Women are navigating ageism, sexism and systems that keep shutting them out, writes Lauren Ryder.
There’s been a lot of talk recently about the “boomer bottleneck” – older workers who remain in the workforce while younger employees wait for opportunities to open up. The conversations are often framed around economic commentary, but every time I see them, it makes my skin crawl.
Why? Because older women who are staying employed, visible, and financially afloat are being cast as obstacles. Meanwhile, older men who occupy boards and senior leadership roles for decades without making space for younger, more diverse or more innovative replacements, seem to raise no equivalent alarm.
It’s a cocktail of ageism and sexism, wrapped up as economic analysis. Funny how the bottleneck is always located in the people with the least structural power, isn’t it?
There is a real and legitimate conversation to be had about creating opportunities for younger workers. I am not dismissing that. But I can’t help but feel that blaming older women for rigid workplace structures they did not design and do not control is a misdirection that serves no one except the commentators who benefit from the tidy narrative.
The women being described as the bottleneck are, in many cases, working because they have to. Because Australia’s superannuation system rewarded decades of uninterrupted full-time careers, and theirs were not that. Because women aged 60 to 64 retire with about 25 per cent less superannuation than men of the same age, having spent years in part-time roles, unpaid care work, or lower-paying industries. Because from 2011 to 2021, the rate of homelessness among older women grew by almost 40 per cent, and for single women in particular, continued employment is not a lifestyle preference but a financial lifeline.
The system is working against them too
What rarely gets reported alongside stories about older workers “taking up space” is how aggressively the hiring system works to push those same workers out of it.
Almost a quarter of HR professionals now classify workers aged 51 to 55 as “older”, up from 10 per cent in 2023, according to the Australian HR Institute and the Australian Human Rights Commission.
More than half of Australians aged 50 and over report having been discriminated against based solely on their age while job-hunting. And the tools being deployed to “modernise” recruitment are making this worse, not better. AI hiring systems are being used to screen candidates at scale, and research from the University of Melbourne has found that age bias is being embedded into large language models, meaning AI is not overcoming bias in hiring but accelerating it.
The result is that women are gaming their own CVs to survive the process, and can we blame them? I’ve spoken to women who have removed graduation years to obscure their age. They are cutting older roles from their employment history to avoid looking overqualified. They are shrinking their own records of achievement so that an algorithm or a 35-year-old recruiter does not decide they are not worth a conversation. Around 30 per cent of Australian organisations now use AI systems in recruitment, and those systems were built on historical data that already carried the biases of the workplaces that produced it.
What employers need to do differently
Employers who genuinely want to address this have to start by acknowledging that the barriers are structural, not personal. An older woman who has not been shortlisted is navigating a pipeline with multiple points of attrition unrelated to her capabilities.
The most immediate fix is scrutinising the language used in job advertisements, which continues to signal age preferences in ways that are technically legal but practically exclusionary. Terms like “digital native,” “high energy,” and “fast-paced environment” function as coded filters. Older workers have been rated more highly by employers for loyalty, reliability, and ability to cope with stress than their younger counterparts, and yet the language used to attract talent rarely reflects those qualities as desirable.
Organisations should also audit their AI hiring tools for age bias before deploying them at scale. In February 2025, a House Standing Committee recommended banning AI from making final recruitment decisions without human oversight. While the regulation catches up, the responsibility falls on employers to ensure their technology is not perpetrating the discrimination their policies say they prohibit.
Beyond recruitment, development opportunities create a genuine competitive advantage for older workers. Almost 40% of respondents aged 55 to 64 reported that their organisation offered them little or no skills training, which means the workforce is simultaneously excluding experienced workers from opportunities and then wondering why those workers feel disengaged. Investing in the development of employees at every career stage is how you retain institutional knowledge and build multigenerational teams that consistently outperform homogeneous teams.
So what can women do about it?
I want to speak directly to the women navigating this, because the systemic critique is real but it is not the whole story, and waiting for the system to fix itself is not a viable strategy.
The CV shrinking has to stop. I understand why it is happening, but concealing your experience is a short-term workaround that undermines your positioning before you have even had a conversation. Instead, focus the first page of your CV entirely on recent, relevant achievements and their commercial outcomes. Dates matter less than results, and results should be front and centre.
Think carefully about where your applications are going. Networks and referrals consistently outperform cold applications through AI-filtered systems, and that is especially true for experienced candidates. The people who already know your work are your most powerful route back in, and investing in those relationships is a better use of time than optimising a document for an algorithm designed to screen you out.
Translate your experience deliberately. The language of leadership, mentoring, navigating complexity, managing change and sustaining performance under pressure is precisely what organisations in transformation need, and it is exactly the language many older women undersell. Don’t be afraid to name it explicitly and name the outcomes it produced.
The framing is the problem
The conversation Australia needs to have about workforce opportunity is an important one, but it has to be grounded in an honest account of not only where the actual barriers sit, but who built them and who bears the cost of maintaining them. Older women staying in the workforce are not the problem. They are, in many cases, its most undervalued asset. The bottleneck is the structures, assumptions and increasingly automated systems that decide, before a conversation even begins, that their best years are behind them.