Time With Sands – Corporate Invisibility

My experience as I have gotten older, is that I am getting more and more invisible to corporate leadership, while the aging men seem to get more power and respect. A man’s wrinkles and gray hair are signs of distinction; in a woman, they often are still treated with disdain.

– Margaret F.

You can’t stop progress, but what is important about now, and going forward, is that when we combine ageism and sexism or ageism and, god forbid, misogyny, it is conflated together. So women suffer more than men when it comes to the ageism and the stereotyping as women become more invisible, more irrelevant, etc.

This is an important conversation because the reality is that women are the leaders of the future. They are moving us into a whole new paradigm shift, and women do mean business.

They are the ones who do the buying and also are in the workforce. They are now in more and more positions of leadership and we know, there’s enough research done that’s been proving, that women in leadership positions are making a humongous difference to the bottom line, not just to the culture itself. And Gen X and Boomer women mean bigger business, and the marketplace has got to catch up to serving these women, not only as consumers, but as employees and as leaders, and we cannot let ourselves be considered irrelevant. That takes us standing up and standing out and stepping forward and not worrying about making waves, and realizing that this is the time for women to lead.

So again, that means a mindset shift not only for men but for us as women to be more assertive.