The Wisdom We Used to Trust: What's Happening to Women of a Certain Age in the Nonprofit and For-Profit Sectors
A look at Hagitude, gendered ageism, and who still gets called wise
There was a time — and it wasn't so long ago, depending on which culture and which century you're standing in — when a woman who had lived long enough to raise a family, bury a few people she loved, run a household or a village council or a healing practice, was the person you went to when you needed real judgment. She was the elder. The one who'd seen enough cycles to know which crisis was actually a crisis and which one would resolve itself by Tuesday. Her age wasn't a liability to be managed around. It was the credential.
I keep thinking about that as I watch what's happening in the nonprofit and government sectors right now. Highly qualified women — women with decades of programmatic expertise, government relations experience, grant compliance knowledge, community trust built over careers — are having a genuinely hard time finding work. Meanwhile, boards and hiring committees keep landing, again and again, on men. Often younger men. Sometimes just less experienced men. It's not that every single hire is evidence of bias — it rarely works that way, one decision at a time. But the pattern, when you step back and look at it across a sector, is hard to unsee.
I don't think this is a conspiracy. I think it's something quieter and more familiar: an old set of assumptions about who gets to be seen as capable, reasserting itself in a moment when it's easy to justify almost any hiring choice as “the right fit.”
What the research actually shows
This isn't just a feeling. A 2023 study published in Harvard Business Review surveyed 913 women in leadership across four fields — law, higher education, healthcare, and faith-based nonprofits — and found that older women in the research described being seen as unworthy of advancement, while younger women faced their own version of the bias, being doubted or mistaken for interns and support staff. The researchers' conclusion was blunt: no matter what age a woman was, it was never quite the right age for leadership.
The hiring data backs this up. A National Bureau of Economic Research field experiment sent out more than 40,000 fictional job applications across a dozen US cities, varying only the implied age of the applicant. The economists found robust evidence of age discrimination in hiring against older women, especially those nearing retirement age, while the evidence of discrimination against older men was considerably weaker. And once an older woman does lose a job, the road back is longer: the long-term unemployment rate — being out of work for more than 27 weeks — increased faster for older jobless women than for older jobless men through the last major downturn, and older, college-educated women were found to face more hiring discrimination than either younger women or older men.
None of this is unique to the nonprofit sector. But it lands with particular weight there, because nonprofit work is disproportionately staffed by women, disproportionately dependent on the exact kind of long-accumulated institutional knowledge that takes decades to build — grant relationships, government contracts, donor trust, program history — and, right now, disproportionately squeezed by funding cuts that give boards cover to make leaner, riskier choices about who leads.
Why this might be landing harder in mission-driven work right now
I want to hold this loosely, because I don't have a clean data set proving cause and effect in our sector specifically. But here's what I'm noticing, and what other people in this work are noticing too: when budgets tighten and organizations are under real pressure, hiring committees often reach for what feels safe. And “safe,” in a culture still wired to associate authority with a certain look, still too often means younger. Male. Untested but confident, rather than tested and, let's be honest, tired.
There's also a quieter mechanism at play. A woman who has led for twenty years has usually also survived twenty years of being underpaid relative to her male peers, of being the one who “does the emotional labor,” of being asked to prove her competence over and over in ways her male colleagues weren't. By the time she's fifty-five, she may not perform effortless confidence the way a less-scarred thirty-two-year-old does — not because she knows less, but because she's paid a cost the sector rarely acknowledges out loud. And that cost gets misread as diminished capacity, rather than what it actually is: the bill for two decades of extra scrutiny.
What Hagitude gets right that our workplaces have forgotten
This is where Sharon Blackie's Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life has been sitting with me. Blackie, a psychologist and mythologist, spends the book excavating the elder women of European myth and folklore — the wise woman, the henwife, the creatrix, the trickster — figures who were once trusted precisely because of, not despite, their years. Her core argument is that midlife and beyond isn't decline; it's an alchemical threshold from which a woman can move into her most authentic, dynamic phase of life and influence.
There's a line from the book that I think about often: it captures the perverse pleasure and sense of rightness in choosing to flower precisely when the world expects you to quiet down and diminish.
Read that next to the hiring data. Blackie is describing a cultural project — reclaiming the archetype of the wise elder woman — at the exact moment our workplaces are doing the opposite: treating that same woman's years of accumulated wisdom as a reason to pass her over. We are, culturally, trying to walk two directions at once. One part of the culture is rediscovering reverence for the “hag” — in the old, unashamed sense of the word, the wise one, the one who knows. Another part, the part that sits on hiring committees, is still quietly defaulting to youth and to men, as if wisdom and age were liabilities rather than the whole point.
A question worth sitting with
I don't think the answer here is outrage, and I don't think it's resignation either. I think it's inquiry. If you sit on a nonprofit board, or you chair a search committee, or you're the one drafting the job description: what would it look like to actually notice the pattern before you repeat it? Who was on your last shortlist? What language crept into the posting — “high energy,” “digital native,” “fresh perspective” — that might be doing quiet work you didn't intend? And for those of us who are the women in question: what would it mean to stop apologizing for our years, and start naming them, the way Blackie asks us to, as the credential they've always been?
I don't have this fully worked out. I'm not sure anyone does yet. But I'd rather ask the question in public than let the pattern keep running unexamined.
The bottom line
Something has shifted, and it's worth naming plainly: a sector built substantially on the labor of women is, in this moment, making it harder for its most experienced women to keep leading it. The research confirms what a lot of us have felt anecdotally. And there's an older story available to us — the one Blackie is retelling — where a woman's fifties, sixties, and seventies were exactly when her voice carried the most weight, not the least. We get to decide which story our organizations actually live inside.
I am working on a podcast on the theme of supporting the wild and wise women in our workforce and our world and how we can support each other through these changes to our lives that can often feel demoralizing and demeaning. Stay tuned!
Want to think through how your board or hiring process might be quietly reinforcing this pattern? Book a consultation at yourmissionmaven.com (http://yourmissionmaven.com) and let's look at it together.
References and further reading
Blackie, S. (2022). Hagitude: Reimagining the Second Half of Life. New World Library / September Publishing. septemberpublishing.org/authors/sharon-blackie (https://septemberpublishing.org/authors/sharon-blackie/)
Diehl, A., Dzubinski, L.M., & Stephenson, A.L. (2023). Women in Leadership Face Ageism at Every Age. Harvard Business Review. hbr.org/2023/06/women-in-leadership-face-ageism-at-every-age (https://hbr.org/2023/06/women-in-leadership-face-ageism-at-every-age)
Neumark, D., Burn, I., & Button, P. Is It Harder for Older Workers to Find Jobs? New and Improved Evidence from a Field Experiment. Journal of Political Economy. economics.uci.edu/~dneumark (https://www.economics.uci.edu/~dneumark/JPE%20paper.pdf)
Button, P., Figinski, T., McLaughlin, J.S., & Burn, I. (2020). Why Retirement and Age Discrimination Policies Need to Consider the Intersectional Experiences of Older Women. Innovation in Aging. ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7742589 (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7742589/)
Economic Policy Research (SCEPA). Long-Term Unemployment Rate Increased Faster Among Older Jobless Women than Older Jobless Men. economicpolicyresearch.org (https://www.economicpolicyresearch.org/research/long-term-unemployment-rate-increased-faster-among-older-jobless-women-than-older-jobless-men)
CBS News (2023). Women Face Age Bias at Work No Matter How Old They Are. cbsnews.com (https://www.cbsnews.com/news/women-ageism-at-work-no-matter-how-young-or-old/)
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