I recently came across Stacey Duguid’s story and I’ve got top be honest – it stopped me in my tracks.
At 52, she had decades of senior-level experience behind her, including a successful career in fashion and publishing. Yet after 16 months of looking for work and more than 150 job applications, she found herself largely met with silence.
Not simply rejected from roles comparable to those she had held before. Ignored when applying for much more junior and lower-paid work too.
Eventually, Stacey did something that many people find extraordinarily difficult: she spoke publicly about what was happening. She described the dwindling savings, the shame and the growing fear that, despite everything she had achieved, she might have become unemployable.
The response suggested that this was far from being a “Stacey problem”. Thousands of women in their forties, fifties and sixties contacted her with stories of their own: highly capable, experienced women sending application after application into what felt like a black hole.
Her experience has now grown into Her Encore, a community and campaign for midlife women who want and need to work but find themselves locked out. Stacey has also launched a petition calling for action on ageism in recruitment, including greater scrutiny of the role played by automated and AI-enabled hiring tools.
Her story raises an uncomfortable question.
Since when did experience become something we have to hide?
A lifetime of experience – edited out
One of the most disturbing details of Stacey’s story is that she was advised to remove around 20 years of experience from her CV.
Let’s just pause and think about the absurdity of that.
We spend years telling people to build their skills, develop their judgment, become more resilient and accumulate experience. Then, at the point when they have the greatest depth of knowledge to offer, we tell them to make themselves look less experienced in order to get through the door.
For midlife women, age discrimination rarely exists in isolation. It lands on top of the accumulated effects of gender inequality: career breaks, caring responsibilities, part-time work, the gender pay gap and lower pension savings. Many women may have already faced discrimination if they had children, only to encounter it again as they reach perimenopause and menopause.
Meanwhile, the state pension age means many will need to continue working into their late sixties.
The message appears to be: you must keep working, but we may stop seeing your value long before you can afford to stop.
Is AI making an old problem worse?
Stacey’s campaign has focused partly on the possibility of “algorithmic ageism”: automated recruitment technology screening out older candidates before a human being has properly considered them.
While we can’t know for sure that an algorithm rejected any particular application without access to the system and its decision-making process. A difficult jobs market, role fit and human decisions may all play a part.
But that uncertainty is itself a problem.
How many employers genuinely understand how the technology within their recruitment process assesses candidates? Do they know what data it was trained on, which signals it treats as desirable and whether its outcomes vary by age, gender or other protected characteristics?
The UK government’s own guidance on responsible AI in recruitment recognises the potential for systems to create barriers for older applicants. The Information Commissioner’s Office also warns that AI trained on unbalanced data, or data reflecting historic discrimination, can produce discriminatory outcomes.
Technology doesn’t arrive free from human bias. It can encode that bias, hide it inside a process few people understand and then reproduce it at enormous scale.
That doesn’t make AI inherently bad. But it absolutely makes human responsibility even more important.
The employee experience begins before employment
For me, this is not only a recruitment or technology story. It is an employee experience story.
Organisations make ambitious promises about being people-first. They talk about inclusion, belonging and valuing difference. But what does that mean if the experience of trying to join them is opaque, impersonal and, for some groups, potentially discriminatory?
The candidate experience is part of the employee experience. It is often somebody’s first direct encounter with an organisation’s culture, and sometimes their last.
Every unanswered application communicates something. So does every generic rejection received seconds after pressing submit. So does asking someone to enter information already contained in their CV, taking them through multiple stages and then disappearing without explanation.
It may be efficient from inside the organisation. It does not feel efficient to the person whose time, hope and sense of worth have been invested in the process.
Multiply that experience across more than 150 applications and it becomes more than frustrating. It can be dehumanising.
What should organisations do?
There are some immediate questions every employer could ask:
- Do we track the age profile of applicants, shortlisted candidates and appointments so that we can identify where people are disappearing from the process?
- Have we tested whether our job adverts, selection criteria and recruitment channels favour particular age groups?
- Do we know which automated tools are being used by us and by recruitment partners, and can we explain how they make or support decisions?
- Are people able to challenge an automated decision or ask for meaningful human review?
- Do hiring managers recognise age-related stereotypes, including assumptions that an experienced candidate will be expensive, inflexible, technologically out of date or unwilling to report to someone younger?
- Are we asking for dates and length of experience when neither might be relevant to someone’s ability to do the job?
- Do candidates receive timely, respectful communication—even when the answer is no?
- Most importantly, organisations need to examine outcomes, not simply intentions.
It is not enough to say that a process is fair because nobody deliberately programmed it to discriminate. If one group is consistently less likely to progress, that is a signal worth investigating, whether the cause sits with the technology, the criteria, hiring-manager judgments or the design of the process itself.
This is a waste of human capability
It is easy to frame this as a problem affecting individual women. But it is also a profound waste for organisations and the wider economy.
At a time when employers talk constantly about skills shortages, resilience and the need to navigate unprecedented change, experienced women are being advised to erase the very things organisations say they need: judgment, pattern recognition, perspective, adaptability and the ability to handle complexity.
Of course, experience alone does not entitle anyone to a particular role. Nor should this become a simplistic battle between generations; younger workers too face their own increasingly difficult and automated route into employment.
But people deserve to be assessed for what they can contribute now, not screened out because of assumptions attached to their age.
Stacey has called her movement Her Encore. It is a brilliant name because an encore is not an apologetic return or a consolation prize. It happens because someone still has more to give, and because people want to see it.
Perhaps that is the shift organisations need to make.
Midlife women do not need to become younger, smaller or less accomplished to fit the future of work. Employers need to get better at recognising the value that is already standing in front of them.
And if an organisation claims to be people-first, that feels like a pretty fundamental place to start.
