The Rise of the Queenager
On Wednesday I had the fortune to be invited to an event where Eleanor Mills was speaking about the ‘rise of the Queenager’. Eleanor is a former senior editor at The Sunday Times, an illustrious journalism career spanning 23 years, before she founded her own company, Noon.
Queenagers are women aged 45-60, and Eleanor believes that midlife is ‘an age of opportunity - a time for transformation and reinvention with the right help’. Midlife women are the fastest growing demographic in the UK:
Women aged 40+ are now out-earning women under 40 for the first time ever (Census, 2019)
They are responsible for driving 93% of consumer decisions
At this age, these women have achieved seniority in their careers with the salaries to match - driving £92 billion of spend annually
Yet despite being a lucrative segment (Forbes calls them ‘super consumers’), midlife women are chronically under-served by companies. You only have to look at advertising to see how these women are viewed: representation extends only to promote incontinence pads, funeral plans and anti ageing cream.
However, midlife is not all ‘jolly fun’ as Eleanor says. By the time a woman reaches 50 she has experienced on average five big life events - those which present significant periods of stress: divorce, bereavement, redundancy, and domestic violence, to name a few. On top of that, the majority of caring responsibilities still fall to women, whether that’s for children (who may now be leaving home) and increasingly for elderly or sick parents. And finally, there’s the “M” word - menopause.
The stereotypes we see of midlife women are overwhelmingly negative - we only have to look at Disney to see the crone (Snow White), the evil step-mother (Cinderella), the envious aunt (Ursula), and other harmful tropes. The media has a lot to answer for perpetuating these biases, as they are responsible for pushing the narrative that women only have value (and are therefore featured on the covers of magazines, or as tv show leads) when they are young and attractive. From Eleanor’s own experience, the purpose of women is to ‘brighten up the page’.
What society fails to appreciate is that midlife women are ‘vessels for huge amounts of wisdom’ - and now is the time to tell a new story. These new stories are ones where midlife women are wise and powerful, yet compassionate - our Queenagers.
We can define a new style of leadership that does not have to conform to existing standards.
We can lead our families, teams and communities in ways that bring us together and are healing, not harmful.
We must be careful that the conversation around midlife women doesn’t become just about menopause. Women are more than just our biology.
We need senior women to stay in their jobs to challenge all male boards and leadership teams, and bring other women up with them.
We must remember that misogyny doesn’t go away, it mutates and adapts so it’s always there in ever more insidious forms (look at the Incel movement, Andrew Tate, etc that disaffected young men are turning to nowadays). The Patriarchy hurts everybody, including those who would supposedly benefit from it by virtue of their sex and gender.
I’ve got a few more years to go before I am a Queenager, but looking ahead, I’m excited for this phase of life. It’s a time when women can’t be controlled, when they know who they are and what they want - and have the disposable income to get it. And that makes us just that little bit dangerous to the existing order…
