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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 normallywho live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible agehave 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. This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, for 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 representedin leadership, in organizations, in the mediathen 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 invisiblepresent 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. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}} Theres no point in blaming the women Let us be absolutely clear: This is not about condemning womens individual choices. Gray 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 naive. 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. Thats 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 womento borrow the central idea of a brilliant newsletter by author Caroline Criado Perezhave 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 placesubmissive, 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 50and especially over 60are 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 both the big and small 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 toleratedeven in leadership or expert rolesonly 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 rejuvenatedEmma Thompson, Keira Knightley, Kate Winsletbecause encountering a female face over 35 that looks real has become a rare event. Seeing such faces should be familiar and banal. On-screen, its exceptional. Thus, we have lost our collective visual memory of what women in their 40s, 50s, or 60s actually look like. Perfectly normal featureslines of expression, changes in skin texture, saggingare 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 35or 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 thirtysomething faces, where age is either erased or reduced to a stereotype. Women in their 50s or 60s are largely absentexcept 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 valueauthority, gravitas, experience, powerwhile 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 sho visible signs of aging without consequence. Many describe a feeling of literal disappearance, what French journalist Sophie Dancourt has memorably called the convent syndrome: an unspoken injunction to withdraw from public life once youth, fertility, and sexualized visibility are presumed to be over. This logic is brutally familiar in the entertainment industry, where womens 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 marginalization, but also a cultural message that equates womens worth with youthand 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 heroesTina Fey, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, and Patricia Arquettewho are celebrating a darkly comic milestone: the age at which women are deemed no longer desirable or castable. Made 10 years ago, the sketch does not feel dated at all. It turns ageist erasure into a sharp piece of feminist satireone 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 destabilizing.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 womennot 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. Its about diversity Calling for more older female role models does not mean prescribing how women should age. There should be no new rulewhether to go gray 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. Gray hair and dyed hair. Bodies that show time in different ways. Making this diversity visible expands what is socially imaginable. Every woman who chooseswhen she can, when she wantsto 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 todayshe 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 womens lives in their full lengthnot just in their youth. {"blockType":"mv-promo-block","data":{"imageDesktopUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-169.jpg","imageMobileUrl":"https:\/\/images.fastcompany.com\/image\/upload\/f_webp,q_auto,c_fit\/wp-cms-2\/2026\/01\/PhotoLVitaud-11.jpg","eyebrow":"","headline":"\u003Cstrong\u003ESubscribe to Laetitia@Work\u003C\/strong\u003E","dek":"Women power the worlds productivity its time we talked more about it. Explore a woman-centered take on work, from hidden discrimination to cultural myths about aging and care. Dont miss the next issue subscribe to Laetitia@Work.","subhed":"","description":"","ctaText":"Learn More","ctaUrl":"http:\/\/laetitiaatwork.substack.com","theme":{"bg":"#2b2d30","text":"#ffffff","eyebrow":"#9aa2aa","subhed":"#ffffff","buttonBg":"#3b3f46","buttonHoverBg":"#3b3f46","buttonText":"#ffffff"},"imageDesktopId":91472264,"imageMobileId":91472265,"shareable":false,"slug":""}}
Category:
E-Commerce
Have you ever watched someone try to come up with a creative idea: Postit notes, coffee, laptop, a determined glint in their eye and a solemn expression on their face? If the idea isnt coming, add a few sighs, some squirming, and the magical rearrangement of every object on the desk. Most workplaces still reward this try harder ritual. This is rarely where creative energy actually emerges. We all know the stories. The best ideas come in the shower, on a walk, doing dishes, or even during everyones beloved folding of laundry. Heres the thing: its not a quirk. Movement helps foster creativity. It occupies the body in a repeating pattern that doesnt require the brain to do too many mental pull-ups, which is why it reliably restores access to insight. When the nervous system settles even slightly, the mind widens its search and connects ideas that didnt seem related a few minutes earlier. When employees end up performing creativity instead of accessing it, their attention often tightens around the problem. They start monitoring, judging, checking. That pressure narrows perception and makes it harder to notice new connections. If your team is struggling to find creative solutions, do not ask people to push harder. Instead, try to get your team to move so people can relax enough for their creative ideas to flow without force. Here are three moments when leaders should watch for and what they should do when they happen. 1. Redlight: Reactive Pause Red-light moments are fight or flight situations, with burn it to the ground imagination at play. This looks like: Lets scrap the entire project and start over, fire off an unprofessional email, or make an impulsive, on-the-spot yes commitment. Perception narrows, patience disappears, and rarely does acting or creating from that charge produce a positive, generative outcome. Red-light pauses call for brief, more vigorous movement to discharge the stress response. Build in a quick change of scene: a fast lap around the building, a flight of stairs, or shaking out the arms. The purpose is to burn off adrenaline, widen perception, and step back out of emergency mode so people can return their creative focus to the ideas and projects they should be solving. If your team is up for it, jumping jacks definitely give that destructive charge somewhere to go with some humor added. 2. Yellowlight: Reroute Pause Yellowlight moments are the Ive been staring at this for an hour and its not getting better days. The mind is running the same idea over and over, the idea of the outcome is sabotaging the actual creating of it, instead of building the conditions for imagination to thrive. Normalize small, rhythmic movement that lets the mind drift. Unlike red-light pauses, which are brief and vigorous, yellow-light pauses are slower and sustained. Close the laptops and take a slow 10-minute walk outside, with the main intention of shifting attention to sensory input, like noticing different types of cars, sounds, or colors, or spend a few minutes doodling the same shape. The plan is to give the brain enough repetition to relax its grip so energy can reroute toward new options. Teams quickly learn that this isnt slacking. Its a practical way to refocus creative energy so work can move faster, not slower. When people step away without technology, theyre far more likely to return with a fresh angle instead of the same recycled thought in a slightly different font. 3. Greenlight: Proactive Pause Green-light moments are when you want to generate new ideas and can see the tank is empty: people are exhausted or viewing the unknown like its an uncertain void. This is where move and think brainstorms shine, because moderate movement feels spacious and supports idea generation. Instead of another conferenceroom session, leaders can take a product question, culture question, or whats next for this team question on a slow lap. For strategy days or longer meetings, consider gifting each person a small notebook for doodling or standing while they think. Making movement part of how your team creates Treat movement as a legitimate part of the creative process, not something people squeeze in at lunch. Many employees discover that language for what they think about a project arrives much more easily in motion than it does under fluorescent lights. Add movement time to the projects creative process, especially for undefined work. Recognize and ask, Is it a reachforthesneakers moment? and then give clear permission to do it. Extra-long meeting? Book two conference rooms and switch at the halfway mark. Model it yourself. Take your own red-, yellow-, and green-light pauses and name them so your team sees that movement is part of how you think. When employees arent generating ideas, its rarely because they lack creativity. Its usually because theyre trying to access it under the worst conditions. The most effective leadership move is giving people permission to step away and trusting that their best thinking often happens when they are given the freedom to move.
Category:
E-Commerce
In the months after a 2018 Supreme Court decision opened the door for states to legalize sports betting within their borders, giddy lawmakers across the country couldnt move quickly enough. No one wanted to miss out on the billions of dollars in tax revenue that the high court had suddenly placed within their reachor, worse yet, to watch that easy money go to neighboring states whose leaders had the presence of mind to move first. Within a month of the decision, Delaware Gov. John Carney bet $10 on a Phillies gamethe first legal single-game sports bet outside of Nevada. Many states were more concerned with getting sportsbooks online in time for a big-ticket event (the Super Bowl, March Madness) than building an infrastructure to regulate the multibillion-dollar industrya dynamic that journalist Danny Funt details in his book Everybody Loses: The Tumultuous Rise of American Sports Gambling. Lawmakers in some states even passed laws authorizing sports gambling before the Supreme Court decided Murphy v. NCAA, so theyd be ready to jump after a favorable ruling. Eight years later, its clear that this gold rush has had (and I am being diplomatic here) some negative consequences. Sports media outlets have become hopelessly intertwined with gambling behemoths eager to turn more fans into paying customers. Athletes who do not perform to bettors satisfaction are often subjected to racist abuse, death threats, or some combination thereof. And gambling addiction has spiked, thanks to the proliferation of app-based mobile betting that allows users to get their fixes anytime, anywhere. A 2025 study found that internet searches for help with gambling addiction increased 23% between 2018 and June 2024, and that they surged more with the arrival of online sportsbooks than they did when brick-and-mortar casinos opened. Over the last few years, a series of high-profile scandals have demonstrated the extent to which legalization has warped the actual games on which people are betting all this money. In 2024, the NBA issued a lifetime ban to Toronto Raptors forward Jontay Porter for his part in a conspiracy in which he pulled himself early from games to ensure that under bets on his performance would hit. Miami Heat guard Terry Rozier was implicated in a similar scheme last year, as were two Cleveland Guardians pitchers who were charged with rigging ball-or-strike bets on specific pitches in exchange for cash bribes. Then, earlier this month, federal prosecutors named 39 players across 17 teams who were allegedly part of a point-shaving ring that fixed mens college basketball games during the 2023-24 and 2024-25 seasons. According to the indictment, bettors offered players bribes in the low five figures to underperform in agreed-upon games, and then wagered heavily on outcomes they had good reason to believe would go their way. Leagues and sportsbooks typically frame corruption as rare and make examples of those who are involved in it. But the mere knowledge that scandals like this exist can throw the entire enterprise into doubt: If you are a gambler who is angry about a bad bet, its very easy to wonder if you were cheated by perpetrators who were just lucky enough not to get caught. A new bill in Tennessee, where residents wagered $1.3 billion on sports over a two-month period last year, is maybe the most significant effort yet to retreat from the status quo. Introduced by a pair of Democratic lawmakers, state Rep. John Ray Clemmons and state Sen. Jeff Yarbro, the proposal would ban state-licensed sportsbooks from taking bets from people who are on the campuses of public colleges and universities, as well as from people at venues where those schools teams are playing games. Sportsbooks use the geolocation capabilities of smartphones to determine app users eligibility, so logistically speaking, rejecting bets from phones that are located within newly designated restricted areas would not be especially complicated. Colleges and universities would also be required to block people from accessing online sportsbooks while connected to campus networks. A handful of states have previously imposed modest limits on betting on college sportsfor example, banning proposition bets on college athletes, or prohibiting wagering on in-state school teams. The scope of Clemmons and Yarbros proposal is broader: It would prevent people on campus from placing any type of sports bet, college or otherwise. The rationales for targeting restrictions at college students are straightforward: Gambling addiction has hit young people hard, and young men the hardest. A Pew Research Center study last year found that 31% of adults between ages 18 and 29 had bet on sports in the previous yearthe most of any age group. A 2023 survey commissioned by the NCAA found that more than a quarter of college-age adults had placed a bet online, and overall, 58% had bet in some form. In 2024, a Pennsylvania addiction therapist told 60 Minutes about a troubling new archetype of patient hed encountered in recent years: college students who gamble away their federal student loan money. Clemmons echoed many of these concerns in an email to me, explaining that he was motivated by rising addiction rates among young people, sportsbooks efforts to target young people with advertising, the ongoing harassment of student-athletes, and a desire to prevent students from losing their parents’ hard-earned money to sportsbooks. If you are a policymaker looking to enact more robust protections for those whom the data shows are most vulnerable, the people who are physically present on a college campus is a pretty good place to start. At the same time, the bills parameters demonstrate the challenges inherent in trying to provide oversight to an industry that has, to date, been allowed to set new land-speed record every year. Bettors have long demonstrated their willingness to move around in order to place bets. In his book, Funt writes that before New York authorized sports betting, New York City residents would simply walk across the George Washington Bridge until their phones registered their presence in New Jersey, where betting was legal. Given what we know about how addiction works and how prevalent it is, Im not sure that requiring college students to cross the street in order to place a wager is going to be, in the scheme of things, a significant deterrent. Its also worth contemplating all the people and behaviors to whom this law would not apply. It doesnt affect private schools, which means that while students at the University of Tennessee might be temporarily locked out of their FanDuel accounts, students at Vanderbilt might not even realize if and when a ban takes effect. It doesnt affect private property, which means that students who live off campus would be free to continue wagering from the comfort of their couches. It doesnt affect access to federally regulated prediction sites like Kalshi, which function as backdoor sportsbooks accessible to anyone 18 and older. Since Tennessee already prohibits anyone under 21 from betting with state-licensed sportsbooks, the people who would be barred from wagering under this law and who are not barred from wagering under existing law are, basically, fans at certain sporting events, and college juniors and seniors at public schools, if they happen to be on school property at that moment. By email, Clemmons noted the legislatures limited jurisdiction over nonpublic property, and he asserted that geo-targeting campuses and sports venues seems the most effective, legal way to accomplish our primary aims. In response to my question about the merits of, for example, raising the minimum betting age or barring college students from betting regardless of their physical location, Clemmons said that if they pass this law and determine that more action is necessary, they will certainly look to have those discussions. I dont mean to suggest that lawmakers considering responses like this one to the various crises before them are falling down on the job. When there is this much evidence over this many years that the post-Murphy free-for-all is ruining this many lives, I would prefer people in power do what they can to mitigate the harm rather than shrug their shoulders and do nothing. I’m simply saying that at this point, eight years after the Supreme Court empowered the gambling industry to begin swallowing sports whole, it is going to be really, really challenging for lawmakers, in Tennessee or anywhere else, to start putting the proverbial toothpaste back in the tube. This is largely the result of the states own choices: They could have proceeded more cautiously after Murphy, by more aggressively limiting the pools of eligible bettors, or imposing more onerous tobacco-style restrictions on sportsbook advertising, or simply deciding to wait a little while before putting virtual casinos in millions of pockets. But they wanted the money that would come with acting fast. Now, theyre paying the true price.
Category:
E-Commerce
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