Gender Balancing Midlife

We are privileged to work with many global thought leaders looking at age and how we make the most of our increasing years.  One of these is the wonderful Avivah Wittenberg-Cox – you can find out more about Avivah in the podcast she did with Next-Up CEO Victoria Tomlinson.

In this article which appeared on Substack, she argues that we have to ensure men are not increasingly excluded as we move to more diversity, something that Next-Up is also concerned to address.

Going Mainstream or Going Male?

Many of the women I know have succeeded professionally in male dominated (and more importantly male-normed) organisations. But often discover they are never truly accepted and integrated.

Women are waking up. They are powering a lot of the attention to this new midlife moment. They are the majority of participants in most of the midlife transition programs I’ve been researching. A slew of new initiatives, websites and menopause-awareness building is under way. They are talking, sharing, and role modelling societal grandmothering, or what my friend Barbara Waxman calls the ‘modern matriarchy.’ They are slowly discovering that Q3 may be their most powerful, productive and engaged decades yet.

There is a lot less attention being given to men and midlife. Here, most of the attention seems to skew towards extending life rather than navigating its more natural contours. The whole issue of gender differences in ageing is rarely addressed.

My thesis would be that the genders become more similar in the second half of life. Men have less testosterone, women less estrogen. The stereotypes and vilifying about crones and witches, long aimed at older women, is simply that mature women start speaking their mind more forthrightly. A friend of my mother’s was one of the founders of a group in Canada called The Raging Grannies. Men calm down a bit. As any military knows, likelihood of war correlates directly to the prevalence of young men. Ageing societies are likely to be calmer ones.

A 10-year study in the US found that men suffered a bigger post-retirement drop in mental cognition than women. Twice as large. Yet retirement in most companies and countries is still an unforgiving cliff edge. Here today, gone tomorrow. The sudden loss of identity, purpose and community leaves countless men at loose ends without the plans or the networks to navigate later life. Women, more socially connected, muddle their way through with a little help from their girlfriends. Men too often disappear into their dens. This isn’t good for them, nor for the women they live with.

How do we get more men engaged in managing midlife transitions? Research shows that men don’t really like the word ‘midlife.’ I think it will require more respected labels and mainstream acceptance. The Harvard programme I did last year was a midlife transition program in all but name. It was called the more aspirational (and I’d argue more male-friendly) Advanced Leadership Initiative. It was also 50/50 gender balanced. All the other universities starting such programmes are following suit.

The real opportunity, I would argue, isn’t to recreate the mistake we’ve made once. We shouldn’t feminise midlife, even if women are likely to be both more skilled and more interested in it. We should gender balance it. And get mature men and women in conversation to balance back from the overly masculine world we’ve birthed (which is killing birthrates globally), to a more balanced social and political system.

I’ll give the gentlemen the last word with an on-point quote from David Dunbar, describing Murdock’s book:

”A fascinating Jungian analysis of what it means to be a woman. The Heroine’s Journey is a counterweight to the patriarchal bias of Western society which privileges male experience. Murdock has to reach back to pre-Christian mythology and beyond the confines of Western society to illustrate the archetypal nature of women’s experiences and to lay bare the dysfunctional ‘to hell in a handcart’ direction of a society that not only ignores but disdains the Feminine as a valid and balancing social and psychological force. This book should not be read necessarily as a gender-focused tract. We all contain a mixture of the Masculine and the Feminine. As a man, I was easily able to identify with the sometimes toxic effects our patriarchal society has on the individual. I have suffered too. I enjoyed this book immensely and appreciated the insights it provided. If we are to heal the world, we need urgently to adopt Feminine values more widely and more deeply.”