Why We Can't Sleep: Women's New Midlife Crisis

by Ada Calhoun

“Trying to have it all could be bad for your mental health.” In my experience, there is only one thing worse for a woman’s mental health than trying to be a superhero, and that is being told to “chill”—especially since any efforts to do so incur swift blowback.

That was the only person this new mother encountered that day who she felt wasn’t judging her. “It’s like you’re supposed to know what you’re supposed to do,” she said. “And we’re not going to help. We’re going to surround you and stare at you and worry about your baby. You don’t exist here, unless we’re pointing out what you’re not doing.”

Gen X mothers typically do not let their kids jump on box springs. They are more likely to serve at cupcake-decoration tables, pumpkin-carving stations, face-painting booths. My son’s elementary school used the scheduling site SignUpGenius. In my head, I always heard this phrase as sarcastic: “Yeah, go ahead and sign up, genius. You definitely should spend four hours on Saturday morning supervising the sand-art activity at the Spring Garden Party instead of resting or cleaning your house, genius.” Once you’re in the system, you can try to get out, but your school family will keep pulling you back in, like the Mafia.

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Each email will cc twenty to forty women. These women have jobs. One is a teacher. One is an event planner. One runs a restaurant. It’s not as though they have tons of free time. And yet, I’ve noticed that men are rarely, if ever, copied. I’ve tried to loop my husband in on some of these chains—just so he can share in the joy, of course—but somehow his name never sticks on the list.

To people ignorant of these threads, the labor is invisible. It is also, as anyone who even comes close to it can tell you, exhausting. Many hours and dollars a year go into reading these emails and then acting on their directives—sending the kid in with a bagged lunch for the museum trip, buying something for the class basket, wrapping the Secret Santa present, venmoing Angela for the principal’s gift. This is an inconspicuous “mental load” that women commiserate about: the holiday gifts and grocery lists and travel plans and all the other “little things” that can eat your brain.

Time-use surveys show that while Gen X men do more at home than their fathers did, it’s still not enough to spare women the bulk of the work. Arlie Hochschild’s 1989 book, The Second Shift—which showed that working women came home from the office and did a second shift as homemakers—remains timely.

According to the Pew Research Center, in 2016, fathers reported spending eight hours a week on child care. That’s more than three times what fathers spent with their children in 1965. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, working women with children under the age of six still spend an average of 1.1 hours of each workday physically taking care of them. Men? Twenty-six minutes.20 Ac...

Recent Pew research on two-income families showed that fathers said they shared household work and child care equally.22 Mothers disagreed, and their “perceptions are supported by plentiful research,” according to the New York Times.23 According to another report, after a baby was born, women’s total time working—including paid work, ch...

There is still a presumption that men are the heads of household, even when they earn less and do less. In fact, according to a 2018 report from the US Census Bureau, both men and women in a heterosexual couple tend to misrepresent—even to census takers—their incomes if the woman earns more. Women understated their income by 1.5 percent and men exaggerated th...

Instead, changing gender roles are causing a backlash. “Women who earn more than their husbands,” Sawhill told me, “actually do more housework in an effort to compensate for their higher earnings and the psychological drama involved.”

Fantasies of an equal partnership, in which both partners do equal amounts of work, make equal amounts of money, and each cook dinner three and a half times a week, typically run up against the reality of just how grueling it is to take care of children when both parents work. Often, both parties wind up feeling underappreciated.

At the other end of the caregiving rack are Generation X’s aging parents. While men are doing more these days to take care of the elderly as well as children, the main burden still falls on middle-aged women (average age: forty-nine) more than on any other group.

The cost is significant, especially for women. According to a 2011 MetLife study, when a woman leaves the labor force early to care for a parent, the potential toll of lost wages and lost Social Security benefits averages $324,000 over her lifetime.30 Six in ten caregivers become obliged to make changes at work, like taking paid or unpaid time off.31 Family caregivers spend about $7,000 per year on out-of-pocket costs relating to caregiving; for women, that’s an average of 21 percent of their income.

She said she believes that, ideally, women come into their own in their forties and fifties, finding their true callings in life, but that often today: “women are too busy to even think about it.”

The caregiving rack is likely to stretch Millennials and Gen Z even more than Gen X. As cancer treatments progress and people live longer with chronic illness or dementia, the absence of family leave and of affordable health insurance could prove yet more debilitating for those cohorts in midlife.

There is one positive trend, for younger women: the gender gap in caregiving is narrowing, though the pattern of having children later and parents living longer persists. It didn’t happen in time for Gen Xers to benefit that much, but younger men appear to be taking on more as fathers, husbands, and sons. According to a recent ...

A 2018 study by the Institute for Women’s Policy Research (IWPR) reported even more dire news: Looking back over a fifteen-year span, the IWPR observed that when you take into account women’s breaks from full-time work, the wage gap widens to forty-nine cents to the typical men’s dollar, significantly less than the eighty cents usually calculated using a single year of census data.5 The report found that women who take just one year off make 39 percent less than women who stayed in the workforce for the full fifteen years.

Only 3 percent of venture capital goes to women-run companies.10 As of 2019, women hold just 4.8 percent of CEO positions at S&P 500 companies.11 In fact, as you may have heard, fewer women run large companies than men named John.

Gen Xers now hold roughly 37 percent of management positions in the United States and 51 percent globally.13 But, just as Generation X ages into managerial positions, those positions are vanishing. In the past two decades, US corporate hierarchies have become flatter, with a reduction, according to the National Bureau of Economic Research, in the ranks of middle managers.14 It seems that every day there’s another report of a company’s bold new plan to cut costs and increase annual savings by “streamlining”—read: having fewer people do more work.

“Despite their growing influence and responsibilities at work, Gen Xers are most overlooked for promotion and have been the slowest to advance,” according to consulting firm DDI’s Global Leadership Forecast 2018,16 which reported, too, that Gen X leaders are “under-recognized” and “typically expected to take on heavy workloads.” The result: demoralization. A 2019 MetLife survey found that Gen X ...

According to the 2018 Women in the Workplace report from Leanin.org and McKinsey and Company, corporate America has made almost no progress on gender diversity in the past four years.19 Women’s presence as a percentage in computer occupations has actually declined since the 1990s.

Headlines confirm our worst suspicions. Harvard Business Review: OLDER WOMEN ARE BEING FORCED OUT OF THE WORKFORCE.24 PBS NewsHour: WHY WOMEN OVER 50 CAN’T FIND JOBS.25 The New York Times: FOR WOMEN IN MIDLIFE, CAREER GAINS SLIP AWAY.

As of this writing, unemployment has just hit a new low.27 But age discrimination is real: A recent New York Times–Pro Publica investigation found that Facebook job ads were not showing up on the pages of people over a certain age, because the site let potential employees target younger demographics for their ads. When Verizon sought recruits for a financial planning and analysis unit, the ad went out to people ages twenty-five to thirty-six.28 Older users never saw it.

A recent lawsuit against the media company Meredith highlighted the age disparity in men and women on TV news. In five years, the company removed seven female anchors with an average age of 46.8 and replaced them with younger women, whose average age was 38.1. Meanwhile, mal...

Now Gen X women find themselves competing in middle age with both younger and older workers. In 2011, the Center for Work-Life Policy called Gen X the “wrong place, wrong time” generation: “thwarted by boomers who can’t afford to retire and threatened by the prospect of leap-frogging Millennials.”

Gen X journalist Ann Sterzinger wrote on Medium that, after she got into the game, the rules changed: “We watched as the standard age for a reporter went from ten years older than we were to ten years younger in the space of five years.”

Henderson offers this example—one you may have heard before: “An unemployed forty-five-year-old woman, college educated, looks at a job description and thinks, ‘Oh, I think I only have about seventy percent of the skills; I won’t apply.’ A man looks at that same description and thinks, ‘Great, I have fifty percent of the skills; I’ll apply!’ That happens every day.”

When you’re told by bosses that you’re worthy of a job or a promotion or a trip to a conference like this one, she said: “Trust their judgment. Do not stay down in the valley; there’s too much room at the top of the mountain.”

Her face fell. I suddenly saw how tired she was. Their baby is in “very expensive daycare,” she said. A lot of it. She and her husband start their day at 6:30 a.m. But the daycare facility doesn’t open that early, so they had to hire a nanny, also expensive, to bridge that time. And they don’t get off work until 6:00 p.m.

They can’t afford the pricey Houston real estate market on only one income, so it’s lucky that both of them want to work. They’ve cobbled together a strategy by which they spend a huge amount of money while seeing very little of their baby during the week. She seemed proud of her good work and proud of her baby and incredibly conflicted about the financial and emotional gymnastics required to have both. Some women who “have it all” may see their children awake ninety minutes or less per weekday.

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Claudia Goldin has found that women’s earnings start out being roughly equal to men’s but then diverge as the women start juggling home and family. The solution to this inequity, she writes,40 “does not (necessarily) have to involve government intervention and it need not make men more responsible in the home (although that wouldn’t hurt). But it must involve changes in the labor market, especially how jobs are structured and remunerated to enhance temporal flexibility.”

Goldin predicts that the gender gap in pay would be “considerably reduced” and might vanish if firms “did not have an incentive to disproportionately reward individuals who labored long hours and worked particular hours.” There’s a rare idea: the private sector could do something to help women—that it’s not just up to us to cultivate sponsors, mentors, or advisers and to demand our place at the table.

Internalizing the idea that it’s within your power to climb the mountain if only you believe in yourself enough and do the work has led us to the logical conclusion: if you haven’t made it to the mountaintop, what’s wrong with you?

Lean In’s main message—which emphasizes individual action as a way to address gender inequality—may lead people to view women as having played a greater role in sustaining and even causing gender inequality.” The more we talk about what women should do, the study’s authors said, the more women tend to be blamed for not fixing it.

“Taking your seat at the table doesn’t work so well when no one wants you there and you are vastly outnumbered.”

Michelle Obama put it more bluntly on her 2018 book tour, telling a New York crowd: “That whole ‘so you can have it all.’ Nope, not at the same time. That’s a lie. And it’s not always enough to lean in, because that shit doesn’t work all the time.”

research “has shown that it’s harder for assertive, ambitious women to be seen as likable, and easier to conclude they lack some intangible, ill-defined quality of leadership.”

Damned If You Do, Doomed If You Don’t.”45 Women in the corporate world often are regarded as either too passive or too aggressive, too ambitious or not ambitious enough, too flighty or too off-putting. Add that to the enduring afflictions of sexual harassment, ageism, pregnancy discrimination, and run-of-the-mill lack of power.

“This is an era when life should be filled with all sorts of rewarding activities,” she said. “Yet many find themselves caught up not only in long hours of work but in debt and suffering from stress, loneliness, and crumbling families.”

A professor for the past forty-three years, Ciulla sees Gen X women in shock from this state of affairs, because, she says, they have credited “the false illusion that all the problems had been solved.

“It used to be amazing to listen to my students,” said Ciulla. “They just had very unrealistic expectations about the gender situation in the world. They’d say, ‘We don’t need feminists anymore. It’s been solved. And feminism turns people off.’ They thought we were crazy old ba...

“It’s kind of a sad comeuppance. Being a fifty-year-old woman out of a job is hard. If you’re a professor, you can be old, but in most other jobs, they don’t want old women. The stats hold that up. They have a much harder time getting into the workplace and lower salaries. And often they’re single parents.”

According to Freelancers Union founder Sara Horowitz, most freelancers are women. She believes it’s because “the traditional work structure just isn’t working well for them … our lives play out in stages that don’t fit well with a corporate world dominated by men. By our thirties, many women are starting families and struggling with taking time away from the office. By our forties, we’re often hitting the glass ceiling in terms of pay and promotions. By our fifties and sixties, unfortunately, we’re often being ignored altogether.”

Brooke Erin Duffy, an assistant professor of communication at Cornell University, calls the rhetoric around pursuing work you love “aspirational labor”: “Aspirational labor is a mode of (mostly) uncompensated, independent work that is propelled by the much-venerated ideal of getting paid to do what you love.”55 The problem: doing what you love often does not pay.

[But] independent work comes with incredible demands. You’re managing a business all by yourself, and you have all the stresses and uncertainties and anxieties that come from being your own boss.” Many women like the ones I met at that conference, having left corporate America for the gig economy, found themselves working twice as hard for a quarter of the money.

“A lot of people have assumed that since I’ve been staying home I’ve kept my son home with me. But I can’t, because you can’t get into a preschool on a moment’s notice. So while I’m unemployed we’re still shouldering the burden of his preschool tuition.” If they pulled him out of school he’d go to the bottom of the waiting list to get back in once she found a job. So she’s paying for child care she doesn’t need. To cover it, she and her husband have started borrowing from their retirement savings.

The American dream is no longer dreamable for many of us. The gap between the richest 1 percent and everyone else has been increasing for the past thirty years; it widened greatly in the 1990s, as we were entering the job market.1

“Stagnant wages, diminishing job opportunities, and lost home values may be painting a vastly different future for Gen X and Gen Y,” reported the Urban Institute. “Today’s political discussions often focus on preserving the wealth and benefits of older Americans and the baby boomers. Often lost in this debate is attention to younger generations whose wealth losses, or lack of long-term gains, have been even greater … Despite their relative youth, [Gen X and Gen Y] may not be able to make up the lost ground.”

money.” It was not bad advice. She didn’t want me to be dependent on a man. For her, money was freedom and power, and she wanted me to have as much of both as possible. The advice had an unintended side effect, though: I work hard, all the time, but when I fail to make an adequate amount of money, I feel terror. I become convinced that not only have I put my credit score or my family’s budget in jeopardy, I’ve set back the cause of feminism and endangered my freedom. I don’t just feel broke; I feel doomed.

In their forties, our parents’ generation could expect to own a house and to have savings. In our forties, we are often still scrambling the way we did at twenty-five. According to a 2017 national survey by CareerBuilder, 78 percent of US workers live paycheck-to-paycheck; nearly three in four say they are in debt.