Women over 40 are being written off. But what if we’ve been looking for our worth in the wrong place?

Women over 40 can feel increasingly invisible in a culture obsessed with youth, career success and constant reinvention. Writer, Ann Louise Graham asks what happens when we stop measuring our worth by our jobs and achievements and instead discover our identity and purpose in Christ.

There is a sign in my hairdresser’s that reads something like, “Don’t be so busy building a career that you forget to build a life.” I don’t really like it, perhaps because, in some ways, that was my story: a very busy career up until the age of forty.

However, it came to mind as I reflected on a recent Times newspaper article titled ‘I’m invisible now’: the high-earning women who can’t find work’. It was about women in their forties and fifties who are described as “high-flyers” but who, after successful careers, now find themselves “broke and unemployed”.

The article features women who once had very well-paid jobs and held senior positions but now find themselves sending out hundreds of applications without receiving responses and feeling at the mercy of an AI bot reading their CVs.