Middle Ground: Being Put Out To Pasture

If you’ve not heard of Stacey Duguid (or her story) these past few weeks then you’ve successfully avoided all major news outlets, the apple news round up prompts on your phone, your Instagram feed, most radio stations, all the terestriel TV channels and also Good Morning America. She is a f*cking force, and I happen to have worked with her at my happiest career peek when she was the Fashion Editor At Large to my Beauty Director of ELLE. We haven’t worked together for a long time now, but we’ve been chatting a lot over IG recently, because we’ve been mutually dumbfounded at the ‘shelving’ of the other. The recruitment ghosting, the sudden inability to even land an interview despite years of incredible and varied experience and hard work, the “but not you, surely!” of it all. Her story is my story and now her story is global news, and frankly, the whole of middle aged womankind needs to thank her for it, because what we need is what she’s now pushing for. Namely the end of professional ageism. Algorithmically, artificial intelligently, but moreover, societally - since that is what’s teaching and driving the other two culprits.

I won’t repeat the whole thing here (because you only have to pick up a paper, or say “STACEY DUGUID” within earshot of your phone and your algorithm will serve you a-plenty. But essentially she was (and by all rights still absolutely should be) a totally impressive, formidable fashion high flyer, and now she’s signing on for universal credit, and decided to share her plight with the internet. A brave feat where so many of us - me included - were too ashamed to do the same.
I’m lucky enough to be married and receive both financial and emotional support from my husband, so I’m not in line at the Job Centre just yet, but if I weren’t I would, quite frankly, be totally f*cked. I’ve written about it on Substack in fact. Oh, you missed that one? That’s cos I didn’t press publish. I was too ashamed. *GASPS* “Not me, struggling to work?! I’m a multi-hyphenate, an award winning editor who worked her way up and up against the odds, and then when the world changed, worked my way across and diagonally, diversifying and expanding, with the imagined promise that my strategy, my hard work and experience and further value would be, well, valuable. When actually, after two redundancies on my two maternity leaves, it would prove to be the opposite. Experience, it seems, is my downfall, because experience is perceived as expensive. Also, it’s attributed to years in the game, and *quickly calculates likely age" filtered out. And/or it’s literally being made redundant by AI. Who needs expensive, years-long dedicated experience when you have thirsty robots, eh? And also I was too fearful to publish it, because if I talk about how hard it is to get a job at this stage in my life am I highlighting the fact that no one wants to employ me and therefore I must be universally unemployable? It’s the career fear equivalent of ‘why is he still single, whats wrong with him?’

In fact, the movement that Stacey is building has taken off massively precisely because it is a plight that is affecting hundreds of thousands of women in midlife. If it was just me and her, wallowing in mutual shame and incomprehension, then ENCORE wouldn’t exist (btw, how smart is that name for a movement for midlife women locked out of employment? Her Next Act. SO smart) Neither would this genius website exist [DidTheyGhostYou.com] , that asks people to name and shame the recruiters who have ghosted them, not just from an ignored application, but sometimes after two or even three interviews. (I have my own experiences with a few big names to add to the leaderboard in fact).

So, in an effort to cleanse my sense of shame, (and cleanse my drafts folder) to further the conversation and admit that being overlooked at the peak of my career is not a me problem but a universal one, I’m gonna publish the piece I wrote and didn’t send out. With pride in fact. Shame survives in silence and all that...

I actually got to interview for a job that, in the words of the people who encouraged me to apply, ‘couldn’t be more you if it tried.’ Round one was over an hour with HR. Round two was with the person whose job I’d be taking. The leaver! I mean, I enjoyed it, was baffled that nobody from the actual business was in the room, yes, but still, it was a great chat. But upon reflection, what’s with the lack of hiring manager, future colleague, anybody with any real stake in the outcome really? Wuh? Just this disgruntled guy on his way out, who spent a significant chunk of our time telling me (in quite impressive detail) what a sh*tshow the company was. Is he really motivated to find the best successor for the business? What were they thinking? I’ll never know, because I chased four times over six weeks, and every email was met with *poof* nothingness. The rejection, when it eventually showed up, was a generic template. Same again for a second ‘made for me’ role, but I never even got to have a conversation with a person this time. Applied, two employee friends recommended me, I heard zero, more than a month went by, yadda yadda yadda. When the rejection arrived and I put it next to the first one, the wording was so similar I actually laughed. Here, I think we can start a series ‘rate your rejection’. What are we giving these?

I do want to be clear about what I’m not saying here, and that is that I’m owed a job. And I’m not saying every application should end up in an interview, or that rejection isn’t a natural and acceptable part of the process, or that I expect a personalised letter or a fully fledged feedback report. But some micro crumb of feedback would be nice…

What I am saying is repeated applications for roles I’m built for, being met with rejections that have probably been generated by the same bot that processed my CV is a gut punch and a half. An invitation to follow a job page in lieu of any human engagement with my actual human experience can frankly f*ck off.

Sigh. But it seems this is the reality of job hunting right now if you are a woman, a mother, in your mid-forties with a solid career behind you and (shock!) more ambitions in front of you. I think the automated recruitment systems can’t process the nuance that we all have. Maternity leave, redundancies, career adjacencies, successfully pivoting to adapt to the digi age in a print publishing crisis, all of it must just be nonsensical noise to a thing that just looks for a pattern it already recognises. Boring is what that is.

I’ve started to - and I can’t believe I’m admitting to this - omit my date of birth and shave 10 years off my experience. 20 + years in the industry used to be a huge achievement. Now it’s the CV equivalent of a bloody zimmer frame. I’m 46. I am at the peak of what I can offer professionally. I am experienced enough to lead plus current enough to be ‘relevant’, and I’m old enough to know what I’m doing and young enough to have decades ahead of me. WHY do I need to delete it from my application?

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I dunno, sometimes I do feel like getting on the shelf and closing shop. I mean what’s the point? I am choosing to work to add an important facet to my life, and to show my daughters that women don’t stop being people when they have children. And we have skills and ideas worth listening to. And that it’s totally normal to have ambitions beyond the home, even if home remains the absolute most important part. I’m annoyed because of the injustice in preparing for an interview because I respect the process and the people in it. And then I follow up because that’s what a professional does. And then I wait for the increasingly predictable infuriating silence. The Scorpio in me wants to just put on my f*ck you pants, give up and play more Padel. The wife and mother and career proud woman in me just wants to go and work hard for someone else’s benefit like the good old days. How infuriating that I’ve basically been put out to pasture. Forced retirement at my age. At what point do I stop trying, stop lowering my experience in tandem with my salary expectations, accept this absolute nonsense? Ugh I dunno.

I do love padel though…

Is this happened to any of you? I’d love to know I’m not the only one over here screaming into my pillow. The comments are open.