Why NOON is at the Labour Party Conference

I have hopped on a train to Liverpool for the Labour Party Conference to spread the word about Queenagers to the new government. We’re hosting a massive Queenager Ball inside the conference at the mighty ACC on Monday night.

The purpose of the party is not just to enjoy some Much More To Come and Not Done Yet cocktails (though I’m looking forward to those) but to make the case for why midlife women are an overlooked powerhouse whose time is NOW. We’ve got some great support on this – the fab Jess Phillips MP is going to speak at the party, along with Dawn Butler MP and M People’s Heather Small MBE. We’re hoping to make quite the splash (big thanks to amazing Queenager and NOON stalwart Tina Backhouse and her company Theramex for sponsoring the party and making it happen!)

Luckily, we are pushing at a bit of an open door on this with Labour – after all, the new Cabinet is rammed with Queenagers. Rachel Reeves (age 45) is the first ever female Chancellor of the Exchequer; Angela Rayner, Deputy Prime Minister; Yvette Cooper,  Home Secretary; Liz Kendall, Secretary of State for Work and Pensions; Anneliese Dodds, Minister for Women and Equalities … the list is long.

Earlier this year when I interviewed Anneliese, she cited a UN women report which shows “how all OECD countries could boost their GDP by over $6 trillion if they all matched Sweden’s high female employment rate”. She added that “rich countries are losing some 15% of potential GCP due to women’s under employment.”

• Read my full interview with Anneliese Dodds
• NOON Consulting: Why women are walking out of their careers
• 5 questions to ask yourself about changing career in midlife

This was echoed by a new report from Europe last week which called for “companies to adapt to the needs of an aging work force”. This includes investing in age-friendly equipment in the workplace and the re-arrangement of workflows, working hours and shifts. “Although these measures are aimed at older employees, all employees benefit, not least women. Generational relations are not antagonistic but cooperative. Age-friendly companies with mixed teams have a positive effect on the productivity of older and younger employees.”

The cost of squeezing out older women at work

We are already seeing 5 generations working alongside each other in many companies – but too often Queenagers are getting squeezed out. As Anneliese Dodds told me: “UK labour market participation by women between 50 and 64 has actually gone down in recent years – in fact, an estimated £7 billion of additional economic output could be released to the UK economy if the 157,000 Queenagers who have left work during the pandemic returned.”

Getting Queenagers back into harness – or indeed getting companies to keep them on rather than making them redundant as they hit 50 – is one of Dodds’s passions. “About a year ago, I launched what I called a conversation with women in the 40s, 50s and 60s about the issues they are facing in the workplace. They are facing so many different kinds of pressures, from being sandwich carers – there are half a million women in that situation – and their health-care issues with about a fifth of of these midlife women who have left the Labour market being on NHS waiting lists…”

(Her official findings echo our NOON research about the midlife collision and that by age 50 over half of women have been through at least 5 massive life events.)

NOON Consulting and research backs this up

Dr Lucy Ryan, our Head of Consulting at NOON has written for us about why women are leaving their jobs just when they are at their most experienced. Her book on the topic – Revolting Women: Why midlife women are leaving their jobs and what we can do about it – has just WON Business Book of the Year.

Lucy calls this maelstrom that hits us at this point the “midlife collision”. Straight from celebrating her victory (she was the first woman EVER to win this award, itself a shocker), Lucy told me: “This goes way beyond menopause, that is just one of the issues hitting women at this point.”

Why we shouldn’t just focus on menopause

Indeed, we’re in agreement that the focus on menopause to the exclusion of everything else can be detrimental.

“Women don’t want to be medicalised around menopause because it’s often been used against us, like pregnancy. What we are seeing is a Queenager brain drain from the work force,” she says. “This aspect of women leaving or being forced out of their jobs is under researched, under explored and too often invisible. I am thrilled that my book won but what we now need is for companies and government to take gendered ageism and the fact of the midlife collision seriously and to create policy which will keep Queenagers in work.”

Lucy points out that we still do NOT have equality. “It’s not shifting when it comes to the number of women at senior levels. Female executive directors make up only 11-30%. For every woman promoted to director level, 2 women leave and 6 out of 10 leadership roles still go to men.”

So what does changing that landscape look like? Top of the list has to be flexibility. Our NOON research finds that flexibility is 16 times more important to senior women than status. But all too often becoming more senior means taking on a hungry job which requires presenteeism. That’s often impossible to square with the other demands on our time at this point.

One answer to midlife career pressure: Life Leave

One answer to that is Life Leave: that is, employers granting midlifers a sabbatical to deal with an acute caring crisis.

In the NOON Circles I hear woman after woman saying she stepped out of her job because she wanted to be there in a caring role … and then found it impossible to get back in again.

Given that according to the Harvard Business Review Queenagers are the best at managing complex change, we need to combat the gendered ageism and the rigged recruitment algorithms that are frustrating so many women trying to get back into the Labour market in their 50s and 60s.

A reminder of what Queenagers bring to the table

The good news is that Anneliese Dodds gets it. “It is these midlife women who are taking responsibility, trying to face all these challenges at the same time, doing an amazing job but with those competing pressures, which are not being recognised by anyone, particularly not employers. This is key to the economy and retention of midlife women in the labour market. There is a clear economic argument for this as well as a moral and ethical one.”

This Queenager generation are the first cohort of women to have worked all through their lives in such numbers and hit these midlife pinchpoints while still in employment (the state pension age is 68 and likely to rise). And the Gender Pension Gap is a whopping 35%. With women living longer on smaller pension pots, no wonder the Labour government wants to keep them in work – otherwise we will see millions of older women in poverty as they age.

Why does Dodds think this cohort of midlife women have been ignored for so long but are now creeping up the agenda? “Because finally we are seeing some women of this age coming into those much more senior roles in business, in media and in politics. That is creating a strong push now for change.

“These women are the role models. They’re the ones who would be providing the support to younger colleagues. They’re the ones who understand what has been tried before in organisations and has worked and what hasn’t worked. They’re the ones who have built up those networks of others in their business and in their industry. And of course, they’ve also often got many skills from bringing up children as well and caring and in other ways, and juggling all of those pressures… So they’re at the top of their game, and the reduced productivity growth, because of those women moving out of the labour market, is a really significant problem.”

Here, here!

This is the argument we will be making at conference on Monday night… I’ll report back on how it has gone.