“It’s a great benefit to have gray hair!”: The intersection of gender, aging, and visibility in midlife professional women’s narratives

ABSTRACT

Midlife professional women’s aging experiences, especially the experiences of changing physical appearance, are examined in this study. A discursive-narrative approach is used to analyze interviews of women working in senior professional and managerial jobs in Finland. The decline narrative is not enough to capture the experiences of these women; noticeable signs of aging can indeed have a positive connotation. After looking older and less attractive (in a stereotypical sense), women are no longer being subjected to a sexualized gaze and are taken more seriously. Aging opens up possibilities for “doing” gender differently and transcending rigid gender dichotomies and relationships.

KEYWORDS:

• Gender
• midlife
• narrative study
• physical appearance
• professional women
• visibility/invisibility

Acknowledgments

I would like to thank “Birgit” and all the other interviewees for making this study possible. I would also like to thank Prof. Kristiina Brunila (University of Helsinki) and the anonymous referees for providing constructive feedback on the earlier version of the manuscript.

Funding

The project was funded by the Academy of Finland (Grant number: 253082).

Notes

^1. There are large national differences in Europe in the participation level of women of any age group. Welfare policies and dominant cultural models in different countries explain why only few women who are not employed are seeking jobs (e.g., middle-aged women are expected to take care of their elderly parents or grandchildren). In Finland, women participate actively to the labor force, and the gender divide is the smallest, less that 2% (Eurostat, 2015b).

^2. The binary opposition of masculine/feminine has been criticized as being oversimplified. In this article it is acknowledged that there are multiple masculinities and femininities in the workplace.

^3. The aim of flirting in the workplace is only superficially sexual; it is more concerned with the display and recognition of gender identity (Gherardi, 1995).

^4. Being young and beautiful almost always means also to be White, affluent, and Western (Calasanti & Slevin, 2001).

^5. The interviews were conducted during the winter of 2012–2013. The interviewees were recruited via the alumni registers of two Finnish universities. Participation was voluntary. The interview questions related to the participants’ prior educational and professional histories, professional expertise, gender, and aging. The interviews lasted approximately 60 to 90 minutes. They took place at the university or the interviewee’s workplace. Also some men were interviewed, but those interviews were not included in the analysis. The interviews were conducted in Finnish, and the quotations used in this article have been translated by the author.

^6. Unfortunately, cultural “invisibility” and marginalization are still a reality for a majority of older women (e.g., Arber & Ginn, 1991; Trethewey, 2001).

Additional information

Funding

The project was funded by the Academy of Finland (Grant number: 253082).