Reaching 50 brings all kinds of unforeseen hurdles. No wonder so many women are quitting work altogether, says Guardian columnist Gaby Hinsliff
Reaching 50 brings with it all kinds of unforeseen hurdles. No wonder so many women who can afford to are quitting altogetherSheryl Sandberg with Mark Zuckerberg, pictured last year.Last modified on Fri 10 Jun 2022 10.05 BSTMeta after 14 years at the top of one of the world’s most powerful companies, for a future that sounds suspiciously vague. Apparently she wants to focus on feminist philanthropy, plus “parenting our extended family of five children”.
Perhaps she simply wants out of an increasingly toxic industry, accused of inadvertently fuelling hate speech, conspiracy theories and poisonous populist movements around the globe. For months Silicon Valley has buzzed with rumours that Sandberg, a committed Hillary Clinton supporter, was more troubled than other executives by social media’s seeming role in the rise of Donald Trump, and that she was simultaneously losingabout its future.
Perhaps we’ll have to wait for her next book to find out. But Sandberg isn’t the first 52-year-old woman to take stock of her life and decide it’s not too late to change, or even to discover that this is a messier and more unforgiving decade than it looks. So many of us imagine we’ll have life sorted by 50: children on the road to independence, more time for yourself, and the professional confidence born of years of experience. Stick at it through the early childbearing years, we tell ourselves, and things can only get easier. For some, midlife really is about reaping the rewards of leaning in.
Britain hasn’t experienced the much-hyped Great Resignation supposedly seen in the US, as the pandemic prompted some to reconsider what really matters to them and chuck in corporate jobs. Instead, we’ve seen something more like the Great Early Retirement, with an unexpected rise in over-50s giving up work that piqued statisticians’ curiosity.
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