ABC News opinion writer Jane Caro has blasted the media and marketing worlds for ignoring women over 50.
In a scathing piece entitled “Women over 50 are living out two fates that show feminism is an incomplete project” the near 60-year-old argued that our sexist society had left older women out in the cold.
From not featuring 50-plus women in mainstream media to the huge gap in superannuation, Caro shone a spotlight on the inequalities in lifestyle older women faced — especially those who were disadvantaged financially.
“Huge multinational enterprises are built entirely upon the exploitation of female insecurity, particularly the fear of growing old,” she wrote.
“However, as someone who has not only crossed the Rubicon of 50, but is on the threshold of the unthinkable (60), I am here to tell the women of the world: fear not. Most of them, anyway.”
Appearing on The Drum last week, Caro wrote that she and three other women of her “vintage” talked about some of the key issues affecting Australian women over 50: ageing, work, money and relationships.
She said viewers were “thrilled” to see the under-discussed demographic finally being talked about.
“Yet somehow, the fact that older women like to see themselves in the media, like to listen to people discussing their lives, and now constitute a largely untapped market, still seems to fly below the radar,” Caro wrote.
“We aren’t sexy to marketers, programmers and editors and so they forget that we are sexy to ourselves. Indeed, many 50-something women relish this stage of their life — enjoying grandparenthood, extra leisure time and a newfound sense of self-assurance. But for too many Australian women, growing older brings a confronting set of challenges that have nothing to do with how they look or feel.”
Caro blamed a lifetime of sexism for the fact that many older women now struggled with underemployment, financial stress and homelessness — in fact the fastest-growing group among the homeless is women over 55.
A distressing fact when Caro points out that most women over 50 have spent their working lives in relatively low-paid, low-skilled jobs as a result of being encouraged as young women to “not bother” with tertiary training because of course, they would marry, have kids and have a husband to support them.
“They don’t have much superannuation (women retire with roughly half as much super as men: $105,000, on average, compared with men’s $197,000), are too old for the job market, too young for the pension and not eligible for any kind of disability support,” she wrote.
But, Caro also argued that there was an upside to being over 50 as we at Starts at 60 know all to well.
From not having periods: “there is simply no negative to that,” — to having grandchildren, Caro said being over 50 finally allowed most women the freedom to do what they wanted.
“Just as we stop physically caring for other people, many of us also stop — at last — caring what anyone else thinks about us, especially how we look.”