The Most Adaptable People in the Workforce Are the Ones Nobody Is Hiring
Updated: Sep 2
Written by Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard is a strategic coach and change consultant helping leaders and high-performing women navigate complex change with clarity and resilience. She brings over 20 years of experience in global organisations, offering practical insights to support meaningful transformation and growth.
Women in their fifties are being removed from the workforce at the point of their greatest professional value, and the reasons given are so vague as to be unfalsifiable. Press anyone for detail and the answer circles around adaptability. There exists a belief, never stated in a form that could be tested, that women of this age have hardened into their methods and will falter at whatever arrives next.
I have spent twenty years moving organisations through change. I have never worked with a group holding a stronger claim to adaptive capacity, or a weaker ability to evidence it. The evidence is missing for reasons that have nothing to do with the women concerned. We were trained to make adaptation invisible. The adaptation was never narrated, because narration read as struggle. Three decades of that produces a generation whose adaptive history went entirely unrecorded, and a market that has taken us at our word.
The consequences show up in the data now. An American Association of Retired Persons (AARP) survey published this year found 64 percent of workers over fifty had seen or experienced age discrimination, with around a quarter feeling pushed out of jobs they had not chosen to leave. Research from Brookings found that of the workers most exposed to artificial intelligence (AI) displacement and least equipped to move on, 86 percent are women.
There is a layer beneath this that the workforce conversation never touches. Many of the women being written off as unable to handle change are, at that moment, in the middle of the most demanding physiological adaptation of their adult lives. Perimenopause reorganises sleep, memory, emotional regulation, and confidence in one's own judgement over a period of years, with no timetable and very little acknowledgement. Women are doing this while running teams and hitting their numbers. Whatever else that is, it is not evidence of diminished adaptive capacity.
Nobody tells you it was your age, because that would be actionable. You are handed a gap where a reason should sit, and capable women fill that gap with themselves. I hear the same sentence from women who have never met one another, which is that they think they have lost their edge. It survives on almost no evidence, mainly because there is nothing to compare it against.
Say some of it aloud to another woman who will recognise it, and listen to what comes back, because what returns is almost always a version of your own account. The isolation is doing more damage here than the bias. A pattern that thousands experience separately will go on looking, to every one of them, like a personal failing.
None of this will be argued out of the people making these decisions by an article. What it can do is settle the account in your own mind, which is where the real erosion happens and where it can be stopped. You have spent thirty years demonstrating the exact capability you are now presumed to lack. That nobody wrote it down does not make it untrue.
Read more from Sass Allard
Sass Allard, Strategic Coach & Change Consultant
Sass Allard works at the intersection of leadership, behaviour, and wellbeing, supporting individuals and organisations as they navigate demanding periods of change. Her background spans two decades in global companies, where she has helped senior leaders strengthen culture, clarity, and capability. She brings a grounded understanding of how hormonal shifts shape women’s experience at work without limiting the broader conversation. As a UN Women delegate to the Commission on the Status of Women, she brings a global lens to agency and progress. Sass writes about adaptation, resilience, and the practical shifts that create real movement in work and life.
