined to avoid open conflict, AI reinforces the tendency to sidestep. In cultures where direct disagreement is seen as healthy and productive, AI introduces a veneer of diplomatic language that can mask real tensions. The danger is organizations where everyone appears to agree — the humans out of politeness, the AIs out of design — and where real problems never surface. A world of frictionless AI-mediated communication will do away with the friction that makes organizations resilient.

8. How We Relate to Time: When a Two-Hour Response Feels Slow

AI responds in seconds. That standard of immediacy, internalized across thousands of interactions, is reshaping our tolerance for human response time. A colleague who takes two hours to reply to an email now seems sluggish. A meeting that “takes time” to build consensus feels inefficient. The AI’s instantaneousness has become the invisible benchmark against which all human pace is judged.

Cultures that already organize work sequentially and value strict scheduling are accelerating further. Cultures with a more fluid, relational relationship to time — where adaptability matters more than the clock — face growing pressure to conform to responsiveness standards that are foreign to them. The AI has, in effect, exported one particular cultural relationship to time and made it feel universal.

The Overlooked Dimension: Gender and the Digital Matilda Effect

The numbers are striking. Women are between 20 and 25 percent less likely than men to use generative AI tools, according to a Harvard Business School meta-analysis. Women are hesitating because they are calculating the risk of being seen using AI. A study found that when engineers submitted identical AI-assisted code for review, women received competence ratings 13% lower; men, only 6% lower.

It’s a sort of digital Matilda effect. The historical Matilda effect is the phenomenon by which women’s intellectual contributions are attributed to their male colleagues. When a woman uses AI, observers tend to assume the tool did the thinking. When a man uses the same tool, he is credited with the strategic intelligence to deploy it well. Women who have spent careers navigating this double standard know how to read the room correctly.

In thinking with machines, we are changing our codes, our expectations, our relationships and our hierarchies. Perhaps it’s still too early to fully comprehend the cultural revolution induced by generative AI. But somewhere between the typos we now leave on purpose and the feedback we no longer dare to give, a deeper transformation is already underway — and we have barely begun to notice it.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Attention les yeux

• Les leçons du désespoir de la jeunesse chinoise

• Diversité contre mérite, une fausse opposition

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

🔔 If you enjoy my Laetitia@Work newsletters—especially those exploring gender-related issues—you might also like the French-language newsletter Vieilles en puissance. Twice a month, illustrator Caroline Taconet and I publish original pieces that explore the intersections of age, gender, money, and culture. Vieilles en puissance has a double meaning: women who hold power in old age, and women becoming old (old in the making). It reflects two hopes: that we’ll be lucky enough to grow old, and that we’ll discover our own form of power when we do. 💪

While the U.S. President is promising to commit war crimes in Iran and destabilize the international order even further than he already has, I’ve been watching The Boys, an extremely gory, dark, funny, cartoonish series about superheroes (all villains in some ways) and the corporation that runs them. Surprisingly the show is disturbing mostly because it feels close to reality. While its final season is about to begin to air this week, Trump is getting rid of some of his own sycophants, making NYT columnist Ross Douthat reflect that “Trump Needs Smarter Sycophants”, which I believe is an utter impossibility. Anyway, all this got me thinking about sycophants, in government as well as in corporations.

The series’ main psychopath, Homelander, is surrounded by them. He selects them for their obsequiousness. And then he’s irritated by their mediocrity and the failures they bring with them. Yet one smarter or stronger than him would be a menace, a rival he couldn’t suffer. There really is no room for two Alphas. At some point, he attempts to bring in someone smarter than himself (she’s a Black woman called Sister Sage)… but we’ll have to wait for the series’ finale to know how that ends. And there aren’t that many possible endings. One thing is certain: it is impossible to have “smart” sycophants. Either they die or the tyrant dies (or the tyranny ends).👇

An unstable relationship

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By using AI less than men, are women opting out of the future or are they in fact seeing it more clearly? Are they more risk-averse, as is often said, or rather more risk-aware?

The gender gap in AI use seems to be real. The numbers are striking enough to demand an explanation. Women are somewhere between 20 and 25 percent less likely than men to use generative AI tools, according to a Harvard Business School meta-analysis. Another recent study found that only 14.7% of women reported using generative AI at least weekly, compared to 20% of men. Meanwhile, the jobs most vulnerable to AI-driven automation are disproportionately held by women. The Brookings Institute found that 86% of the workers in roles most likely to be disrupted are women.

So women are slower to adopt the very technology that threatens them most. Is it a paradox? Not really. The original Luddites — the 19th-century British textile workers who smashed the machines replacing them — understood exactly that the new machines would concentrate power in the hands of owners and replace their craft with cheaper output. They didn’t smash looms out of confusion and stupidity. Yet when we call someone a Luddite today, we use it as an insult. We probably shouldn’t.

Women who hesitate to embrace generative AI may be operating with similar clarity. If your job — administrative assistant, receptionist, legal clerk, office manager — sits squarely in the crosshairs of automation, enthusiastic AI adoption is not obviously in your interest. Training the system that replaces you, accelerating its capabilities, smoothing its integration into your workplace: these are acts that primarily benefit your employer, not you. The question “why aren’t women using AI more?” should be replaced with “why would they?”

Women’s hesitancy may be attributable to discernment. A case should be made for “fierce ambivalence” (as was made by Mara Bolis in the Stanford Social Innovation Review). Technology is not neutral, and who benefits from its adoption is a political question, not a technical one. The reasons behind the gap are more interesting — and more flattering to women — than the usual framing suggests. Here is my analysis of the AI-use gender gap👇.

The Penalty for Trying

One underappreciated reason women hesitate is that they have more to lose from being seen using AI. A study published in the Harvard Business Review found that when male and female engineers submitted identical AI-assisted code for review, women received competence ratings 13% lower, compared to just 6% lower for men. The same output produced with the same tool leads to different consequences.

So women’s hesitancy may be a calculated read of a biased environment. In ambiguous situations — and “did AI write this?” is inherently ambiguous — evaluators fall back on stereotypes. Technology is still culturally coded as male, so when a woman uses AI, observers tend to assume the tool did all the thinking. It’s like a digital Matilda effect, where the tool gets the credit and the woman gets the doubt. By contrast, when a man uses the same tool, he is credited with the strategic intelligence to deploy it well. Women who have spent years navigating exactly this kind of double standard anticipate it here.

👉 Also read Why women over 50 are the future of work in the age of AI. Laetitia@Work #95

A System Trained Without Them

There is a second, less-discussed reason that doesn’t get enough attention: the outputs of generative AI are frequently less useful to women because the systems were built largely without them. Women are underrepresented in the engineering teams that designed these models, in the policy discussions that shaped their deployment, and crucially in the training data that gives them their sense of the world.

The result is a technology that can feel subtly foreign or hostile. For example, a German study found that AI chatbots advised women to ask for significantly lower salaries than identically profiled men — with gaps of up to $120,000 a year for the same role. Outputs on professional scenarios, historical figures, and even basic personal finance questions tend to reflect a perspective that is implicitly male. Women notice the hallucinated citations, the lazy generalizations and the gender-blind advice.

The Burden of AI Slop

Women may use AI less partly also because they are the ones who most clearly see where it fails. They are already the ones cleaning up after it.

In many workplaces, the unglamorous work of reviewing, correcting, and polishing AI-generated content falls disproportionately on administrative and support staff, roles overwhelmingly held by women. The people who rewrite the slop don’t need a study to tell her where the productivity gains are, or aren’t. Greater AI literacy may in this case lower adoption. When you actually understand what the tools do and do not do, enthusiasm tends to become more measured.

Moral Weight and Environmental Anxiety

The aformentioned research also found that among users who expressed concern about AI’s environmental impact, the gender gap in usage jumped to 9.3 percentage points. Among those concerned about AI’s mental health implications, it widened to 16.8 points. And among older women worried about climate, the gap reached nearly 18 points.

Researchers describe this as alignment with “greater social compassion and moral sensitivity among women” — though a more precise reading is that women have been socialized to weigh collective consequences more heavily than individual advantage. No, I don’t believe that women are genetically wired to be superior moral beings! But whatever the origin, the behavioral pattern is consistent: women are statistically more likely to act on their moral concerns. According to IEA estimates, a ChatGPT query uses nearly ten times as much electricity as a Google search, and global AI-related water demand is projected to skyrocket. That a growing number of women have made a deliberate choice to abstain, connecting the carbon footprint of generative AI to real-world environmental consequences, is a rational response.

The Contrarian Case for Abstaining

What if the women opting out are not falling behind, but preserving something the enthusiastic adopters are gradually losing?

There is an emerging body of concern about what habitual AI delegation does to cognitive skills like writing, reasoning, and problem-solving. The same tools that offer efficiency gains may, with prolonged use, erode the capacities that made the user valuable in the first place. If women are, on average, engaging more selectively and critically with these tools, they may be better positioned to maintain the deep expertise that AI currently cannot fully replicate. In a world saturated with AI-assisted mediocrity, genuine human judgment and craft may become more and more valuable.

Thus women may be like the canary in the coal mine. Ask what the canary knows that you don’t.

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What Needs to Change

None of this means the gap is fine. The career risks are real. Major employers are beginning to tie AI adoption to performance reviews and promotions, and women who remain on the outside of that shift will face compounding disadvantages. The answer is to use these tools deliberately and critically, while holding their developers to the highest possible standards on transparency, bias, and environmental accountability.

Women’s lower adoption of generative AI is not due to irrational fear but to informed “risk awareness” about bias, opacity, and potential harm, yet opting out risks amplifying gender inequality in careers and influence. The article argues for “fierce ambivalence”—engaging with AI while demanding accountability—so women can shape its development and ensure more equitable outcomes.

Women’s skepticism is data. The industry should be reading it, not waiting for women to get over it.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Les leçons du désespoir de la jeunesse chinoise

• Diversité contre mérite, une fausse opposition

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

At 47, I find myself thinking more and more about what it means to grow older as a woman at work. I want to be able to look forward to that future with confidence, not with anxiety. Yet the reality is hard to ignore: ageism and sexism remain a powerful combination that pushes many women toward lower pay, fewer opportunities, and greater financial insecurity as they age.

Still, when I wrote this piece for Fast Company, I was struck by how strongly it resonated with readers. Many told me they recognized themselves in it, or that it articulated something they had long felt but rarely seen acknowledged. For those of you who haven’t read it yet, here it is👇.

For years, companies have been told to prepare for the future by chasing youth, digital fluency, and technical skills. They have been urged to bet on “high potentials” and to focus on the next generation. At the same time, they have spent years overlooking one of the most strategic talent pools already available to them: women over 50.

This blind spot now looks increasingly dangerous. The future of work is arriving amid inflation, oil crises, wars, and all sorts of geopolitical tensions, economic anxiety, demographic aging, climate disruption, and the destabilizing effects of AI. In such a world, organizations need people who can handle ambiguity, navigate transitions, sustain relationships, and make sound judgments under pressure.

That is one of the reasons women over 50 matter so much. They are among the most underused sources of resilience, intelligence, and practical capability in the labor market. If companies are serious about surviving—and growing—in an age of volatility, here are nine reasons why they need to stop overlooking them.

1. Demography is on their side

The first reason is demographic reality. In aging societies, women over 50 are an expanding part of the population and, increasingly, of the available workforce. Women live longer than men, often work longer than previous generations, and represent a growing share of experienced talent. Yet they remain underrepresented in hiring pipelines, in leadership tracks, and in strategic workforce planning. Companies speak often about talent shortages while ignoring one of the biggest reservoirs of talent in plain sight.

2. They are veterans of career transitions

Women over 50 are often veterans of career transition. Long before everyone started talking about the end of linear careers, a majority of women were already living that reality. Their working lives have frequently included interruptions, pivots, reinventions, periods of part-time work, freelance activity, caregiving, and reentry into employment. What traditional employers have too often interpreted as instability is, in fact, a deep familiarity with change. In a world where careers are less and less predictable, those who have already navigated multiple transitions have a head start.

3. They know how to learn

This leads to a third advantage: They know how to learn. In the age of AI, the most valuable workers are not simply those who possess knowledge, but those who can update themselves continuously. Women over 50 who have had to change sectors or rebuild confidence after setbacks often develop a powerful capacity to learn, unlearn, and relearn. They are used to adapting. They are used to having to prove themselves again. They are often much more agile than employers assume, precisely because life has not allowed them the luxury of rigidity.

I’ve been writing Laetitia@Work—a newsletter on the future of work with a feminist perspective—since late 2019, without sponsors. If you find value in my work and would like to support its continuation, please consider taking out a paid subscription. I would be truly, truly grateful 🤗

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4. They bring judgment in an automated world

A fourth reason is judgment. AI is very good at generating text, summarizing information, and automating routine cognitive tasks. But organizations do not thrive on information alone. They thrive on discernment: the ability to read a situation, understand context, weigh trade-offs, and anticipate consequences. These are not purely technical skills. They are human ones, and they tend to deepen with experience. Women over 50 often bring a kind of seasoned judgment that becomes especially valuable when the environment is uncertain. They are more likely to have seen management fashions come and go, to recognize false urgency, and to distinguish between real innovation and empty hype.

5. They bring emotional intelligence to organizations

As work becomes more digital, more hybrid, and more fragmented, organizations depend even more on people who can create trust, resolve tension, and keep teams functioning. Women over 50 often bring strong interpersonal skills forged not only through formal work experience but through years of invisible labor: coordinating, listening, mediating, caring, anticipating needs, and managing relationships. These capacities are still routinely undervalued because they are associated with femininity and because they are difficult to quantify. Yet they are central to organizational performance. In chaotic times, the people who can keep human systems working are indispensable.

6. They strengthen intergenerational workplaces

Many companies now employ several generations at once, but few know how to turn age diversity into an advantage. Too often, the focus remains fixated on attracting younger workers, as though experience were a burden rather than an asset. Women over 50 can play a crucial role here. They can mentor younger colleagues without reproducing rigid hierarchies. They can transmit knowledge, stabilize teams, and provide historical perspective. They can also help bridge cultural and professional differences between generations. In organizations where everyone is encouraged to learn from one another, this is a strategic asset.

7. They are often deeply motivated to contribute

Contrary to cliché, many women over 50 are not winding down. Quite the opposite. Midlife often brings a sharper understanding of one’s strengths, limits, and aspirations. Many women at this stage are more interested in meaningful contribution than corporate theater. They know what they care about, what they are good at, and what nonsense they no longer wish to tolerate. This often makes them highly effective. They may be less ready to play status games, but they are frequently deeply motivated by usefulness, autonomy, and impact. In a period when so many organizations are struggling with disengagement, that matters.

8. They are agile in times of crisis

With an oil shock, economic turbulence, and geopolitical instability looming—or already unfolding depending on where you sit—companies need people who know how to operate when the script no longer works. Women over 50 have often spent years adapting to scarcity, uncertainty, and institutional dysfunction—whether at work, at home, or both. They know how to do more with less. They know how to reprioritize, improvise, and keep going when systems fail. They are often pragmatic rather than ideological, flexible rather than brittle. In an economy shaped by repeated shocks, that kind of agility could be a growth strategy. Companies looking for new sources of resilience and invention should start betting on those who have already learned how to survive upheaval.

9. They help companies understand the society they serve

Finally, women over 50 help organizations understand the world they actually operate in. Consumers are aging. The workforce is aging. Families are changing. Needs around health, finance, care, mobility, and everyday life are increasingly shaped by midlife and older adults, especially women. And yet these women remain strikingly absent from leadership teams, innovation departments, media representation, and product design. This makes companies less intelligent. It narrows their imagination and weakens their ability to serve real markets. Hiring women over 50 is therefore a way to become more lucid about society itself.

These are some of the reasons why they are (and should be) the future of work. The conditions of the coming economy favor the kinds of strengths they have too often been forced to develop in silence.

Sci-fi author Ursula K. Le Guin captured this idea beautifully in her essay Space Crone. Asked to imagine whom humanity should send to represent itself to extraterrestrials, she proposed not a president or a great scientist, but an old woman—because she alone has lived through the full arc of the human condition. She has known youth, change, loss, reinvention, and resilience.

In many ways, the same logic applies to the workplace (albeit with older women rather than old women). In an economy defined by disruption and transformation, the people who have already navigated the most change may be the ones best equipped to face what comes next. Women over 50 are guides to our future.

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💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Diversité contre mérite, une fausse opposition

• Dites merci, on vous surveille

• JO : Quand les victoires féminines sont dévalorisées

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

🔔 If you enjoy my Laetitia@Work newsletters—especially those exploring gender-related issues—you might also like the French-language newsletter Vieilles en puissance. Twice a month, illustrator Caroline Taconet and I publish original pieces that explore the intersections of age, gender, money, and culture. Vieilles en puissance has a double meaning: women who hold power in old age, and women becoming old (old in the making). It reflects two hopes: that we’ll be lucky enough to grow old, and that we’ll discover our own form of power when we do. 💪

I admire people who protect their focus fiercely, who move through the day with calm linearity: one task, then the next, everything in its place. But that has rarely been my lived experience. I’ll often interrupt myself to put on a load of laundry, stand up to make tea, or find some small practical excuse to leave my desk for a few minutes. And yet, paradoxically, I’m also capable of disappearing into a task and being “in the flow” for hours when I’m writing or thinking.

Anthropologist Edward T. Hall described two different relationships to time: monochronic time, which treats time as linear and segmented (one thing at a time, protected focus), and polychronic time, where activities overlap and interruptions are part of the rhythm of the day. I’ve never quite known where I fit between the two.

In French we have an expression—gauchers contrariés—for people who are naturally left-handed but were forced at school to write with their right hand because left-handedness was once considered abnormal. Sometimes I wonder whether some of us might also be reluctant monochronics (or reluctant polychronics?)—trying to conform to a time model that was never fully compatible with the way our lives actually unfold.

I originally wrote this piece for Fast Company in which I explore how modern workplaces tend to reward monochronic behavior—deep focus, linear progress, protected time—even though many workers, and especially many women, operate in a far more fragmented temporal reality. Our relationship to time is not simply cultural or psychological; it also reflects the distribution of responsibility in our lives. And for many caregivers, polychronic time isn’t a preference👇.

Picture two scenes. In the first, a Swiss train pulls away at exactly 10:02 a.m. If you’re not on the platform, it’s already too late. Precision is respect. It always comes first. In the second, a family minibus idles with the engine running. Somebody’s cousin is late. “We can’t leave without him”. The whole group waits because relationships matter more than the clock.

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These two images capture what anthropologist Edward T. Hall described in the 1950s as monochronic and polychronic relationships to time. In monochronic cultures, time is linear and segmented. You do one thing at a time. You respect deadlines. You don’t interrupt. In polychronic cultures, by contrast, time is fluid. Multiple activities can overlap. Interruptions are normal. Human connection often takes precedence over punctuality. There’s room for improvisation.

Hall’s framework is usually applied to national cultures—Northern Europe and the United States are often described as more monochronic whereas parts of Latin America, Africa, the Middle East, or Southern Europe are said to be more polychronic. But in today’s workplace, this distinction is no longer just about geography.

It’s about how we work. It’s about how we reward work. And even more importantly, it’s also about gender.

A Productivity Bias Toward Monochronic Time

Modern corporate life is built on monochronic assumptions. Calendar invites carve the day into neat blocks. Deep work is idealized. Focus is fetishized. The most admired professionals are often those who can shut the door, silence notifications, and deliver—on time, every time.

Monochronic work has undeniable advantages. It enables depth. It supports complex problem-solving. It rewards persistence. In research, engineering, writing, and strategy, sustained concentration can be transformative.

But it can also become rigid. Monochronic workers may stick to a plan long after conditions have changed. They may resist interruptions that, in hindsight, could have opened new opportunities. The system prizes predictability, which is often hard to generate.

Polychronic workers, by contrast, tend to thrive in flux. They switch contexts more easily. They welcome the unexpected conversation, the new angle, the emerging opportunity. Their days are less linear, more improvisational. In that sense, polychronism may be particularly well suited to innovation and entrepreneurship — especially in moments that call for a strategic pivot mid-course. This flexibility can produce increased relational intelligence. But it comes at a cost: dispersion, unfinished tasks and cognitive overload.

And that cost is not distributed equally.

The Gendered Burden of Polychronic Time

Too often, the monochronic/polychronic distinction is framed as a personality difference. Some people are “naturally” or “culturally” focused; others are scattered. Some are disciplined; others are relational. But that is way too simplistic a framing. Many people—especially women—do not choose polychronic time. They are assigned to it.

It’s hardly a revelation: women continue to shoulder a disproportionate share of unpaid care work. Beyond the visible tasks lies the mental load: the constant anticipation of needs, the quiet monitoring, the emotional labor that keeps family life coherent. Even in dual-income households, research consistently finds that this invisible infrastructure of daily life rests largely on women’s shoulders.

And this work is inherently polychronic. It requires constant switching between domains: professional deadlines, school emails, elderly parents’ prescriptions, a last-minute call from daycare. It demands anticipatory thinking across multiple timelines. It rewards attentiveness to interruption.

In other words, many women operate in a state of enforced polychronicity. But then they enter workplaces designed for monochronic performance, which produces a double bind. In professional settings, monochronic behavior— uninterrupted focus, linear execution—is often interpreted as leadership potential and intellectual superiority. Meanwhile, polychronic behavior—context switching, responsiveness, relational attentiveness—can be misread as lack of focus or insufficient discipline.

Yet for many women, the fragmentation of attention is not a personality flaw. It is the structural consequence of unequal responsibility. That’s why our relationship to time is not simply a matter of national culture or individual temperament. It is shaped by life constraints, social expectations, and economic realities.

A mother who answers a school call during a meeting is not demonstrating a cultural preference for fluid time. She is navigating a system that assumes someone else will absorb the interruption—and almost always, that someone else is her.

In theory, polychronic time can generate serendipity, creativity and strong social bonds. But often it produces cognitive strain. The inability to complete tasks without interruption erodes satisfaction. The sense of never being fully present—at work or at home—feeds guilt and self-doubt. Many women internalize this strain as personal inadequacy. They compare themselves to monochronic partners or colleagues. They conclude they lack discipline.

Rethinking Time as a Workplace Equity Issue

If we take Hall’s framework seriously, we should stop treating time orientation as a moral hierarchy. Monochronic is not superior. Polychronic is not inferior. They are adaptive responses to different environments. The most important aspect of the question is whether or not we get any choice in the matter.

Organizations that value inclusion should examine how their structures reward one temporal style over another. Do performance metrics assume uninterrupted availability? Do leadership norms privilege those who can guard their time fiercely? Are flexibility policies distributed equally? Do they come with less pay?

It’s true that hybrid work and digital tools have blurred boundaries for everyone. But the burden of managing that interruptibility still falls unevenly.

Instead of asking individuals to “be more focused,” perhaps we should ask how teams can better distribute cognitive labor, including the cognitive labor associated with teamwork. How can an organization protect deep work time for caregivers? How can workplaces recognize relational labor as real contributions?

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Of course we need both models at work: monochronic time is invaluable when precision, safety, or deep thinking are required; polychronic time is essential when navigating uncertainty or human crises. Some people can alternate between the two by design. But for caregivers — including those who absorb the invisible coordination work at the office — polychronic time is simply an obligation.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• JO : Quand les victoires féminines sont dévalorisées

• Gays au travail : le backlash

• Sédentarité au travail : 8 méthodes passées au crible

And two new podcasts (in French):

• Petites phrases, grands dégâts

• Formation professionnelle : la nouvelle lutte des classes

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

🔔 If you enjoy my Laetitia@Work newsletters—especially those exploring gender-related issues—you might also like the French-language newsletter Vieilles en puissance. Twice a month, illustrator Caroline Taconet and I publish original pieces that explore the intersections of age, gender, money, and culture. Vieilles en puissance has a double meaning: women who hold power in old age, and women becoming old—old women in the making. It reflects two hopes: that we’ll be lucky enough to grow old, and that we’ll discover our own form of power when we do. 💪

I’ve already written about the menopause penalty. And yes, it’s real. Women’s earnings dip and their hours shrink. Careers stall just when women should be at the height of their expertise and influence.

But let’s be careful not to attribute to biology what is in fact produced by social factors. We have been there before: “It’s your hormones.” “You’re hysterical.” “Is it that time of the month?” For centuries, women’s credibility and professionalism have been undermined by pathologizing their bodies.

Menopause per se does not create inequality out of nowhere. It amplifies the cumulative effects of ageism, rigid career norms, and the unequal distribution of unpaid care.

I’m all for better information about HRT and improved medical support. Those things matter enormously. But there is no pill against the unequal distribution of unpaid care work. There’s no pill against discrimination. And none that restores lost pension rights or helps pay the rent. If we want to address the menopause penalty seriously, we must resist medicalizing what are fundamentally social and organizational failures. We need to redesign work for long lives rather than ask women to adapt their bodies to systems that were never built with them in mind.

I originally wrote this piece for Fast Company. I’m now a regular contributor to Fast Company and happy to share this essay with you here👇.

Menopause doesn’t create inequalities. It amplifies those that already exist

After 50, too many women reduce their working hours, become trapped in lower-quality jobs, or exit the labor market altogether. Part-time employment becomes more prevalent as women age. The gender gap widens. For women, this means lower lifetime earnings and significantly smaller pensions. Many are calling this phenomenon the “menopause penalty” — a midlife equivalent of the motherhood penalty. And indeed, research suggests that women’s earnings drop in the years following a menopause diagnosis.

But while menopause clearly plays a role, there is a risk in attributing these economic setbacks too narrowly to biology. Doing so not only oversimplifies women’s lived realities — it also medicalizes what are fundamentally social and organizational problems. Menopause matters. But it rarely acts alone.

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A convergence of pressures and setbacks

Midlife is often the most demanding phase of women’s lives. Menopause tends to coincide with a series of other “life shocks” that disproportionately affect women. Caregiving responsibilities intensify: aging parents begin to need support, while many women are still helping children or even grandchildren. The “sandwich generation” is squeezed between upward and downward care.

Meanwhile, serious health risks increase — including breast cancer and chronic illness. Divorce is also common in midlife and comes with major financial and emotional consequences. The death of a parent is another major shock that frequently occurs in midlife and is largely invisible in workplace thinking — grief doesn’t fit into a few days of leave but often brings lasting exhaustion and difficulty concentrating.

Overlay all of this with growing exposure to ageism in the workplace and it becomes clear that menopause is rarely the only culprit. Yes, symptoms such as fatigue, hot flashes, or brain fog can make work harder to sustain. But menopause comes at a moment of cumulative strain. It does not create the inequalities. It amplifies those that already exist.

When work refuses to adapt

Many jobs are still designed for a worker who is endlessly available, physically resilient, emotionally stable, and largely free from caregiving responsibilities. Menopause symptoms collide with these unrealistic expectations.

Instead of redesigning work — adjusting schedules, reducing unnecessary presenteeism, offering autonomy, improving ergonomic conditions and workplaces, or recognizing fluctuating capacity — organizations implicitly ask women to adapt their bodies. And when they cannot, the “choices” available are reducing hours, stepping back from responsibility, refusing promotions, accepting less visible roles, or leaving work altogether.

From the outside, this looks like individual preference. That’s why the menopause penalty looks exactly like the motherhood penalty. Neither is caused simply by biology. Both result from the collision between life stages and rigid work systems built around male, uninterrupted career norms.

The penalty is also reinforced by stereotypes. Menopause is still associated with emotional volatility, decline, and loss of competence. Many women fear being perceived as less reliable or less ambitious. Some avoid high-visibility projects. Others turn down leadership roles or client-facing positions simply because they fear exposure. Menopause stereotypes are like sexism on steroids.

Economically, the menopause penalty represents a massive loss of human capital. Women in their late 40s, 50s, and early 60s often hold their highest levels of skill, institutional knowledge, and professional experience. When they reduce hours or leave work prematurely, organizations lose leadership potential, mentoring capacity, and expertise.

The danger of medicalizing inequality

There is an increasing push to frame menopause primarily as a health issue requiring medical solutions — more awareness campaigns, more diagnoses, more treatments.

Don’t get me wrong: better healthcare really does matter. Too many women suffer unnecessarily because of lack of information, poor medical support, or lingering fears around hormone therapies. For those with severe symptoms, treatment can be life-changing.

But there is a real risk in making menopause the central explanation for midlife economic inequality. When reduced earnings or stalled careers are blamed mainly on hormonal changes, it obscures the role of workplaces, the gendered division of unpaid work, insufficient care infrastructure, ageism, and broader social, political, and corporate issues.

It suggests that if women simply managed their symptoms better, the problem would disappear. We often medicalize social problems. For example, we prescribe antidepressants without addressing poverty, violence, overwork, or isolation.

Hormone therapy may ease hot flashes and prevent osteoporosis (and that’s a lot). But it won’t pay the rent, restart a stalled career, restore lost pension rights, or compensate for years of unpaid care work. Pills don’t fix ageism. They don’t erase structural inequality.

Let’s redesign work for long lives

1. Design work for sustainability. Most jobs are still built around an ideal worker who is always available, endlessly energetic, and free from responsibilities outside work. This model breaks down over long working lives. Companies should rethink workloads, hours, and performance expectations to allow for fluctuating capacity over time. Focusing on outputs rather than presence, reducing unnecessary urgency, and normalizing lower-intensity periods would make careers more sustainable.

2. Make flexibility the norm. When flexible working is treated as an exception, it carries invisible penalties (slower progression, reduced visibility). To avoid turning flexibility into a career trap, companies should offer autonomy over hours and location by default and ensure flexible workers are not sidelined.

3. Confront ageism head-on. Many midlife career setbacks for women are inseparable from age discrimination. Employers should track pay, promotions, and evaluations by age and gender, challenge stereotypes in leadership cultures, and ensure development opportunities exist throughout careers.

4. Recognize caregiving as a normal life-stage reality. Midlife is often when care responsibilities peak — for aging parents, ill relatives, or extended family — yet workplace policies remain focused on early parenthood. Companies should expand support to include eldercare flexibility. When caregiving is ignored or treated as a personal inconvenience, many women quietly reduce hours or exit.

5. Address menopause openly. Raising awareness and training managers can reduce stigma and improve support. But if rigid schedules, long hours, and unforgiving performance models remain, women are left to manage symptoms within broken systems. Menopause initiatives must go hand in hand with reforms in job design, flexibility, and inclusion — or risk becoming symbolic rather than effective.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Sédentarité au travail : 8 méthodes passées au crible

• Epstein, les boys clubs et la sidération

• Quand la perte économique est une émancipation

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

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I’m 47, and I increasingly feel the need to see and be with women who are older than I am. I need to be able to imagine what I could become. I also love being around women who are younger than me: we need much more age diversity in our social circles, in general. But the focus here is on our need to see a wide range of older women — active, visible, sometimes in positions of power — in organizations, in the media, onscreen.

It’s why I’m deeply grateful to the women in their fifties today and to boomers, many of whom refuse to go silent, refuse to shrink, and definitely refuse to limit themselves only to baking for their grandchildren.

I originally wrote this piece for Fast Company. I’m now a regular contributor to Fast Company and happy to share this essay with you here👇.

Women over 50 — and especially over 60 — are still dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power

There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion 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 vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time.

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This is not a trivial aesthetic issue because it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lose access to role models at exactly the moment when careers are supposed to stretch and evolve. If you are expected to work for 50 years but can only see the first 20 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 look like at 60.

When women in their 50s or 60s are made visible, it is often on the condition that they look 10 or 20 years younger. As a result, women in their 60s are effectively invisible—present only if their age is erased. This narrows ambition, encourages self-censorship, and makes later-life leadership or reinvention seem abnormal rather than expected. It quietly redistributes power away from aging women by making long careers harder to imagine, claim, and inhabit.

There’s no point in blaming the women

Let us be absolutely clear: this is not about condemning women’s individual choices. Grey hair or dyed hair. Injections or not. Surgery or not. Filters or not. To suggest that women are responsible for their own invisibility because they “give in” to beauty standards would be both unjust and profoundly naïve. We do what we can with the constraints and possibilities we have. We do what we can with the contradictory injunctions we receive.

The problem is not that women try to look younger. That’s perfectly understandable. The problem is that older women are either not there or only tolerated if they do not look old. As a result, the “normal faces” of aging women — to borrow the central idea of a brilliant newsletter by author Caroline Criado Perez — have almost disappeared from our visual landscape. This disappearance is anything but accidental.

It reflects the demographic structure of power in which men are allowed to age as they move up the ladder, while women in the workspace are expected to remain in their place—submissive, at the bottom of the hierarchy, there to please the eye whatever their job and position.

A double disappearance: organizations and media

Sociologists have long documented the progressive invisibilization of women in U.S. organizations, and the numbers tell a familiar story. In Fortune 500 companies, women now make up roughly 30% of executive leadership roles, but this progress is uneven and heavily skewed toward younger cohorts. Women over 50 — and especially over 60 — are dramatically underrepresented at the highest levels of visible power, despite decades of accumulated experience.

This organizational invisibility mirrors what happens in the media. Research by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media consistently shows that women are both underrepresented and age-erased on screen. Women over 50 account for a small fraction of speaking roles, even though they represent more than a third of the U.S. adult population. As women age, they quite literally vanish from movies, television, and advertising. And when they are allowed to reappear, it is often on the condition that their age be visually erased. Across film, TV, and ads, female bodies are tolerated — even in leadership or expert roles — only if they are filtered, smoothed, lifted, and polished. We want women leaders, but not their wrinkles of concentration nor the visible marks of 25 years of work.

When aging becomes a “defect” 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 encountering a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On screen, it’s exceptional. Thus we have lost our collective visual memory of what women in their 45s, 50s, or 60s actually look like. Perfectly normal features — lines of expression, changes in skin texture, sagging — are now perceived as signs of neglect and personal failure. The traits of a normal age have been reframed as flaws.

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 will usually get either a smoothed, poreless face that could be 35 — or a woman who looks closer to 70. The technology merely reproduces and amplifies the biases of the image databases it is trained on. AI does not show us women of 50; it shows us what the internet imagines they should look like.

It is just as pervasive in corporate stock photography, in recruitment materials, and in the visual representations of the business world more broadly. The “world of work” as it is depicted today is populated by smooth, vaguely thirty-something faces, where age is either erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s or 60s are largely absent—except when they are used to illustrate end-of-career narratives, mentorship, or decline.

The enduring “double standard of aging”

This brings us back to a concept articulated more than 50 years ago by Susan Sontag:: the double standard of aging. Male aging is associated with added value—authority, gravitas, experience, power—while female aging is framed as decline. Nothing fundamental has changed. After 45, women are expected either to fade into the background or to invest enormous energy into looking younger, but never to show visible signs of aging without consequence. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, what French journalist Sophie Dancourt has memorably called this the “convent syndrome”: an unspoken injunction to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility, and sexualised visibility are presumed to be over.

This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where women’s careers are still shaped by narrow and unforgiving norms of desirability. Aging men are cast as mentors, leaders, or lovers; aging women are quietly written out, unless they conform to increasingly unrealistic beauty standards. The result is not only professional marginalisation, but also a cultural message that equates women’s worth with youth—and treats aging as a problem to be managed rather than a reality to be lived.

That is precisely what makes the sketch “Last Fuckable Day,” from Inside Amy Schumer, so powerful. Schumer unexpectedly runs into her show-business heroes—Tina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquette—who are celebrating a darkly comic milestone: the age at which women are deemed no longer desirable or castable. Made ten years ago, the sketch does not 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 matters so much at work

The absence 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 deeply destabilising.

Second, it reinforces discrimination. When women over 45 are rarely seen in leadership, those who succeed are perceived as exceptions rather than as the norm. This fuels stereotypes about “atypical” careers and legitimizes bad decisions in hiring, promotion, and training.

Third, it creates collective anxiety around aging. When the only acceptable image of professional success is youth, aging becomes something to fear. This anxiety affects all women — not just those who are already older.

Finally, organizations lose out. Women over 45 represent a massive pool of experience, skills, and leadership potential. Treating them as obsolete is economically irrational.

It’s about diversity

Calling for more older female role models does not mean prescribing how women should age. There should be no new rule—whether to go grey or not, to reject aesthetic medicine or embrace it. The aim is not to replace one norm with another, but to leave room for choice.

What we desperately need is more diversity of the ways of aging. Wrinkled faces and smooth ones. Grey hair and dyed hair. Bodies that show time in different ways. Making this diversity visible expands what is socially imaginable.

Every woman who chooses — when she can, when she wants — to show her real, aging face widens the spectrum of the visible. She sends a simple but powerful message: I am here. I am aging in my own way. And I matter.

In doing so, she not only challenges stereotypes today — she also helps shape the images, datasets, and representations that will train the technologies and imaginations of tomorrow.

Older female role models at work are not a niche demand. They are a condition for fairer careers, healthier organizations, and a society that can finally accept women’s lives in their full length — not just in their youth.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Quand la perte économique est une émancipation

• Marie Kondo, sors de nos bureaux !

• Bonjour ennui

And a new podcast:

• Canada, sortir de l’ombre étatsunienne 🎧

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Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about what it really means to learn at a time when AI can answer almost anything for us. Not merely access to information but the ability to stay with a subject long enough for it to work on us, to change how we see, judge and act.

These reflections were sparked in part by my recent reading of Passagère du silence by Fabienne Verdier, and by the powerful exhibition of her work currently on view in Paris, which offers a striking reminder of what patience, repetition and humility can produce over time.

As attention fragments and shortcuts multiply, I found myself turning to an unexpected source of insight: Taoism, and what it can teach us about deep learning in the age of AI.

I originally wrote this piece for Fast Company, where it was published recently. I’m proud to now be a regular contributor to Fast Company, and happy to share this essay with you here👇.

As our attention spans and cognitive abilities are increasingly damaged by digital overuse and AI-mediated shortcuts, the ability to focus deeply and learn something in depth is fastly becoming a critical skill.

Never have we had such broad access to information. And never have so many people felt unable to concentrate long enough to truly master anything. Learning is everywhere, yet depth feels elusive.

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In a world where AI can retrieve, summarise and recombine information faster than any human, what remains valuable is the capacity to incorporate it. And for that to be possible, you need to stay with a subject long enough for it to transform you. To develop judgment, sensibility and embodied understanding.

Engineering scarcity in a world of abundance

It is striking that some of the wealthiest people on the planet are actively trying to recreate conditions of scarcity for learning. Silicon Valley billionaires famously send their children to schools with no screens. The goal is to give the young brains of their offspring the chance to build attention, memory and imagination without constant digital solicitation. And to give them an edge over hyperconnected, cognitively eroded plebs.

Conscious of the erosion of their cognitive abilities, more and more people attempt to engineer artificial information scarcity for themselves. They block websites, silence notifications, use distraction-free devices, or retreat into “deep work” bubbles. A growing number deliberately swap smartphones for so-called dumb phones, accepting inconvenience in exchange for cognitive space.

Among younger generations, a curious trend has emerged on TikTok: videos of people filming themselves doing absolutely nothing. What looks like absurdity is, in fact, a rebellion against overstimulation—a desire to recover the ability to sit with oneself without external input.

All these strategies point to the same intuition: abundance without boundaries is not liberating. It is paralysing. And learning, in particular, seems to require limits to flourish.

Learning when the future is radically uncertain

This matters all the more because learning has lost one of its traditional motivations: predictability. For decades, acquiring skills was tied to relatively stable professional trajectories. You learned accounting to become an accountant, law to become a lawyer, engineering to become an engineer. The link between effort and outcome was broadly intelligible.

Today, nobody knows which skills will be valued among future white-collar workers—or whether many of those will still be hired at all. Entire professions are being reshaped, fragmented or automated faster than educational institutions can adapt. In such a context, learning can feel strangely demotivating. Why invest years mastering something that may soon be obsolete?

And yet, this very uncertainty may make deep learning even more meaningful. When external guarantees disappear, learning becomes less about employability and more about orientation, about building internal resources like discernment, aesthetic sense, intellectual resilience. This is where Taoist-inspired approaches to learning suddenly feel increasingly relevant …

What’s Taoism?

As one of the great spiritual traditions of China, it is traditionally associated with the Tao Te Ching, attributed to Lao-Tzu (around the 6th century BCE), and later texts such as the writings of Zhuangzi. At its core lies the concept of the Tao—often translated as “the Way”—the underlying, ever-changing principle that governs the natural world.

Taoism is not a doctrine of control or optimisation. It emphasises alignment rather than domination and harmony rather than performance. One of its central ideas is wu wei, often mistranslated as “non-action”, but better understood as “effortless action”: acting in accordance with the natural flow of things rather than forcing outcomes.

Another key idea is pu, the “uncarved block”, symbolising simplicity, openness and unconditioned potential. Taoist wisdom consistently warns against excess—of desire, of knowledge, of intervention—and values emptiness, slowness and restraint as conditions for clarity. In short, Taoism offers a sharp lens through which to rethink how we learn today.

A lesson from Fabienne Verdier: scarcity as a teacher

I was reminded of this while reading Passenger of Silence, French artist Fabienne Verdier’s remarkable account of the ten years she spent in China in the 1980s, studying calligraphy and immersing herself in Chinese artistic and philosophical traditions. (Until March 2026, some of her striking works are exhibited at the Cité de l’Architecture in Paris, offering a visual echo to the intellectual journey she describes.)

Verdier recounts the ascetic teaching methods of her calligraphy master. The caricature comes to mind immediately: the merciless master in Kill Bill, forcing Beatrice Kiddo to repeat the same gesture endlessly, withholding validation until the student is almost broken. Repeat and repeat and repeat the same stroke—until boredom, frustration and despair surface. Wait months, sometimes years, before being deemed worthy of moving on. Prove motivation, patience and humility before even being accepted as a student.

At one point in the book, Verdier recounts a decisive moment of collapse after being asked to paint endlessly the same strokes—one that her master greets not with concern, but with joy:

After months and months of training I burst out one winter morning in front of my master:
“I can’t go on anymore; I don’t know where I am. In short, I don’t understand anything anymore.”
“Good, good.”
“I don’t know where I’m going.”
“Good, good.”
“I don’t even know who I am anymore.”
“Even better!”
“I no longer know the difference between ‘me’ and ‘nothing.’”
“Bravo!”

The more I fumed, the more delighted he became, his face radiant with happiness and amazement. He was hopping with joy, tears in his eyes. I went on, overwhelmed by an inner pain, thinking he hadn’t understood what I was saying:
“After all these years of practice, I realise that I am still just as ignorant in the face of the universe. I will never manage to accomplish what you are asking of me.”
“Yes, that is exactly it,” he said, clapping his hands with joy.

He danced in place with an incomprehensible delight. At that moment, I thought he was delirious.
“You have no idea how much pleasure you’ve just given me! There are people for whom an entire lifetime is not enough to understand their own ignorance.”

Five Taoist principles of learning we could all adopt

1. Learning as transformation, not acquisition: In Taoism, knowledge is not something you accumulate but something you become. The Tao Te Ching repeatedly suggests that true understanding comes not from adding more, but from stripping away the superfluous. Mastery is not about collecting credentials or information, but about internal change. Learning is successful when it alters how you act in the world.

2. Patience as a prerequisite: Lao-Tzu famously writes: “I have just three things to teach: simplicity, patience, compassion. These three are your greatest treasures.” Patience is a condition for learning to occur at all. Progress can’t be forced. Growth unfolds in its own time, like seasons. In learning, waiting is not wasted time but part of the process—especially when what is being learned is judgment, taste or sensibility.

3. Scarcity and simplicity as cognitive discipline: Taoism consistently warns against excess. The ideal learner is not surrounded by infinite resources but protected from distraction. Fewer tools, fewer references, fewer stimuli allow attention to settle. As Lao-Tzu notes, “When you realise there is nothing lacking, the whole world belongs to you.”

4. Process over outcomes: Taoist wisdom is sceptical of linear progress and measurable outcomes. Learning does not move smoothly from beginner to expert; it circles, deepens, stalls and restarts. This stands in stark contrast to modern learning cultures obsessed with efficiency, milestones and KPIs. If you focus too much on results, you miss the internal transformations that constitute real mastery.

5. Boredom and not-knowing as thresholds: Perhaps the most radical principle is the role of boredom. Taoist practices value stillness and emptiness as gateways to insight. In learning, boredom is often the point where superficial motivation collapses—and where something deeper can begin. To tolerate boredom, uncertainty and silence is to resist the constant stimulation of digital environments.

Learning humility in an age of hubris

Taoism dismantles the illusion of mastery and domination. It reminds us that knowledge is always partial, that control is fragile and that force ultimately backfires. Water defeats rock.

Those who claim to know do not truly know. Learning, in this tradition, is inseparable from the recognition of one’s ignorance. Verdier’s master does not celebrate her despair out of cruelty, but because she has finally reached a point where ego, certainty and ambition collapse. Only then can real learning begin.

This stands in sharp contrast with our contemporary climate of hubris—technological, economic and political—where confidence is rewarded more than doubt.

Taoist learning offers a counter-ethic. It teaches that in brutal times, restraint may be the most radical form of resistance.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Pourquoi donne-t-on tant de pouvoir aux narcissiques ?

• Bonjour ennui

• Infrastructures : la ruine lente mais certaine de l’Allemagne

And a new podcast:

• Femmes et monde du travail : la trahison 🎧

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

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I wish you all a happy new year!

For a while, it looked as though popular culture had finally diversified the scripts available to women. There were a few female CEOs, ambitious strivers, anti-heroines navigating power, money, and work. Not equality, certainly—but at least some narrative pluralism. Today, that range feels like it’s narrowing again. In a lot of contemporary US pop culture, women’s choices are increasingly framed in starkly binary terms: marry wealth or serve it. Trophy wife or servant.

Films and series mirror a broader political, economic, and cultural backlash against women’s autonomy—one that has intensified in the Trump era, that now permeates work, family policy, and digital culture. To make this shift tangible, I’ll illustrate it through two recent productions I watched over the holidays: a series (Sirens) and a film (The Housemaid).💡👇

Back to nineteenth-century choices

The dichotomy is familiar. Jane Austen’s England offered women few respectable routes to survival: marry well or become a governess. (I love all six of her brilliant novels). Today’s equivalents are almost as constraining (with an important difference: women can inherit wealth today). If you are young and pretty, you may attach yourself to a rich man—tech entrepreneur, hedge fund manager, real estate tycoon—and access wealth through marriage. But the arrangement is fragile. Prenups ensure that once desirability fades, so does economic security.

If you are not—or no longer—eligible for that role, there is always service work. Care work. Domestic labour. Hospitality. Pink-collar jobs that are underpaid, undervalued, and overwhelmingly female, but “safe” in the sense that they are always available. Someone will always need a cleaner, a caregiver, a nanny, a waitress, sometimes, in wealthier households, an educated governess (hello, nineteenth century again). What these roles share is dependence: on employers, on husbands, on tips, on goodwill. And in both scenarios, women remain exposed to male power and violence—economic, psychological, sexual.

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Pop culture is registering this regression. I’ll illustrate it with the two aforementioned examples I’ve recently watched.

Sirens: luxury, control, and replaceability

Netflix’s Sirens (2025) is a dark illustration of how female power is imagined today. Set over a single weekend in a billionaire’s seaside estate, the series stages an enclosed social experiment about class, gender, and domination. Julianne Moore plays Michaela Kell, the elegant, control-freak wife of a wealthy man. She manages a lot of money which isn’t hers to keep unconditionally. There’s a prenup hanging over her.

Michaela’s position looks enviable from the outside: art, luxury, authority over staff, proximity to power. But it is entirely derivative. Her status depends on her husband’s continued desire and tolerance. Of course, he could replace her with someone younger, poorer, and closer to servitude: the female employee Michaela herself hired, for example?

Sirens suggests that elite femininity is not necessarily empowerment. Trophy wives are not winners; they are placeholders. Proximity to wealth does not equal control over it. What remains is competition / rivalry among women within structures designed and owned by men.

The Housemaid: violence behind the binary

The Housemaid (2025), adapted from Freida McFadden’s best-selling novel, explores the good old duo wife vs maid. As the plot unfolds, the distinction quickly collapses. Both women are infantilised, gaslit, physically confined. Marriage and employment are simply two administrative arrangements for the same domination. (I did my best to avoid spoiling it for those of you who want to see it. Suffice to say the rivalry isn’t what it seems.)

What’s interesting about The Housemaid is that it illustrates how one option isn’t actually safer than the other. The trophy wife is not protected by her status. The servant is not protected by her usefulness. Both are disposable and trapped.

(By the way, I recommend this New York Times piece about actress Sidney Sweeney who plays the maid: “Is Sydney Sweeney Today’s Most Perplexing Movie Star?” Sweeney is a Republican (so Trump supporter) who plays ambiguous characters in films that often convey feminist messages. Perplexing, right?)

TikTok masculinity and “your body, my choice”

These stories do not exist in a vacuum. They resonate with a resurgence of openly misogynistic discourse online, where figures like Andrew Tate and countless TikTok imitators promote a worldview in which women are either prizes or tools. The slogan “your body, my choice” illustrates this common ideology.

In this world, feminism is mocked, DEI is framed as an elite scam, and female independence is portrayed as unnatural and unattractive. Submission is rebranded as security and dependence as tradition. Violence—sexual, emotional, economic—is normalised as the price women pay for stepping out of line.

Pop culture absorbs and reflects this climate. It is no accident that stories of women climbing corporate ladders are rare today. There were never many to begin with, really not many since Working Girl in the 1980s.

But today’s dearth of stories about self-made women reflects a scary lack of prospects in real life. So female ambition, when it appears, is more often redirected toward marriage than mastery.

The economic backdrop: shrinking choices

The cultural regression coincides with material constraints. In the US labour market, women are leaving the workforce in alarming numbers. 2025 has seen a very large female labour-force exit (“An estimated 455,000 women left the workforce between January and August”). Highly educated mothers and Black women are disproportionately affected.

The reasons are structural. Childcare has become scarcer and more expensive. Return-to-office mandates have stripped away flexibility that allowed women to remain employed. White-collar hiring has slowed, while AI threatens many customer-facing roles. Meanwhile, public-sector jobs—where women, particularly Black women, are overrepresented—have been cut. What remains abundant are poorly paid, feminised service jobs.

👉 Also read: Is free universal childcare really such a crazy idea? Laetitia@work #88

So the message is quite clear. If you cannot combine motherhood with professional work, perhaps you should exit the labour force. If you cannot access wealth through wages, perhaps you should access it through marriage.

The Great Wealth Transfer: too little too late?

This makes the looming “Great Wealth Transfer” paradoxical. Over the coming decades, trillions of dollars will change hands, much of it passing first from husbands to wives, as women outlive men. Statistically, more wealth will indeed end up under women’s control—at least temporarily.

But inheritance is not the same as empowerment. Much of this wealth arrives late in life, after careers have stalled or ended, after caregiving has taken its toll, after economic vulnerability has already shaped women’s choices. Control over assets does not automatically translate into power, voice, or safety—especially when financial systems, advisers, and family norms continue to privilege male authority.

In other words, women may inherit money without inheriting the freedom that usually comes with it. Of course, it is good news that today’s women inherit wealth—unlike Jane Austen’s characters—but this massive transfer of wealth does little to expand our narratives of success.

A narrowing imagination

What is most depressing about this moment is not only the material rollback, but the imaginative one. Fiction tells us what a society thinks is possible. Right now, US pop culture suggests that women’s paths to security run either through men or through service. It teaches women that ambition is dangerous, autonomy is lonely, and that power is something they can only brush against, never fully claim.

Like Austen’s heroines, today’s female characters are often intelligent, ironic, and observant—but trapped within rigid social architectures. The difference is that we have already lived through decades that promised something else. Which makes the regression harder to accept.

The choice between trophy wife and servant is not new. But seeing it reassert itself so prominently—in fiction and online culture—should worry anyone who believed that women’s economic independence was an irreversible achievement.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Best-of 2025

• Le care, antidote à la crise masculine

• Télémédecine : un outil de résistance ?

• Job sharing : quand le temps partiel rencontre l’ambition

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This November and December mark the release of the fifth and final season of Stranger Things. The launch is colossal: budgets that seem almost supernatural, promotional campaigns that spill across every platform, millions upon millions of views accumulating every hour. I watched the first four episodes of this last chapter with my teenage children, letting myself be pulled back into its familiar yet unsettling universe. And while waiting for the end — the final confrontation, the closing of the portal — I found myself pondering its metaphors, especially those that could illuminate the modern workspace.

Freud’s concept of das Unheimliche, the uncanny, captures that eerie feeling when the familiar becomes strange, when the normal world reveals its hidden double. The Upside Down in Stranger Things is the perfect illustration of this concept: our world, but drained of warmth; the same streets and houses, but darker, colder, crawling with dangers people don’t want to see. It is uncanny precisely because it is almost the same. Workplaces, too, have their doubles — their own shadow dimensions, their uncanny strata that reveal what lies beneath the narratives of culture, care, trust, and innovation.

The Upside Down is dangerous because it is inhabited by monsters. And work, too, has its share of creatures — toxic bosses who drain energy like Demogorgons, manipulative colleagues, Trump-like mini-autocrats who thrive on chaos and intimidation. These monsters are not supernatural. They are born from power imbalances, unchecked egos, unspoken rules, and cultures that tolerate violence as long as “results” seem to keep coming. Here are four lessons the Upside Down can teach us about the workspace.💡👇

#1 When the façade cracks

The first lesson the Upside Down teaches us is that a workspace can look perfectly healthy on the surface while hiding a toxic interior. Many organisations present a bright, confident face to the world: polished employer branding, inspirational values plastered on walls, and HR narratives carefully designed to seduce. Everything is curated to project harmony — the glossy recruitment videos, the smiling team photos, the leadership speeches about care and innovation. This is the visible world. But behind the façade, there can be a different atmosphere that reveals itself to those who experience the daily reality.

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It’s painful when there is a discrepancy between the external story and the internal experience. Employees who were promised empowerment discover layers of bureaucracy; those sold a message of inclusion encounter subtle exclusion; those attracted by the promise of “flexibility” find rigidity dressed up in agile vocabulary. The gap creates cognitive dissonance — the discomfort of living in a world that says one thing and behaves according to another. It hurts precisely because people want to believe in the story they are told. When the story collapses, they feel betrayed, foolish, and suddenly foreign in a place that claimed to welcome them.

And once the façade cracks, the atmosphere changes. A coldness settles in, a sense of walking through two overlapping realities: the one in the ads, and the one you breathe every day. What is repressed always comes back. In the workspace, it returns as cynicism, quiet attrition, and whispered warnings to newcomers — Be careful, it isn’t what it seems.

#2 Parallel realities: women in the Upside Down

For many women, the workspace resembles the Upside Down even on ordinary days. The structures are familiar — the same boardrooms, hybrid schedules, performance reviews — yet the atmosphere is different for them. It is a parallel reality shaped by microaggressions, invisible emotional labour, unspoken expectations, and the constant surveillance of tone, appearance, and likeability. The threats are omnipresent (albeit subtle): the interruption, the idea credited to someone else, the extra care expected but never rewarded, the pressure to be competent without appearing ambitious.

The difference is not just emotional but structural: navigating the same space does not require the same effort for everyone. Men are often presumed competent until proven otherwise; women are presumed incompetent until they perform beyond doubt. The distance may look identical on paper, but the journey is not. What appears to be one workplace is, in fact, two overlapping worlds — the official one and the shadow one women must contend with. Moving through them demands constant adjustment, vigilance, and translation that others rarely see.

The uncanny arises because the workplace looks modern and egalitarian on the surface, while an archaic underworld endures underneath. What should be supportive becomes unsettling. Women navigate this dimension every day, adjusting to rules they did not write, surviving in an environment that mirrors the official world but does not fully belong to it.

#3 Burnout as the mind’s Upside Down

A third dimension appears when burnout takes hold. In the series, slipping into the Upside Down can happen after a flickering light. Burnout works the same way. On the outside, things can remain the same, with calendars, emails and meetings. On the inside, everything has collapsed. The person is present but emptied, still moving but no longer inhabiting the movement. The world of work becomes foreign and hostile.

This can be a structural phenomenon: workloads that exceed capacity, cultures that reward overextension, organisations that mistake availability for commitment and exhaustion for excellence. When burnout strikes, the worker inhabits the same physical space as their colleagues but a completely different psychological one — a parallel dimension of numbness, disconnection, and quiet dread. Like the Upside Down, it is not a place they chose to enter, but one they slip into when the world around them refuses to notice the warning signs.

#4 Those who never leave the Upside Down

Finally, there are the workers who live permanently in the Upside Down: care workers, nursing assistants, cashiers, cleaners, hospitality staff, delivery drivers, warehouse workers, and many others whose jobs society loudly calls “essential” yet treats as disposable. Their workplaces mirror ours — hospitals, supermarkets, kitchens, hotels — but every structure is warped by understaffing, emotional exhaustion, precarious contracts, and daily exposure to incivility or outright violence. The shifts start earlier, end later, and leave less room for recovery. The atmosphere is heavy, the demands relentless, the recognition minimal.

During the pandemic, a portal briefly opened between the two worlds. For a moment, everyone could see what these workers endured: the fragility, the exhaustion, the lack of protection, the thin line they walked to keep society functioning. But when the crisis faded, the portal closed again. Their Upside Down continued, once more invisible, humming quietly beneath the comfortable narrative of “essential work.”

In their case, the invisible Upside Down doesn’t merely coexist with the visible world — it sustains it. The polished surface of modern life depends on the shadow labour that remains unseen. Cleaning women work before dawn so offices can appear pristine when everyone else arrives. Delivery riders race through traffic so that a package seems to materialise “as if by magic” simply because someone clicked a button. Workers in ghost kitchens prepare meals that appear under the illusion of convenience, with no trace of the human toil behind them. All this unseen labour props up the visible world. It’s a world essential to our comfort, yet treated as if it belonged to a parallel dimension.

Freud reminds us that the uncanny is not about the supernatural; it is about the ordinary world made strange. Work becomes uncanny when the bright surface hides darkness, when equality coexists with gendered inequality, when burnout hollow outs individuals from within, and when society praises essential labour while relegating essential workers to the shadows. The Upside Down is not a fantasy dimension — it is a metaphor for the truths we would prefer not to confront.

Let’s wait and see what resolution the last episodes bring; with any luck, they’ll offer us a few ideas for repairing the workspace too.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Moins de parité au cinéma : toute la société est concernée

• La migraine, ce handicap invisible

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

✍️ And last but not least, Caroline Taconet and I have just published this new piece on Vieilles en puissance:

• Seulement si elles ne font pas leur âge

  

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The recent election of Zohran Mamdani as Mayor of New York City in November 2025 has put a spotlight on what some critics—particularly Republicans—labelled his most “radical” and “socialist” campaign commitment: free, high-quality universal childcare for every New Yorker from six weeks to five years old. Mamdani also promised to boost childcare workers’ wages to match those of the city’s public school teachers.

But is it really that “crazy” to advocate for free, universal childcare? Its economic benefits are well documented. Other countries have implemented it and benefited from it for years. In fact, today’s critical necessity in addressing global demographic crises suggests that universal childcare might not be radical at all, but rather an essential piece of modern social and economic infrastructure—indeed, perhaps the absence of such a system is the truly crazy idea (albeit a very widespread one).💡👇

A system under strain

Mamdani’s promises resonated with New Yorkers struggling with the high cost of living. The financial burden of raising young children in NYC is staggering. Housing is unaffordable. And so is childcare. More than 80% of families with young children cannot afford the average annual cost of US$26,000 for center-based care. Nationally, the U.S. system is widely considered broken, with families spending up to 16% of their median income on full-day care for just one child. The cost of daycare and preschool surged by 263% between 1990 and 2024, far outpacing inflation. The expense is driving families out of the city.

👉Also read: How housing scarcity influences everything. Laetitia@Work #81

Meanwhile, the workers providing this essential service are severely underpaid. In 2024, the median annual pay for childcare workers was only $32,050 ($15.41 per hour), nearly at the bottom of all occupations. This workforce, predominantly composed of women and often women of colour, suffers high turnover, which inevitably compromises the quality of the service.

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Mamdani’s promise includes decent pay for staff, which could transform the politics and reality of childcare both in New York and across the nation. If implemented, his plan is estimated to cost $6 billion annually, which he proposes funding through increased state corporate taxes and raising the city income tax.

An investment, not an expense

Economically, it makes a lot of sense.

First, women’s participation in the labour force increases significantly, which has huge implications for GDP. Research indicates that investing in childcare helps remove barriers women face in entering the workforce, leading to increased productivity and poverty alleviation. By empowering women, the Asia and Pacific region, for example, could see a 12% increase in regional annual GDP.

Second, quality early childhood education and care (ECEC) is human-capital building. Economists cite high returns on investment (ROI), as children who attend good programmes tend to have better long-term outcomes in education, earnings, and health.

Third, universal access reduces inequality. When lower-income families and single parents are not forced out of the labour market by prohibitive fees, the lifetime earnings gap shrinks, contributing to greater economic stability.

While the cost of implementation is high upfront, proponents argue that the cost of not doing it is also massive—lost productivity, lost taxes, increased inequality, and greater long-term social spending.

Precedents in the U.S. History

The idea of federally supported childcare in the U.S. is not without historical context. During the Great Depression, the Works Projects Administration (WPA) established emergency nursery schools, initially intended to employ teachers, which offered de facto childcare.

The most significant historical parallel is the Lanham Act of 1941 during World War II. As rising numbers of women entered war industries, the Lanham Act funded childcare for working mothers. Nobel Prize economist Claudia Goldin noted that this was the closest the U.S. has come to establishing national, practically universal, federally funded childcare. The Lanham nurseries provided year-round supervision, education, and often nutritionist-devised meals for children aged 2 to 11.

The craziness of inaction: lessons from East Asia

The crucial argument for universal childcare is framed by demographic urgency. Countries that fail to provide accessible support systems suffer from profound gender inequality and dangerously low fertility rates.

Japan and South Korea are prime examples, facing the world’s lowest fertility rates (1.25 and 0.72 in 2023, respectively). Both are fast-ageing countries struggling with labour shortages. In both countries, this is driven by the persistence of gender norms—such as the Japanese ideal roysai kenbo (“good wife, wise mother”) and historical Confucian hierarchy—and the lack of systems to support women combining career and family.

👉 Also read: Flowers of Fire: How South Korea’s Feminists Inspired the World. Laetitia@Work #77

Job recruitment strongly favours men due to demands for a 40-hour week with overtime, or fear that women will take career breaks.

The low labour participation of women in these countries is a huge waste. As living costs increase, the pressure for dual income rises, discouraging women from having children altogether, further depressing demographic outcomes. Systemic changes will be necessary to address these demographic obstacles.

The Nordic model

The Nordic countries, such as Sweden, are often held up as a template for successful universal childcare. Sweden’s programme was designed to offer high-quality care regardless of income, promote women’s equality and independent income, and treat childcare as a shared responsibility between parents and the state.

The state pays about 90% of the cost of care, keeping the cost low for parents, often capped at a maximum monthly fee around 3% of family income. This makes many people want to use the system. Thus the government successfully managed to dramatically increase female paid labour force participation, which rose from 59.3% in 1970 to 81.7% in 1988. By 2014, 83% of mothers with children aged 14 or under were in paid work, the highest rate in the EU.

Sweden also pioneered shared parental leave policies, although government policy has increasingly relied on social engineering—such as non-transferable parental leave quotas (the “daddy quota”)—to pressure men into taking time off and ensure the benefit is not lost. (Even in Sweden, men would not automatically take a leave if they weren’t pressured into taking it 🤔)

To achieve all this, Sweden is one of the highest-taxed nations globally. An average production worker may pay 62% of their income in tax, and the total average tax rate is around 60% of income. Yet it’s quite clear that when you add up the private costs of healthcare, childcare, and education in countries like the US, households often end up paying as much if not much more out-of-pocket than what the average Swedish taxpayer contributes through taxes.

Yet Sweden is no paradise. Fertility has dropped there too: after reaching 2.14 around 1990, it fell back to 1.66 by 2020. Childcare isn’t a magic fix, and although Sweden’s fertility rate remains higher than in places like Japan or South Korea, it is still declining. The reasons are complex—ranging from persistent inequalities and limited parental choice to soaring housing costs and rising environmental anxiety. At the same time, wellbeing indicators have also shown strain: levels of good mental health among 15-year-olds declined faster in Sweden than in eleven other European countries between 1986 and 2002.

The way forward

France offers some sort of middle ground, as the école maternelle (for children aged 3 to 6) is available but full universal, free care is generally not provided for children below three. Women still overwhelmingly bear the majority of the family burden, making it difficult to balance professional and family life “successfully”.

There’s a core argument to be made for institutional support: “It takes a village to raise a child,” but the traditional “village” has all but disappeared. It’s a structural shift. Housing costs have pushed families into smaller homes. More transient living situations make multi-generational proximity rare. Rising individualism—celebrated as autonomy and personal achievement—has eroded the informal networks that once supported parents. Instead of extended families living nearby, most households today are built around the nuclear family or single-parent families, which concentrate the caregiving load on too few people. Add to this the reality of dual-income demands, which leave little time for the informal caregiving that relatives, neighbours, or community groups once provided.

If the traditional village disappeared, then its absence must be compensated by ambitious, well-designed institutions capable of providing the support that families can no longer rely on informally.

👉Also read: Single Mum By Default. Laetitia@Work #45

Mayor Mamdani’s vision for free universal childcare in NYC is a recognition of this necessity. It is not a crazy socialist fantasy, but rather a robust economic policy and a critical piece of social engineering aimed at stabilising the labour market, reducing inequality, and investing in human capital, while providing essential support for mothers and families. Such a system requires heavy societal investment (high taxes) and careful quality.

In the end, universal childcare is like investing in clean tap water or reliable electricity: once implemented, it ceases to be a controversial political item and becomes recognised as basic infrastructure.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Le design universel : l’inclusion comme choix de conception

• Sous le vernis du jeunisme, la gérontocratie

• Êtes-vous plutôt monochrone ou polychrone ?

• La pénibilité du client-tyran

🎤 And these 3 new podcasts were published:

• Psychédéliques : au-delà du moi (avec Mathilde Ramadier)

• Recrute-t-on mieux avec l’IA ? (avec Pierre Monclos)

• La chaise tue (with Alexandre Dana)

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

📚 To promote my new book L’Atout âge, I was invited by several French media outlets:

• on Zoom Zoom Zen on France Inter : N.E.R., les personnes ni en emploi, ni à la retraite

  

• on les Matins du samedi on France Culture : Du stage à la retraite, le monde du travail arnaque-t-il les femmes ?

• in French magazine Le Point : « Il est urgent de repenser la place des séniors au travail »

• in Noémie Aubron’s Substack newsletter Futur(s): L’or gris

✍️ And last but not least, Caroline Taconet and I have just given our media Vieilles en puissance a fresh start with a new series of articles:

• Les vieilles et les poupées russes

• Si les hommes lisaient comme les vieilles, le monde irait mieux

• Puberté, ménopause : le même combat anti-Meta

• Moi hier, moi aujourd’hui, moi demain

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Japan’s new prime minister is a woman — and I wish I could celebrate that, but honestly, I can’t. What should feel like progress is actually the opposite. Why is that? This is what I call the First Woman Paradox: when the first woman to reach the top ends up defending the very system that keeps most women down.

The appointment of Sanae Takaichi in Japan is a historic moment — but one that feels strangely familiar: around the world, the first women to reach the very top in politics and the corporate are so often the most conservative of all.

Takaichi is Japan’s 104th prime minister — and the first woman ever to hold the job. She has broken through one of the thickest glass ceilings in the developed world, as Japan ranks among the lowest in the OECD for gender equality. Until now, it had never had a woman leader and had only 13 female CEOs across all listed companies on its main stock exchange.

And yet, this “first” does not come with the kind of feminist promise many hoped for. Takaichi is an ultra-conservative who opposes same-sex marriage and wants to preserve male-only succession in the imperial family. She is against allowing married couples to use separate surnames — a small but powerful symbol of independence in Japan. Her political idols include another first woman, Margaret Thatcher, Britain’s Iron Lady.

In short, it’s an understatement to write that Japan’s first female prime minister is not a feminist. She completely embodies the First Woman Paradox: the idea that the first woman to reach the top of a male-dominated system is often the one least likely to challenge that system.💡👇

The first woman who reassures the system

In politics, and often in business too, women do not reach leadership positions because patriarchy suddenly decides to open the gates. They reach them because they are the kind of women who reassure those in power that they won’t change the rules.

It is symbolic representation: the appearance of progress without structural change. Having a woman at the top allows the system to say, “See? The glass ceiling is gone,” even though everything else actually stays the same.

In highly conservative societies, this is especially true. The political establishment doesn’t embrace feminism; it embraces a woman who shows that gender equality won’t threaten the existing order.

That’s why so many of these “firsts” — Thatcher in the UK, Meloni in Italy, and now Takaichi in Japan — define themselves against feminism. Thatcher famously said, “I owe nothing to women’s lib.” Meloni insists she is not fighting for women’s rights.

The message is always the same: I’m not here to represent women. I’m here to prove I can rule like a man.

Marine Le Pen was France’s only shot at having a female president

France’s own “almost first” female president, Marine Le Pen, fits the same paradox. Before her recent conviction and sentence of ineligibility, she was honestly France’s best chance at having a woman in the Élysée Palace. But she is also, unmistakably, her father’s daughter.

Le Pen inherited not only the far-right Rassemblement National party but also its nationalist, anti-immigration, anti-EU DNA. She has worked to soften its image — swapping her father’s explicit racism for a rhetoric of “patriotism” and “sovereignty” — but her project remains built on the same ideological foundations. She is conservative on gender, sceptical of feminism, and careful not to disturb traditional gender roles.

Her rise, like Takaichi’s, tells us that being the “first woman” in power does not automatically mean progress for women. If anything, her political strategy has been to use her femininity as a shield — presenting herself as a protective mother of the nation, someone both “strong” and “caring” (an animal lover who brings kittens to meetings), in short a “safe” kind of woman for voters who distrust feminism.

If she hadn’t been barred from running until 2030, she might well have become the first woman to lead France in 2027 — not by challenging the patriarchy, but by making it feel comfortable with her.

Why do conservative voters sometimes choose a female leader

Conservatives sometimes choose women leaders because it allows them to appear modern without changing anything fundamental. A woman at the top gives the illusion of progress — a convenient symbol to show that their movement is not “stuck in the past.” The face changes, but the system stays the same. Having a woman lead an otherwise male-dominated party can disarm critics and make the ideology look softer, more inclusive, even when the policies remain deeply conservative.

There’s also the enduring appeal of the “Iron Lady.” In conservative culture, strength, discipline, and authority are prized traits, and when a woman embodies them, she stands out. Her toughness surprises, and that makes her power even more compelling. Margaret Thatcher built her identity around that image, and others like Giorgia Meloni or Marine Le Pen have followed the same path. They prove that a woman can succeed — as long as she plays by men’s rules and reinforces the values of order, family, and nation.

Another reason is that a woman can personify the idea of the protective mother — an image that works well with nationalist and traditionalist narratives. The leader becomes “the mother of the nation,” defending her people from threats, guarding their identity, and nurturing a moral order. A conservative cliché is that women are guardians of moral values so when moral values seem under threat, a woman can be tempting.

The maternal symbolism helps justify authoritarian instincts under the guise of care. When Giorgia Meloni says she governs “as an Italian mother,” it’s not just rhetoric — it’s a deliberate strategy to make hardline politics sound compassionate and natural.

Finally, many conservative women who rise to power reject feminism and claim that their personal success proves that gender barriers no longer matter. They become the exception that reinforces the rule. By saying “I made it on my own,” they dismiss collective struggles for equality and confirm the conservative belief that individual effort — not structural change — is what counts.

The Queen Bee effect

In psychology, this is known as the Queen Bee Syndrome: when a woman who succeeds in a male-dominated environment distances herself from other women and from feminist causes. It’s a survival strategy.

In organisations where leadership is coded as masculine — decisive, aggressive, rational — women who want to rise learn to overperform those traits. They become “tough,” “disciplined” or“cold.” They are praised for their productivity and strength — and often for not being “too emotional.”

They also learn to criticise other women who do not fit this mould. They may say things like “I’ve never experienced sexism” or “If I could do it, anyone can.” This reinforces the system that allowed them to rise in the first place.

Political systems work the same way. The woman who rises first is often the one who embodies the masculine ideal of power better than her male colleagues. Her success becomes evidence that the system is fair, even when it’s not.

A mirror in the corporate world

The same paradox appears in business. Many of the first female CEOs in major corporations also come from conservative corporate cultures that have not changed their expectations of leadership. They are chosen not to transform the system, but to fit perfectly into it.

It’s not that these women lack conviction or competence — quite the opposite. They have worked twice as hard to be taken seriously. But to survive, they often had to adapt to a culture that rewards masculine-coded behaviour.

They were trained to value control, hierarchy, and measurable results. They often rise through finance or operations, rather than human resources or communications. They are rarely the ones who talk about empathy or work-life balance. Those values are still coded as “soft,” even though they are essential for good leadership.

Meanwhile, women in middle management are still expected to carry the mental load of care: remembering birthdays, checking on team morale, organising meetings, mentoring younger staff — all the invisible emotional labour that keeps organisations running. At home, they are still often responsible for family logistics: school pick-ups, medical appointments, ageing parents.

Culturally, men are still allowed to be monochronic — focused on one thing at a time, measured by their results — while women are forced into polychrony, juggling multiple roles at once. The system values one kind of time, but demands the opposite from women.

So when a woman finally reaches the top, she often does so by mastering the “male” time of focus and efficiency — and leaving behind the relational, multitasking time that society once imposed on her. That’s another version of the First Woman Paradox: to be accepted, she must stop being the kind of woman the world expects her to be.

It’s often women who end up killing the feminist agenda

Phyllis Schlafly is a striking example of the First Woman Paradox in action. She became one of the most influential women in American politics not by advancing women’s rights, but by actively opposing them. Her campaign against the Equal Rights Amendment in the 1970s, famously mobilised under the slogan “STOP ERA,” succeeded in preventing its ratification. Schlafly’s power rested on a paradox: to be accepted and effective as a female leader, she had to reject the feminist ideals of equality and gender liberation, championing instead a vision of women as homemakers and moral guardians. But in doing so, she transgressed the traditional model of femininity she publicly praised.

This dynamic is brilliantly explored in the 2020 FX miniseries Mrs. America, where Cate Blanchett portrays Schlafly with nuance and force (this actress is so amazing in roles of villains!!). The show highlights how Schlafly’s ascent was tied to her strategic embrace of conservative values. For feminists, it underscores a difficult truth: the very women who break barriers can wield their power to maintain systems that limit others. For Schlafly, stepping into leadership meant both embodying and subverting the ideals of her gender.

This could also be called the Thatcher Paradox: the first woman to lead becomes proof of progress while actively limiting progress for others. She becomes an icon of meritocracy — living proof that women can succeed if they just “work hard enough” — while maintaining the structural inequalities that make it so much harder for others to follow.

It’s painful

True progress will come when we no longer need women to act like men to be trusted with power — when leadership itself changes shape.

For feminists, the First Woman Paradox is particularly painful. It is difficult to watch women wield power to uphold structures that harm other women. That negative power creates a moral conflict: it makes feminists resent a woman for the damage she enforces, and then feel guilty for that resentment. Japanese women deserve better. They deserve leaders who make life easier for women in the OECD’s most sexist systems.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Au secours ! La hustle culture est de retour

• Pourquoi la « bouillie d’IA » coûte cher

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

Miscellaneous

👵 What Happened to the Idea of “Middle Age”?, Valerie Monroe, Allure, July 2025: “In fact, unlike other life transitions such as puberty and menopause, old age has no definitive physiological markers and, researchers are discovering, happens in myriad physical and mental changes that occur on a continuum, but with no definitive timeline. Some researchers believe it’s not even a linear process, but one with rapid bursts of aging at certain tipping points, every 20 years or so.”

This publication—and the podcast it accompanies—was created in partnership with ENVI, the school founded by Catherine Barba, Carine Malaussena, and Charlotte de Charentenay to help freelancers and entrepreneurs grow their businesses. Through its DO TANK, ENVI helps companies anticipate and act on the transformations shaping the future of work—a mission I’m delighted to collaborate on with such an energetic, innovative, and generous team.

Among these transformations, demographics play a crucial role—a topic I explored in my book L’Atout âge, because I’m convinced it’s one of the most important (and often overlooked) forces reshaping work today. As our societies age and careers lengthen, we need to rethink how we organise work, manage talent, and define success across generations.

That’s precisely the focus of this episode of the DO TANK podcast by ENVI, where I had the pleasure of speaking with Avivah Wittenberg-Cox, a global thought leader on longevity, gender balance, and the future of work. Together, we explore how demographic change is transforming careers, leadership, and HR through the lens of 100-year lives—an inspiring and urgent conversation for anyone shaping the workplaces of tomorrow. 💡👇

In HR circles, the demographic transition reshaping our world isn’t getting the attention it deserves. Whilst AI and climate change dominate headlines, we’re overlooking the fact that we’re living longer, healthier lives—and that our career models haven’t caught up.

Avivah has spent recent years evangelising and offering solutions. A former computer scientist who spent two decades working on gender balance in business, the Canadian/French expert now based in London has become one of the leading voices on longevity and the future of work. With her newsletter Elderberries and her Forbes columns, she’s helping all of us navigate the shift from a three-stage to a four-quarter life.

The four quarters framework

“We’re moving from the old demographic pyramid—lots of young and few old—to a square,” Wittenberg-Cox explains. “For the first time, there are more people over 65 than under 18 in many developed countries. It’s a completely new demographic shape.”

Yet our systems remain stuck in an outdated model: education until 25, work from 25 to 65, then retirement. That three-stage approach no longer fits lives that now stretch up to 100 years. Enter the four quarters framework: Q1 (0-25), Q2 (25-50), Q3 (50-75), and Q4 (75-100). The model borrows from accounting and business planning—everyone in the corporate world understands quarters—making it instantly accessible to the organisations that need to adapt most urgently to the new demographic reality.

“What’s really new is the third quarter,” she says. “We didn’t used to have 25 healthy, engaged years after 50 where people still need to work given the financial setup—and still want to contribute.” The challenge? Our career systems, pension models, and corporate mindsets remain designed for the old three-stage life and ignore our stretched lifespans.

The rise of chief longevity officers

Wittenberg-Cox has recently documented a fascinating trend: forward-thinking companies beginning to integrate demographic change into their strategic decisions. Some have even created roles like chief longevity officer. L’Oréal, Portugal’s Fidelidade insurance company, and luxury hospitality group The Estate are among the pioneers she mentioned in a Forbes column.

“It’s about getting the topic onto the leadership agenda in a transversal way,” she explains. These initiatives go far beyond HR and talent—they touch product development, marketing, AI adoption, and the ability to understand consumers in their 50s, 60s, and 70s as a major growth market.

She draws a parallel with the early days of diversity officers. “I don’t think this will necessarily remain a standalone position long-term. It’s more like the first wave of chief diversity officers, when companies started treating diversity as a strategic issue. Over time, it became embedded across the business—and the same will happen with longevity.”

The early movers tend to be companies with an obvious connection to ageing—beauty, insurance, healthcare. But Wittenberg-Cox stresses that the talent dimension matters across all industries, especially in industrial firms where highly specialised knowledge is at risk as boomers retire. “The issues of knowledge transfer and succession planning are not always addressed in time to prepare for this massive departure,” she warns.

Different motivations across quarters

One of Wittenberg-Cox’s key insights concerns the differing motivations between Q2 and Q3 workers. Q2, she explains, is “a more extrinsically driven phase”—people are building families, careers, reputations, and financial assets. Careers are essential to that accumulation.

Q3 shifts to something more intrinsic. “It’s about meaning,” she says. “People have ticked the boxes that were expected of them in Q2. By Q3, they’ve often emerged post-children into an empty nest. They’ve accumulated some wealth. They’re relatively successful. And then it’s like, ‘Okay, what’s next? Is that it? Or is there something more?’”

But there’s another group of women for whom Q3 isn’t about peak performance—it’s about catching up. These are women whose careers were derailed or slowed by the motherhood penalty in Q2, who spent years juggling childcare and / or elder care, who made career compromises that their male partners didn’t have to make. “They arrive at Q3 not in the phase where everyone should slow down, but needing to accelerate and accumulate the things they haven’t had enough chance to accumulate in Q2”. They haven’t built the same financial cushion, haven’t reached the same senior positions, and face Q3 with different urgencies than other Q3 people.

This creates a paradox: just as corporate norms expect workers over 50 to wind down, many women—whether driven by ambition or necessity—are ramping up. Meanwhile, at home, tensions emerge in traditional couples where men expect their partners to join them in retirement whilst women are saying, “Wait a second, that’s not at all what I want to do.”

Breaking down ageism

Ageism, Wittenberg-Cox notes, remains “the last acceptable bias” in many workplaces. It cuts both ways—against the young who aren’t yet in Q2, and against older workers deemed past their prime. “All our systems, everywhere, are designed for Q2. The challenge now is to flex and open up to these different phases.”

Overcoming this requires education and awareness at leadership level, plus fundamental flexibility in career models. “People should be able to work both younger and older in very different ways—more flexibility but with security,” she suggests, pointing to Swedish experiments with “gig security.”

She’s also adamant about the need for intentional intergenerational management. “Companies are already intergenerational—they have four or five generations working in them. The challenge is that it’s unconsciously managed. We need to become consciously competent at intergenerational management.”

Closing wisdom

When asked what she’d tell her 25-year-old self, Wittenberg-Cox laughs: “Don’t worry, it gets a lot better.” To her 50-year-old self: “You’re on the doorstep of the very best years of your life.“ And to her future 75-year-old self? “Stay curious, connected, and explore what’s there. Q4 probably has a lot more potential than we know or expect.”

It’s advice that captures the essence of her work: longevity isn’t a burden to manage but a frontier to explore—both for individuals and the organisations smart enough to adapt.

👉Listen to the full conversation 🎧

This written summary only scratches the surface of the more far-ranging conversation we had with Avivah. In the full podcast, she shares fascinating insights on cultural differences in how various countries approach ageing—from individualistic Anglo-Saxon cultures to more collectivist Asian societies—and her recent observations from Australia’s demographic awakening. She also discusses the concept of the “exposome” (how everything we’re exposed to throughout life affects our longevity), offers advice on creating new rituals for longer lives, and explains why going back to school at 60 was the perfect transition ritual for her own Q3. Listen to the complete episode of the DO TANK podcast by ENVI for the full discussion.

👉Also read: Navigating Change: The Midlife Journey. Laetitia@Work #76

👉Also read: The transformation of age markers. Laetitia@Work #85

👉Also read: Why midlife women walk out of corporate jobs. Laetitia@Work #67

🇨🇭 I’m in Lausanne, Switzerland, today (October 9), to take part in a conference organised by Insertion Vaud about the “labour shortage.” I’ll be speaking about how what we call a shortage actually reflects a deeper structural misalignment between working conditions and contemporary realities — especially the unequal burden of care work carried by women. When 60% of women work part-time, it doesn’t take much imagination to see the millions of work hours that could be regained — if only the motherhood penalty weren’t so heavy.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Transparence salariale : pas la panacée, mais une révolution quand même

• L’IA tindérise le recrutement

• Data-Driven ou Data Bullshit ?

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

Miscellaneous

🤖 AI-Generated “Workslop” Is Destroying Productivity, Kate Niederhoffer, Gabriella Rosen Kellerman, Angela Lee, Alex Liebscher, Kristina Rapuano and Jeffrey T. Hancock, Harvard Business Review, September 2025: “As AI tools become more accessible, workers are increasingly able to quickly produce polished output: well-formatted slides, long, structured reports, seemingly articulate summaries of academic papers by non-experts, and usable code. But while some employees are using this ability to polish good work, others use it to create content that is actually unhelpful, incomplete, or missing crucial context about the project at hand. The insidious effect of workslop is that it shifts the burden of the work downstream, requiring the receiver to interpret, correct, or redo the work. In other words, it transfers the effort from creator to receiver.”

Across history, human societies have relied on age markers to structure individual lives and collective expectations. These markers—whether puberty, adulthood, marriage, parenthood, or retirement—functioned as milestones that everyone was meant to pass at roughly the same stage of life and at the same age. They gave meaning to transitions, making clear when a child became an adult, when an adult became a parent, and when a worker became a retiree. They also offered a form of security: one could measure oneself against others, knowing that social approval or disapproval hinged on whether or not one followed the shared script.

Yet in the twenty-first century, these markers have become blurred. The digital revolution, longer life expectancy, economic upheavals, and cultural change have transformed the way societies perceive age. Expectations that once felt natural—leaving the parental home at twenty, marrying in one’s mid-twenties, becoming a parent soon after, and leaving work permanently at around sixty—have become unrealistic or undesirable for many.

This fundamental shift raises questions not only about individuals’ sense of identity but also about the institutions, including the workplace, that once relied on age-based categories. 📚 In my forthcoming book, L’atout âge. 64 clés pour faire de la diversité générationnelle une force, to be released on October 2, I explore these issues in detail, examining how companies and societies can reframe generational diversity as a strength rather than a problem. 💡👇

PRE-ORDER MY BOOK

Age markers across cultures and history

One way to appreciate the transformation of age today is to look back at history and across cultures. Age markers are never universal. In many traditional societies, puberty functioned as the decisive threshold: rituals marked the child’s entry into the world of adults, bringing with them obligations of labour, marriage or warfare. In the industrialised West of the twentieth century, one of the most powerful age markers was retirement. To be sixty was to stand at the gate of old age, either already retired or soon to be so, with a life structured around the sharp division between work and retirement.

Cultural attitudes to age have varied too. At the turn of the twentieth century in Vienna, then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, maturity was a form of social capital. Young men sought to appear older than they were in order to command respect. Beards, walking sticks, and other symbols of seniority were coveted accessories. As Stefan Zweig recounts in The World of Yesterday, young men often cultivated these outward signs of age to gain authority and social recognition in a society that prized experience and stability. A century later, in the Silicon Valley of the 2000s, the situation was inverted. Youth became the ultimate credential. Investors looked for founders in their twenties, not their fifties. Start-up culture fetishised energy, disruption, and a capacity to reimagine everything from scratch. Older workers found themselves concealing their age, turning to cosmetic interventions like Botox to remain employable in a culture obsessed with novelty and youthfulness.

The weakening of traditional age markers

Today, the old certainties have melted away. The stages that once defined adulthood no longer follow a predictable sequence. Leaving the parental home, once a clear rite of passage, now occurs later and more variably than before. In Europe, high housing costs mean that many young people stay with their parents well into their twenties, and some return home after divorce or financial difficulty even at thirty or forty. In 2020, a Pew Research Center study found that 52% of young adults in the U.S. were living with one or both of their parents, marking the first time since the Great Depression that a majority of this age group resided in their parents' home. What was once considered a shameful regression has now become commonplace.

Even those markers that seemed universal in the 20th century, such as acquiring a driver’s license, no longer function as they once did. In the United States, only 60 percent of 18-year-olds held a license in 2018, compared to 80 percent in 1983, reflecting changing urban lifestyles, environmental concerns, and new forms of mobility. In cities like London or Paris, young adults can spend entire lives without owning cars, challenging the association between adulthood and independent driving.

Marriage and coupledom, long assumed to be cornerstones of adulthood, have become precarious too. In France, eleven million people now live alone, and the proportion of single-person households has risen from 13 percent in 1990 to 21 percent in 2019. In the United States, 27.6 percent of households consisted of one person in 2020, compared to only 7.7 percent in 1940. These figures reveal profound cultural change: adulthood is no longer automatically equated with the stable couple. Moreover, separation and divorce are frequent at all ages, meaning that many people cycle in and out of coupledom across their lives.

Parenthood too has lost its status as an inevitable step. A 2022 IFOP survey conducted for Elle magazine found that 13% of French women aged 15 and older prefer a life without children, a significant increase from just 2% in 2006. This trend reflects a growing "childfree" movement in France, where individuals are choosing to forgo parenthood for various reasons, including personal freedom, environmental concerns, and evolving societal norms. In the United States, Pew Research Center surveys suggest that 44 percent of non-parents under 50 say they are not likely to have children, a figure that has grown over the past decade. Choosing not to be a parent has become a legitimate pathway, supported by public voices such as French journalist Bettina Zourli, who argues that women must be able to choose in full conscience whether to become mothers or not. Parenthood is no longer a shared expectation; it is a personal choice.

The same weakening applies to midlife markers. Reaching fifty once implied security—stable marriage, stable job, stable income. Today, the middle decades of life are often periods of turbulence and reinvention. Divorce rates among the over-50s have risen sharply in both Europe and North America. Career reinvention, whether voluntary or forced by economic restructuring, is also widespread. The “midlife crisis” has become a common experience of personal transformation.

👉Also read: Navigating Change: The Midlife Journey. Laetitia@Work #76

Retirement and ageing: the new realities

Perhaps the most dramatic redefinition has taken place at the boundary between work and retirement. To be sixty once meant to be at or very near retirement. Now, that expectation has been overturned.

In France, reforms to the pension system and rising life expectancy have pushed more people in their sixties into the labour force. Between 2018 and 2023, the proportion of 60- to 64-year-olds in work rose by more than six points. Thirteen percent of new retirees in 2024 combined work and pension income, illustrating how hybrid arrangements—entrepreneurship, phased retirement, or volunteer work—are becoming more common.

The US reveals similar trends. In 1985, only 10.8 percent of Americans aged 65 and older were still in the labour force. By 2024, the figure was 19.5 percent. Many of these older workers choose part-time employment: more than a third of workers over 65 are part-time, compared to just 14 percent of those in their fifties. At the same time, older Americans devote more time to leisure, spending on average seven hours a day on recreational activities, almost three hours more than those in their prime working years.

In the UK, older worker participation varies widely by region. In 2022, about 68% of 55- to 64-year-olds were employed in the South East, compared to just 57% in the North East. PwC estimates that if all regions matched the South East’s level, the country would gain 320,000 additional jobs—nearly a third of current vacancies. Yet Britain still underperforms internationally, ranking only 21st out of 38 OECD countries in PwC’s 2023 Golden Age Index. The pandemic further worsened the picture, as rising house prices and health concerns pushed many into early retirement.

Despite national differences, these developments point to a shared demographic reality. Across the OECD, the ratio of working-age adults to retirees is steadily shrinking. In 1950, there were more than seven people aged 20 to 64 for every person over 65. By 2010, the figure had dropped to four, and by 2050 it is projected to fall to just over two. In the US, the ratio is expected to decline from 4.6 to 2.5 between 2010 and 2050; in the UK, from 3.6 to 2.1. This demographic pressure makes the “retirement cliff,” in which people abruptly shift from full activity to full inactivity, increasingly obsolete. What is emerging instead is a more gradual and diverse transition between work and retirement—one that may help ease the demographic squeeze and sustain the balance a little longer.

In my book L’atout âge, I argue that these demographic transformations require societies to rethink the meaning of ageing itself. “Old age” is no longer a single, uniform stage; it is a diverse and dynamic period in which individuals combine activity, leisure, care responsibilities, and community roles in countless different ways. Increasingly, we must speak not of one “old age” but of several: the “young old,” often still active in work or civic life; the “old old,” who may shift gradually into part-time activity or more leisure; the “very old,” for whom care and support become central; and even more nuanced categories such as the “active old” or the “semi-active old.” In other words, just as childhood, adolescence, and adulthood have long been recognized as distinct phases, later life, too, is fragmenting into multiple stages, each with its own challenges, opportunities, and social roles.

Toward a redefinition of age markers

Even markers associated with family life have fragmented. Becoming a grandparent, once a near certainty for those who had children, is no longer universal. Many in their fifties and sixties today will never become grandparents. This reflects both the decline in birth rates and the rising choice among younger generations to remain childfree. As a result, the traditional picture of late adulthood as a time of grandparental responsibility has faded, creating new forms of identity and contribution for older adults.

None of this means that age has lost its importance. Age continues to shape experience, but it no longer dictates destiny. What matters is not chronological age but the intersection of personal circumstances, opportunities, and social support. A fifty-year-old who has just divorced and is searching for housing may face the same challenges as a thirty-year-old leaving the parental home. Conversely, a sixty-year-old entrepreneur may resemble a forty-year-old career changer in energy and ambition.

To adapt, societies need to adjust both their cultural expectations and their institutions. Employment, retirement, and social benefits should be tailored to individual situations rather than fixed age categories. Companies in particular must rethink how they value and integrate workers of different generations, resisting ageist stereotypes and supporting employees through transitions at any stage of life. This is a theme I develop extensively in L’atout âge, which offers practical strategies for making generational diversity a real organisational asset.

Conclusion

The weakening of traditional age markers challenges the way we think about life itself. Where once there were predictable stages and clear boundaries, there are now fluid transitions and more plural trajectories. Adulthood is no longer defined by marriage, parenthood, or leaving home at a set age. Midlife no longer guarantees stability but often brings reinvention. Retirement no longer signals withdrawal but can be a phase of new engagement. Old age is no longer synonymous with decline but can be a time of vitality and contribution.

These changes are not simply private matters; they reshape the foundations of society, from welfare systems to intergenerational relations and corporate practices. They also open up new possibilities. By releasing individuals from rigid age scripts, they create room for choice, flexibility, and innovation. Yet they also create anxieties: without clear markers, how do people know they are on the right path? How do societies maintain solidarity across generations when everyone follows a different timeline?

In L’atout âge. 64 clés pour faire de la diversité générationnelle une force, I suggest that embracing generational diversity—acknowledging the variety of pathways, the richness of experiences across ages, and the new opportunities created by longer lives—can help societies turn these challenges into strengths. Ageing remains a powerful force, but one that affects people unevenly. The gap between chronological age (the number of years lived) and biological age (how our bodies and capacities actually age) highlights profound disparities. Age still matters, yet less as a rigid sequence of milestones and more as a flexible framework that allows for multiple ways of living, working, and thriving.

📌 I’ll be at the Librairie Eyrolles (Paris) on September 29 at 6pm for the launch of my book L’atout âge.

In this book, I share keys to turn generational diversity into a strength, rethink management, and value all ages at work.

For those who will be in Paris, this will be a fantastic opportunity to chat on these themes and leave with a signed copy. Register here 👇

Register here for the 29th of September

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote several new articles (in French):

• Rendons le baby-sitting à nos ados

• L’atout âge : mon nouveau livre

• Combien valent cinq ans de vie ?

• 2025 : Le double « Big Freeze »

• Le personal branding, c’est fini

🎙️ And these two podcasts (also in French):

• En équilibre (with Sandra Le Guyader-Fillaudeau)

• L’IA nous mène-t-elle tout droit à la stagflation ?

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

Miscellaneous

😪 The Job Market Is Hell, Annie Lowrey, The Atlantic, September 2025: “a lot of job applicants never end up in a human-to-human process. The impossibility of getting to the interview stage spurs jobless workers to submit more applications, which pushes them to rely on ChatGPT to build their résumés and respond to screening prompts. (Harris told me he does this; he used ChatGPT pretty much every day in college, and finds its writing to be more “professional” than his own.) And so the cycle continues: The surge in same-same AI-authored applications prompts employers to use robot filters to manage the flow. Everyone ends up in Tinderized job-search hell.”.

I've been on holiday for a month, and it feels like it's been a long time since I worked on a long-format post. Happy to go at it again!

"Too few of us will work in the future?" You're probably expecting yet another post about the impact of AI on work. But no—I'm quite bearish on this issue. I believe the impact of AI on work is largely overblown and that it will wipe out far less human work than we claim it will.

Nor is this piece about the upcoming stagflation (stagnation plus low employment and inflation) brought about by Trump's policies. Yes, these policies are reducing employment. Yes, young graduates are finding it hard to get jobs these days. Yes, many US federal employees have been laid off. Yes, Trump's tariffs will have a global impact on employment in export-dependent countries. Employment worries are already visible in US statistics, which Trump didn't like—so he fired the head of the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS).

But this piece is not directly about all that. Nor is it directly about population ageing and the decreasing share of working age people (yes, the share of working age people will shrink in the future).

This post is primarily about other long-term trends that will reduce the working population even more than expected if we’re not careful. These are four interconnected reasons that have little to do with "personal choices" and everything to do with the collective institutions that we're allowing to weaken and crumble, even as we should be celebrating their anniversaries.💡👇

#1: Insufficient childcare and support for working mothers

The latest US statistics tell a dispiriting story. Working mothers, who helped drive much of the job market's post-pandemic comeback, are again leaving the workforce in large numbers. The share of working mothers aged 25 to 44 with young children has fallen nearly every month this year, dropping by nearly 3 percentage points between January and June. This reversal wipes out many of the gains made by working mothers after the pandemic, when remote work arrangements and flexible schedules lured many back to the labour force.

The causes are systematic and prevalent in many other countries. Return-to-office mandates have eliminated the flexibility that made work possible for many mothers. Major corporations like J.P. Morgan, AT&T, and Amazon, as well as large swaths of the US federal government, have begun mandating that employees clock in to the office five days a week. The enforcement may be uneven, but labour economists say these requirements have added extra strain for many workers, particularly those with young children. As a result, the share of women in the US workforce has fallen since January.

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As national and corporate policies turn their backs on working mothers, it’s becoming harder and harder for people with caregiving responsibilities to thrive in the labour market. An economist for the BLS compares this with the moment to the Barbie movie when Ken takes over the feminist land of Barbie with masculine ideals.

It's clear that we're backsliding in the Ken-ergy economy, that the return-to-office chest pounding is having a real ripple effect.

Childcare has reached breaking points with soaring costs and recruiting difficulties. The ripple effects extend across entire industries and the entire economy. It also means lower growth. Of course, there are also huge implications for the women themselves—their lifetime earnings will be lower, they will most likely return to jobs that don't pay the salaries they were making when they left. It'll be harder for them to get back in, harder to move up the ladder to senior management positions because of employment gaps.

👉 Also read: Women’s Experience Trap. Laetitia@Work #82

This trend may not be limited to the United States. The same conservative backlash against flexible work policies, combined with insufficient childcare infrastructure and corporate return-to-office mandates, threatens to spread this pattern to European countries as well.

#2: Housing crisis trapping workers

Housing shortages represent much more than an isolated economic issue—which is why economists John Myers, Sam Bowman, and Ben Southwood speak of "the housing theory of everything." Housing scarcity is an invisible hand shaping nearly every aspect of working lives, social structures, and even our most personal decisions about careers and family formation.

👉 Also read: How housing scarcity influences everything. Laetitia@Work #81

The digital revolution promised freedom from geography, but instead of dispersing, knowledge work has concentrated in dense urban centres. Cities like San Francisco, New York, London, and Paris have become super-magnets for tech, finance, and creative industries. The "superstar cities" offer higher wages, more opportunity, and vibrant cultural scenes. But they have systematically failed to build enough housing to accommodate their growing workforces.

For every well-paid person in knowledge work who can theoretically work anywhere, there are approximately five people in service work who usually earn significantly less. These "essential" workers—in hospitality, restaurants, elderly care, childcare, healthcare, and other service sectors—serve knowledge workers, care for their children, clean offices, and prepare meals. Unlike knowledge workers, they cannot work remotely and must live within reasonable distance of where the work is located.

This creates a “spatial mismatch”, whereby workers cannot afford to live where the jobs are. The mismatch is likely to widen as service-sector employment—especially in care work—continues to grow, while the creation of new jobs in parts of the knowledge economy slows (due to tariffs, stagflation and perhaps AI too).

When housing is scarce in high-productivity areas, many talented people are priced out entirely, preventing them from accessing better-paying jobs. Many are pushed to give up on work entirely (because it’s not worth it and their skills aren’t valued). You may find yourself stuck somewhere underemployed or unemployed because you simply can't move to where opportunity exists.

More people are forced to live further away from places where they can find quality employment and networks of care and solidarity—parents, friends, extended family, which adds to the childcare burden described in reason #1.

Furthermore climate change compounds the housing crisis by making entire regions uninsurable and uninhabitable.

#3: Population ageing and the caregiving time bomb

By 2030, more than one in four workers in France will be responsible for caring for an elderly relative. Similar trends are unfolding in every fast-ageing society. This isn’t a niche issue—it’s a structural shift in the working-age population.

The reality is stark: millions of people in their prime working years will have to reduce their hours, step back from promotions, or abandon work altogether to care for an ageing parent. The vast majority will be women, because even in households with supposedly “equal” divisions of labour, the burden of elder care falls disproportionately on them (or at least the “choice” to give up paid work for care work is overwhelmingly theirs to make). These exits from the labour market won’t just be temporary. Many will never return to their previous level of pay, seniority, or career momentum. Some will never return at all.

Already, about half of unpaid carers to older adults are employed, often juggling work with exhausting and unpredictable care duties. But without strong public support—professional carers, flexible working rights, and proper leave—many will find the juggling act impossible and be forced to leave work at precisely the stage when their experience is most valuable.

Losing a parent is always difficult. But in economic terms, the danger is what happens before the loss—when caregiving responsibilities pull thousands of skilled, experienced people out of the workforce for years at a time. Without collective action, this silent drain of talent will accelerate, weakening our economies and worsening gender inequality.

👉 Also read: The Future of Work & the Sandwich Generation. Laetitia@Work #63

#4: Deteriorating health of workers

While life expectancy has risen continually —by about 20 years since 1945—several troubling health trends now threaten to shrink the available workforce in ways we are only beginning to grasp.

Mental ill-health, particularly depression and anxiety, shows no sign of improvement despite greater awareness. Cancer rates are climbing among younger cohorts. Meanwhile, the sedentary, screen-heavy nature of much modern work is sowing the seeds of chronic conditions whose full impact will emerge over the next decades.

Perhaps most critically, workplaces have not adapted to the realities of an ageing workforce. As people work longer, employers must invest in ergonomics, equipment, and organisational design that support older bodies. Yet in countries such as France and Germany, high rates of sickness absence suggest that current working conditions are already unsustainable for many. The result: valuable, experienced workers leaving the labour market earlier than planned, often permanently.

The health crisis is also profoundly unequal. Averages conceal the truth that health outcomes are tightly bound to education and income. Poorer workers face multiple, compounding health risks that make consistent employment harder to sustain, triggering a vicious cycle: poor health leads to reduced earning power, which in turn worsens health.

In short, the workforce is ageing, but jobs remain designed for the young. Unless we close this gap—by rethinking work organisation, adapting roles, and investing in healthier workplaces—we will lose growing numbers of workers not to retirement, but to preventable ill-health.

Collective institutions are not a burden—they are the infrastructure of work

The four reasons above—insufficient childcare, the housing crisis, the care demands of an ageing population, and deteriorating worker health—are not about “personal choices.” They must be thought about in relation to the weakening of the collective institutions that sustain workers: unions and collective bargaining, the US Social Security, the French Sécurité sociale…

Eighty years ago, the French Sécurité sociale was born to enshrine collective protections: universal healthcare, family benefits, retirement pensions, and unemployment insurance. It was designed not as a cost to manage—but as the social infrastructure that would allow people to live and work with dignity.

Across the Atlantic, the United States had already enacted its own Social Security system in 1935 under President Roosevelt—which now marks its 90th anniversary. Unlike the French model, U.S. Social Security focuses mainly on pensions and disability insurance—it does not provide universal healthcare or family benefits. A chunk of it came later as Medicare, the health insurance programme for older Americans, was introduced in 1965, and 2025 marks its 60th anniversary.

Yet both systems are under strain. In France, successive reforms have curtailed unemployment benefits, eroded healthcare access while “medical deserts” expand, and tightened retirement provisions. Meanwhile, in the U.S., not only is Social Security being targeted by political forces aiming to shrink its scope, but Medicare and Medicaid are also under threat—facing budget cuts and accelerated privatisation through measures like Trump’s “One Big Beautiful Bill” (this name is so ridiculous that I don’t feel the urge to change it).

The real failure lies in cutting back foundational protections without building new ones for our era’s most pressing challenges—elderly care, affordable housing, lifelong professional reinvention, and resilience in the face of climate change. The pattern repeats across all these issues: rather than strengthening collective solutions that make work sustainable, we are dismantling them and leaving individuals to face systemic problems alone. The choice before us is stark: invest in rebuilding the collective institutions that enable people to work—universal childcare, affordable housing, comprehensive elder care, workplace health protections—or watch our workforce shrink as individuals struggle against challenges too large for any one person to overcome.

The French Sécurité sociale was built as infrastructure enabling work and welfare, not a burden on the state. I wish we were now truly celebrating its anniversary—but there is surprisingly little celebration, and far more dismantling than commemoration. It would be far better if, by the time we reach the centenary, these institutions were points of pride. To get there, we must evolve them, not dismantle them—expanding, not contracting, our collective social safety nets to meet the needs of 2025 and beyond.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote many new articles (in French):

• Masculinité sous stéroïdes

• Mince alors ! Le backlash revient

• Pilates : 7 leçons sur l’avenir du travail

• Et si vos « meilleures années » n'avaient pas commencé ?

• Août, mois sacré : un trésor français

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

Miscellaneous

😪 Why Women Are Weary of the Emotional Labor of ‘Mankeeping’, Catherine Pearson, The New York Times, July 2025: “mankeeping. The term, coined by Angelica Puzio Ferrara, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, has taken off online. It describes the work women do to meet the social and emotional needs of the men in their lives, from supporting their partners through daily challenges and inner turmoil, to encouraging them to meet up with their friends. “What I have been seeing in my research is how women have been asked or expected to take on more work to be a central — if not the central — piece of a man’s social support system”.

Happy birthday to both Social Security and Sécurité sociale—may your next decades be healthier, fairer, and better celebrated than this one! 🎂

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It’s summer so I can finally take the time to read the books 📚 I’ve been meaning to read for months. In my to-read list was Careless People: A Cautionary Tale of Power, Greed, and Lost Idealism by Sarah Wynn Williams, a former Facebook employee. I wasn’t disappointed. It’s a great account of the carelessness of the tech bros that generated the Trumpian world we now live in.

Her memoir offers a front-row seat to Facebook’s transformation (or enshittification), chronicling her seven years inside Facebook (now Meta) as it evolved from a (mostly) idealistic startup that pretended to “connect people” into what she describes as an engine of “lethal carelessness.”

Of course, with hindsight, one can challenge the idea that Facebook was ever an idealistic startup (after all, it was first created as a tool to grade people’s hotness). But what’s certain is that at several specific points in the history of the company, choices were made that indicate a complete disregard for human rights or basic decency and that greed (growth at all costs) came before everything else.

As they became more and more powerful, as their apps scaled to reach billions of users, Mark Zuckerberg and his acolytes (notably Sheryl Sandberg) lost touch with their humanity. Extreme wealth and influence don't just corrupt—they literally rewire the human brain in ways that mirror psychopathy.

When growth and profit become the only goals, everything else gets sacrificed. To grow at all costs, Facebook decided it had to:

• amplify rage, resentment, and fake news for engagement;

• strike deals with dictators and hand over user data;

• weaponise “free speech” as a tool for expansion;

• ignore the suffering of its employees.

Here are a few takeaways from the book—mixed with some of my own reflections.💡👇

The neuroscience of absolute power

The saying "power corrupts" has ancient roots, but modern neuroscience reveals the biological mechanisms behind this corruption. Research shows that people primed with power show decreased activity in brain regions associated with empathy and perspective-taking.

In experiments, participants who had been made to feel powerful showed less "mirroring" when watching videos of other people's actions. Mirror neurons normally fire both when we perform an action and when we observe others performing the same action—it's part of how we understand and empathise with others.

But power quite literally switches off this empathetic response. Hence, the brains of powerful individuals react differently to social cues in ways that resemble psychopaths. The powerful become less accurate at judging others' emotions and more likely to rely on stereotypes rather than seeing people as individuals.

👉 ALSO WATCH this video I made in French about the effects of power on the brain:

This isn't metaphorical corruption—it's measurable brain change. And nowhere are these changes more visible than in Wynn-Williams's intimate portrait of Facebook's leadership.

Move fast and break things

New Zealander Wynn-Williams joined Facebook in 2011 as an idealistic former diplomat who believed “the platform was going to change the world.” She pitched herself to the company for months, convinced she could help them navigate the complex political landscape as governments were not yet beginning to understand Facebook's power. When the company finally hired her, she was elated: “I can't believe I have the opportunity to work on the greatest political tool of my lifetime.”

What she discovered inside was a leadership structure that had already begun showing the neural hallmarks of power corruption. Mark Zuckerberg, she observed, was “desperate to be liked” and increasingly “hungry for attention and adulation.” During a tour of Asia, she was directed to gather crowds of over a million so that he could be “gently mobbed.”

More troubling was Zuckerberg's growing disconnection from the human consequences of his platform's reach. “Moving fast and breaking things” was a philosophy as well as a coding practice. Today, with hindsight, this phrase “move fast and break things” is seen for what it is: incredibly toxic. Indeed it has had deadly consequences.

In Myanmar, Facebook's platform became a vector for genocide against the Rohingya people. Wynn-Williams had raised alarms about hate speech circulating on the platform years earlier, but Facebook's content moderation was painfully inadequate—the company relied on a single Burmese-speaking contractor based in Dublin, multiple time zones away from both Myanmar and Facebook's California headquarters.

“Myanmar demonstrates better than anywhere the havoc Facebook can wreak when it's truly ubiquitous,” she writes. Yet the company's response remained focused on technical solutions rather than human ones, treating genocide as a content moderation problem to be solved with better algorithms rather than a moral crisis requiring immediate human intervention.

The Sheryl Sandberg paradox

Perhaps nowhere is the gap between public persona and private reality more stark than in Wynn-Williams's portrait of Sheryl Sandberg. The author of Lean In, who positioned herself as a champion of women in the workplace, presided over what the author describes as a very toxic environment for female employees.

The cognitive dissonance was painful. Sandberg would turn her charm “on and off like a tap,” demanding “obedience and closeness” beneath her public feminist messaging. Sandberg allegedly instructed her 26-year-old assistant to buy $13,000 worth of lingerie for both of them, and insisted on inappropriate physical intimacy during business travel (probably embodying a grotesque, out-of-touch vision of sisterhood).

When Wynn-Williams nearly died during childbirth from an amniotic fluid embolism, requiring life support and a medically necessary coma, work demands continued unabated. Her manager Joel Kaplan—described as a former Marine and Republican operative—gave her a performance review on her first day back, criticising her for not being “responsive enough” while she was literally fighting for her life on maternity leave.

This disconnect between public advocacy and private behaviour illustrates this fact about power: it makes people less able to see the perspectives of others while increasing their confidence in their own moral righteousness. Sandberg could genuinely believe she was advancing women's causes while simultaneously creating conditions that drove talented women out of the company.

Over the years, Facebook—now Meta—has faced repeated allegations of fostering a workplace culture where misogyny, harassment, and discrimination against women are widespread. Reports from former employees, lawsuits, and investigations have pointed to patterns of sexual harassment, dismissive attitudes toward women in leadership, and a lack of meaningful accountability for perpetrators. Despite public commitments to diversity and inclusion, Meta has often been criticised for protecting powerful men within the company while sidelining or silencing women who speak out.

On top of this, the company's demanding work culture—where 60- to 80-hour workweeks are normalised—makes it especially difficult for parents, and particularly mothers, to thrive. The expectation of constant availability clashes with caregiving responsibilities, reinforcing a system that sidelines women in the workplace.

In short, the “feminist” advice and mantras of a billionaire executive who’s always had the help of countless nannies and servants is of little help to regular female employees. Worse, they may have added insult to injury, making these women feel worthless for not “leaning in” and “sitting at the table”, putting the blame on them, rather than tackling the toxic culture making their success so fraught.

The China files: when "Free Speech" actually means censorship

Perhaps the most damning parts in Wynn-Williams's book concern Facebook's secret project to enter the Chinese market. Despite public statements about supporting free speech and democratic values, Facebook was privately developing censorship tools and data-sharing arrangements that would satisfy the demands of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

In many ways, the hypocritical way Facebook weaponised the free speech argument foreshadows Elon Musk’s transformation of Twitter-X and the advent of Trump II. While Zuckerberg testified before Congress about Facebook's commitment to free expression, the company was simultaneously developing mechanisms to silence Chinese dissidents. When Chinese exile Guo Wengui used Facebook to broadcast attacks on the CCP, the platform shut down his account following behind-the-scenes pressure from Beijing.

Wynn-Williams describes how Facebook's leadership crafted “cleverly worded talking points” to mislead Congress about their China activities. When a senator asked Zuckerberg directly about Facebook's willingness to operate under Chinese censorship, he replied that “no decisions have been made around the conditions under which any possible future service might be offered in China.” “He lies,” she writes.

There is a pattern here: making public proclamations about democratic values and coupling them with secret accommodations to authoritarian regimes.

Mountainhead isn’t far off

A few weeks ago I watched the film Mountainhead (on Max), a satirical comedy-drama about four billionaire friends who meet at a remote mountain house while the world is falling apart due to AI-driven disinformation spread by a social media platform (fictitious Traam in the film). The film's premise—three billionaires whose social media platform has unleashed chaos through deepfake technology—feels less like science fiction than documentary preview today.

In Armstrong's satire, the tech titans fantasise about taking over “failing nations” and running them like startups. “We intellectually and financially back a rolling swap-out to crypto network states, populations love it, and it snowballs,” one character explains. When that proves insufficient, they consider more direct action: “Do we just get upstream, leverage our hardware, software, data, scale this up and coup out the U.S.?”

The film's power lies in its recognition that these men aren't necessarily evil masterminds—they're just fantastically arrogant and ineffective outside their tech domains. Like Wynn-Williams's portrait of Facebook leadership, they combine vast power with stunning ignorance about the world they're reshaping (destroying). They literally don’t know what they’re doing. They are fantastically careless and devoid of empathy.

The algorithmic amplification of chaos

In some ways, the neurological changes that come with extreme power explain why platforms designed to “connect the world” became engines of division and violence. Leaders whose empathy circuits have been dampened by wealth and influence naturally gravitate toward metrics that ignore human suffering—engagement, growth, user acquisition—while remaining blind to the human cost.

Facebook's algorithm, designed to maximise user attention, inevitably amplified content that triggered strong emotional responses: rage, fear, resentment, and outrage. The platform discovered that fake news spreads six times faster than true information, but rather than seeing this as a problem to solve, leadership treated it as user preference to satisfy.

The result was a global experiment in social manipulation. Brexit. Trump's first election. The January 6th insurrection. The fast rise of the Rassemblement national in France and AFD in Germany. Trump’s second election. And many more chaotic world events in all parts of the world. Each of these events and phenomena illustrates the platform's extraordinary ability to weaponise human psychology for “engagement”, with devastating consequences for democratic institutions worldwide.

Carelessness is evil

Again, what makes Wynn-Williams's account of Facebook’s leaders so disturbing isn't just the presence of calculated malevolence—it's the total absence of curiosity about the consequences of their actions. Facebook’s leaders know very little about the world. And they don’t care. There is no machiavellian conspiracy so much as carelessness and cynicism on an unprecedented scale.

The neuroscience of power suggests that the problem isn't primarily individual bad actors but structural arrangements that concentrate vast wealth and influence in the hands of people whose brains get rewired to lack empathy.

No amount of corporate diversity training or ethics workshops will suffice here. Only the strongest regulation. Breaking these monopolies so this unprecedented concentration of power can no longer be possible. And creating accountability mechanisms that don't depend on the voluntary good intentions of a few people.

In the end, Careless People is both memoir and warning—a reminder that in our connected world, a few individuals do a lot of evil. The world is most definitely a worse place because of them. The evil they cause is because they don’t give a shit.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote many new articles (in French):

• Et si vos « meilleures années » n'avaient pas commencé ?

• Août, mois sacré : un trésor français

• Des histoires d'entrepreneures d'exception

• En finir avec l'IA-gisme

• La pénibilité du travail des femmes, toujours invisibilisée

• Le double standard du vieillissement : toujours d'actualité

• Le coût de la séniorité des femmes

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🎙️ I recorded an episode of the THUNE podcast (in French), hosted by Laurence Vély, to discuss my recent report for the Fondation des Femmes on the hidden costs of female seniority in the workplace. We discussed how ageism and sexism combine to penalise women as they grow older, often leading to significant income gaps and increased vulnerability. We also talked about the solutions that can help ensure women don’t grow older only to end up poorer.

🎙️ I joined Faustine Duriez on the Yes We Care podcast (in French) to talk about how, despite RTO momentum, the traditional office will continue to lose its central role as a workspace. In many companies, the push to return to the office really means to mask the will to lay people off. We discussed how work is increasingly happening elsewhere: in homes, in between spaces, on the road etc. This episode is an invitation to rethink the symbolic power of the office and to explore what a more flexible, inclusive vision of work could look like.

📻 Two weeks ago, I had the pleasure of joining the renowned French radio show Le Téléphone Sonne on France Inter, alongside labour lawyer Élise Fabing and professor Clothilde Coron, to discuss women’s experiences at work. We tackled critical issues such as menopause, career barriers, gendered discrimination, and the persistent cultural silence around women's struggles in the workplace.

Miscellaneous

📚 Debunking the myth of male genius, Peter Conrad, The Observer, June 2025: “Helen Lewis devotes her angry, witty book to a narrowly polemical account of the notion and its myth-making boosters. For her, genius is “a rightwing concept”, offensive “because it champions the individual over the collective”. This special category, “somewhere between secular saint and superhero”, is not democratically open to all, and the prodigies it celebrates are for Lewis “misshapen figures”, monsters who typically mistreat their wives, neglect their children and deny credit to their collaborators. The geniuses are all men, since women, as Lewis suggests in a glance at Jane Austen, lack the requisite swagger. I think she underestimates Austen’s sense of her own importance: she described novels, her own included, as “works in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed”.

Don’t become careless! 🤗

So far, 2025 has been a year of intense writing and reflection for me. I’ve just finished a book that will be published in France this October (more on that very soon), and I’ve also had the privilege of writing a report for La Fondation des Femmes, a remarkable organisation fighting for women’s rights and gender equality in France. This foundation plays a crucial role in supporting feminist initiatives through funding, legal advocacy, and public awareness. I’m proud to contribute to its mission at a time when the need for action has never felt more urgent.

The report I was asked to write focuses on a group too often forgotten: women between the ages of 45 and 65. These women are paid less, promoted less, and seen less. They become invisible just as they start to see things more clearly. Their health concerns are often dismissed. They carry the emotional and practical burden of caring for both older and younger generations—the so-called “sandwich generation”—and they’re often exhausted. Writing this report was enraging. It sheds light on a cruel paradox: just when women reach a stage of life marked by insight, experience, and strength, society turns away from them.

👉 READ THE REPORT IN FRENCH (Fondation des femmes)

This report exposes what I call women’s “experience trap”: women’s accumulated skills and expertise are treated not as assets, but as liabilities once they pass the age of 45. Women in France lose an average of €157,245 in earnings compared to men—that’s €7,862 per year. Behind these numbers lies a structural injustice: a society that sidelines its most experienced female talent, failing to recognise their value just when they should be most empowered.

For women in the private sector, this penalty reaches €159,000 over the same period. These figures highlight more than statistical disparities; they reveal how France transforms women's decades of professional growth into economic punishment, creating an "experience trap" where expertise means exclusion and seniority becomes stigma.

This systematic waste of human capital represents not just individual hardship but a collective economic catastrophe, as France squanders the potential of millions of women at the height of their professional powers.💡👇

The double penalty: when ageism meets sexism

INSEE data reveal that salary gaps between men and women dramatically worsen after age 40, demonstrating how the experience trap tightens over time. In France's combined public and private sectors, the income gap increases from 23% at ages 40-49 to over 27% after age 55. This progression represents what we coin "the cost of seniority" for women—a perverse system where additional years of experience correlate with greater economic penalty.

The situation is particularly acute in the private sector, where salary gaps in full-time equivalent positions surge from 13.6% at ages 40-49 to nearly 25% after age 60. Before age 40, the gap stands at 10% in full-time equivalent terms. By age 60, a private sector woman earns €937 less monthly than her male equivalent—a staggering difference that reflects decades of accumulated disadvantages, where each year of additional experience paradoxically decreases rather than increases her market value.

This economic penalty stems from multiple intersecting factors. According to Force Femmes, a French organisation supporting women over 45 in career transitions, 47% of recruitment agencies admit difficulty "placing" women over 45. The challenges these women face include:

• Perceived lack of flexibility and adaptability ;

• Assumptions about obsolete digital skills ;

• Concerns about high salary costs ;

• Judgments about insufficient remaining working years ;

• Discrimination based on physical appearance (cited by 78% of recruitment agencies)

While 16.9% of women report age discrimination compared to 13.8% of men, 23.7% of women also face sex-based discrimination—creating a double barrier to career advancement.

The sandwich generation: caught between care responsibilities

Women aged 45-65 often find themselves in the "sandwich generation," simultaneously caring for aging parents, supporting teenage (or young adult) children, and sometimes providing childcare for grandchildren. This period represents the culmination of care responsibilities that have shaped women's careers throughout their lives.

👉 ALSO READ Laetitia@Work #63, “The Sandwich Generation”

The average age of becoming a grandmother in France is 55—well before retirement—yet this role's professional impact remains largely unrecognised. According to the European Grandparents School (EGPE), grandmothers contribute 23 million hours weekly of unpaid childcare. This invisible labour often requires professional accommodations, reduced working hours, or early retirement.

As Odile Plan, president of the Or Gris association, notes: "In our imagination, the grandmother is the one who always says yes." This cultural expectation creates pressure for women to prioritise family care over professional advancement, despite their continued career ambitions.

The report references earlier research demonstrating that 41% of female caregivers refuse professional opportunities, while 43% stop working entirely. This caregiving role pushes women toward part-time work (29% compared to 13% of men) and compromises their retirement rights, with 62% expressing concern compared to 44% of men.

The health impact is equally severe: 81% of female caregivers prioritise others' health over their own, 20% forgo their own medical care, and over half experience mental overload, stress, and professional burnout. One-third suffer psychologically, with real mortality risks—60% of caregivers face increased mortality risk following a loved one's illness.

A thicker glass ceiling

The traditional glass ceiling becomes a "seniors' ceiling," particularly resistant to breaking. If you haven’t broken it until yet, there’s not much chance you’ll break it now. You’re no longer seen as having ‘potential’.

Professional trajectories differ sharply by gender: as men age, they are increasingly likely to move into executive roles—a trend not mirrored among women. Economist Françoise Milewski notes, “Among full-time employees, career progression is significantly more pronounced for men, especially those with higher education, whereas for women, career paths remain relatively flat regardless of education level or generation.”

Women’s salaries tend to plateau around the national average throughout their careers, while men’s earnings climb steadily, reaching 130% of the national average by the end of their careers—compared to just 110% for women. This wage stagnation reflects limited internal mobility: only 12% of senior-level women report receiving a promotion in the past five years, versus 19% of their male counterparts.

Entrepreneurship as escape route

Facing employment barriers, many senior women turn to entrepreneurship. While women represent only 25% of business leaders overall, 37% of female entrepreneurs launch their ventures after age 50, compared to 23% of men. However, they typically create businesses in traditionally female sectors—care, wellness, personal services—which generate lower revenues.

The gender gap persists in entrepreneurship: women’s average annual revenue is 20% lower than men’s (€39,363 versus €49,304 among the self-employed). Among so-called micro-entrepreneurs—a simplified legal status in France designed to encourage small-scale, often solo business activity—women earned an average of €6,598 in 2022, 18.9% less than men’s €8,135.

The menopause penalty

Menopause affects millions of French women— almost half of all women and a quarter of the population. 87% experience at least one symptom, with 20-25% suffering severe symptoms. A 2023 study by MGEN and Fondation des Femmes found that 35% of French people still find menopause difficult to discuss, with 32% considering it "unpleasant" and 32% viewing it as "taboo."

Only 30% of female employees would discuss menopause-related issues with employers or supervisors, though this represents an 8-point increase since 2019. British research indicates women experience an average 4.3% income reduction in the four years following menopause diagnosis, reaching 10% by the fourth year—adding a "menopause penalty" to existing maternal and caregiving penalties.

A recent French parliamentary repors recommends making menopause a public health priority, proposing 25 measures including integration into mid-career medical visits, specialised consultations, and workplace accommodations.

Women’s health jeopardised at work

Women face increasing occupational health risks that often remain invisible. Workplaces designed with a male-centric perspective—from equipment to safety protocols—systematically disadvantage women. As Dr. Agnès Aublet-Cuvelier highlighted in her testimony to the Senate: "Wearing oversized gloves forces us to exert greater gripping force to hold both the gloves and objects. This mismatch significantly raises the risk of musculoskeletal disorders."

Women represent 60% of all workers who develop musculoskeletal disorders (MSDs), with severity indexes three times higher among female workers than male workers. Between 2001 and 2019, while French men's workplace accidents decreased 27%, women's increased over 40%.

Only 23% of beneficiaries of the Professional Prevention Account (C2P)—a French system that helps workers in risky jobs reduce health hazards and extend their careers—are women. This is because the system’s six recognized risk factors—night work, high-pressure environments, extreme temperatures, noise, rotating shifts, and repetitive motions—mostly come from male-dominated industries. It overlooks health risks common in female-dominated jobs, such as long hours of standing, emotional stress, and light but repetitive tasks.

Older women’s precariousness is a social time bomb

A growing phenomenon affects those "neither employed nor retired" (NER)—people aged 55-69 who have left the workforce but cannot yet access the pension system. Women represent 60% of this group, with the proportion increasing from 14% to 16% between 2014 and 2021 due to successive pension reforms.

At age 55, 22% of women are NER compared to 17% of men, with the gap widening to nearly double by age 62 (11% versus 6%). Among 55-61 year-olds who are NER, 63% suffer chronic health problems compared to 35% of employed seniors. Among those who are NER due to health issues, 54% are women.

The phenomenon of senior women who are neither employed nor retired remains deeply invisible. Pension reforms tend to increase the number of people relying on social assistance—and women are disproportionately affected by this shift.

All these accumulated disadvantages lead to retirement poverty. Among French retirees living on less than €1,000 per month, 75% are women. On average, women receive a pension of €1,268 monthly, compared to €2,050 for men—a 38% gap.

Pension reversions help reduce this gap to 26%, as 32% of women receive them versus only 6% of men. However, this support weakens as fewer couples marry. Among elderly people below the poverty line, 70% are women, and one in six women over 75 lives in poverty.

The 2023 pension reform risks worsening these inequalities. The raised minimum pension of €1,200 remains out of reach for most women with interrupted careers, since it requires a full career history.

Nine policy recommendations

We end the report with nine policy proposals to address these systemic inequalities:

1. Launch a national campaign against inequalities for senior women, focused on the specific inequalities faced by senior women compared to senior men, targeting private-sector employers. This could include adapting the existing “50+ Charter” with commitments for senior women and commissioning new studies or parliamentary reports on the employment of senior women.

2. Take caregiving into account for retirement benefits: care work, mostly done by women for elderly relatives, sick loved ones, or disabled children, currently doesn’t count towards retirement credits. Introduce a “caregiving bonus” to validate retirement quarters for those who reduce or pause their work to provide care, similar to maternity leave recognition.

3. Acknowledge the hardship involved in women’s work: many physically and emotionally demanding jobs held by women (caregivers, cashiers, cleaners) are overlooked when recognising difficult working conditions. These roles involve heavy mental load, irregular hours, and emotional stress, but current systems fail to account for these challenges. It is essential to update workplace policies and protections to include these factors and better support women in such roles.

4. Make care jobs sustainable careers: care professions should no longer wear out workers before retirement. Develop career paths allowing experienced caregivers to move into less physically demanding roles, improve working conditions, staffing, equipment, and ensure recovery time is built into work schedules.

5. Protect part-time workers who care for others: many women work part-time to care for family members, risking future poverty. Reform pension rules so part-time caregivers can earn full retirement credits and fight the stigma that limits their job opportunities or career progression.

6. Address the “neither employed nor retired” group: most people who are neither employed nor retired (NER) are women. Improve data collection to better understand their situation, challenges, and needs. Use this information to design policies for job reintegration, health-accessible jobs, or transitional income support.

7. Boost research on women’s health and menopause: increase funding and focus on women’s health research, especially menopause, which remains neglected. Implement a public health plan in workplaces to raise awareness, train managers, adapt work conditions, and provide personalised care options.

8. Train occupational doctors on menopause: menopause symptoms often affect work performance but are rarely addressed in occupational health. Train workplace doctors to recognise symptoms, recommend accommodations, and manage risks like osteoporosis that can affect women in physically demanding jobs.

9. Create new caregiver and grandparent leave: senior women often provide care but receive little recognition. Introduce paid leave for caregiving to seriously ill family members and short paid grandparental leave to acknowledge their important family role.

Conclusion: Ending the double standard of ageing

As Susan Sontag wrote over 50 years ago in "The Double Standard of Aging," society judges women's ageing far more harshly than men's. While men supposedly gain authority and credibility with age, women are perceived as "declining" and marginalised from valued roles.

This represents an immense waste of skills, experience, and untapped potential, not just individual hardship but collective loss of productivity and societal wealth.

The report sheds light on invisible phenomena that don’t have to be inevitable. With ambitious public policies recognising women's contributions throughout their lives—from caregiving to professional expertise—France can prevent the social time bomb of senior women's precariousness while harnessing their full economic potential.

The cost of female seniority is ultimately the cost of a society that fails to value half its population's accumulated wisdom and experience. Breaking this pattern requires not just policy changes but a fundamental shift in how we perceive ageing, gender, and value creation in the 21st century.

💡For Nouveau Départ, I wrote many new articles (in French):

• Les violences conjugales : un sujet d’entreprise ?

• Le blues du développeur

• Échelle cassée, jeunesse bloquée

→ Subscribe to receive my future podcasts and articles directly in your inbox!

📢 I am pleased to announce the publication on June 12 of this new report I co-authored with the Fondation des Femmes, titled « Le coût de la séniorité. Sortir de l’invisibilisation pour prévenir la précarité de demain ». The report sheds light on the often invisible challenges faced by senior women in the workforce—balancing care responsibilities, enduring career barriers, and facing health risks—that contribute to growing economic precariousness. It offers nine policy recommendations to recognise and support women’s contributions and prevent future inequalities.

Miscellaneous

💻 For Some Recent Graduates, the A.I. Job Apocalypse May Already Be Here, Kevin Roose, The New York Times, May 2025: “Unemployment for recent college graduates has jumped to an unusually high 5.8 percent in recent months, and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York recently warned that the employment situation for these workers had “deteriorated noticeably.” Oxford Economics, a research firm that studies labor markets, found that unemployment for recent graduates was heavily concentrated in technical fields like finance and computer science, where A.I. has made faster gains.”

Don’t let experience become a career trap! 🤗