Gen Punk won’t go down without a fight.

Image: @mayahartphotography

I hate generational demographics with a passion. They squeeze billions of radically different people into tiny pigeonholes, creating ageist tribes who think they are the greatest generation of all time. This leads to generalisations like: Boomers are greedy. Gen X sits on their arses. Millennials are entitled. And Gen Z needs emotional support.

Midlife women are aged 45 to 70 (from the end of fertility to the end of our working life). We span early Gen X to late Boomers—or Gen Punk, as many of us prefer to be called. Unlike the early Boomers who grew up in post-war peace, we’ve had to fight every step of the way, and we’re not stopping now.

The Equal Opportunity Act was signed into law in 1975. A 70-year-old woman today would have been 21 at the time, and the last of Gen Punk were still at school, picking career options that had just exploded!

We were the first women with equal rights in the workplace.

We’re now the first women who have experienced the full career cycle en masse.

Most of us started our careers as the lone young woman in a company or department. For some of us, there were women ahead of us—the Iron Lady generation—hardened battle-axes like Margaret Thatcher who had fought the marriage bar and stayed in careers against incredible odds. To survive, many became tougher than the men. They terrified us (and in many cases, terrorised us), but we are eternally grateful to them because we wouldn’t be here without them. And our pay would have been dramatically less if it weren’t for the working-class heroines from the Ford factory in Dagenham who won us equal pay in 1970.

In the early 80s, when we started arriving in the workforce in noticeable numbers, there was no maternity leave for all (those who qualified got six weeks), childcare was a nanny or nothing, and sexual harassment wouldn’t be explicitly defined in law for another two decades. We were pioneers in the wild, wild west, and we have horror stories that would have younger women curled up in the foetal position.

We were the first women who couldn’t legally be fired for getting pregnant, but that didn’t stop it from happening. If we kept our jobs, there was no part-time option, no leaving early or taking time off for a sick kid. More and more of us dropped off as we discovered that we couldn’t actually have it all.

Then those of us who survived hit the wall at 45. The practice of ‘retiring’ non-fertile women was so entrenched in many industries that even we didn’t question it; we knew if there was a round of redundancies coming up, we were going to be the ones to go.

Leaving a few lonely women at the top of the tree. And we’ve been shaking it!

We’re now seeing the first group of women hitting midlife who have always had equality, support, and opportunities.

Over the last couple of weeks, I’ve seen a lot of posts from these women saying Gen X are kicking gendered ageism in the face, and how wonderful it is that perimenopause is centre stage. Gen Punk went through it without knowing a fucking thing, with doctors who didn’t know a fucking thing, and we weren’t working because we’d lost our fucking careers at the first sign of a hot flush.

Thanks to our shouting—starting with grassroots campaigns years before Claudia Winkleman was given airtime—45-year-old women now get menopause programmes at work instead of the boot.

You’re welcome.

To these new members of the midlife sisterhood, we want to say: if you think perimenopause is bad, you don’t want to know what the end of women’s careers currently looks like. Even though it’s right in front of your face. Ask yourself this: when you started your careers, did you see lots of women ahead of you? How many are there now?

We are in crisis. We can’t claim our pensions until we’re 67, but almost no one will employ us past 50. One in four of us have less than £5,000 in our pension pots, and if something isn’t done about getting us back into the workforce, half of us are going to retire in poverty. So not only did we find out that we couldn’t have it all—it turns out we could end up with nothing at all.

There are ten times more of you than us thanks to us. Instead of dominating the conversation with the life stage at the start of midlife, it’s time for you to fight with us for something our daughters will be eternally grateful for:

Designing women’s careers that suit our biology, needs, and family commitments. Careers that span 50+ years (because that retirement age is going to keep going up as we live longer). We need to normalise women’s career paths with plateaus, breaks, and peaks that reflect our lives. Sorry, guys, but without a post-menopause boost, most of you reach your peak at 40, and it’s all downhill from there. Most women I know are just getting going at 40, especially as their children get older, freeing up massive amounts of brain space for our careers. Because even though the patriarchy has tried for decades to set traps so we couldn’t have it all, we can. Just generally, not all at once.

They say, "You can’t be what you can’t see" so it’s time to look out for us. All women need to champion Gen Punk’s return to the workforce to ensure we enjoy magnificent careers right to the end. So you all do too.

And don’t come at me about the greatness of Gen X. Our grandmothers were and always will be the Greatest Generation—they officially have the title. The second generation of women in the UK with the right to an education ended up running the country during the war. What happened to them makes our trip seem like a walk in the park—but that’s a post for another day.

If you want information on how to champion Gen Punk in the workplace contact Jacquie Duckworth