The Queenager | Eleanor's Letter

Making the case at Adweek that we are Queenagers: Not Walking Hot Flushes

So yesterday I went to Adweek London, a mega jamboree for the great and not so good of the marketing and advertising world. I appeared on the Great Minds stage with the amazing wellbeing guru Liz Earle, she of the facial polish and Liz Earle Wellbeing - bless her it was her birthday, 59, and she’d come all the way up from Dorset.

We were first asked to do a talk about how brands are waking up to the power of menopausal women… hmmm any of you who have been following Noon for a while will know that is not my favourite framing of this debate. Sure we need and want information and access to the best treatment for menopause; indeed it is a scandal that so few GPs get the right training and that half of women when they do get to a GP and complain of low mood are given antidepressants not HRT. And I am a big subscriber to the Caroline Criado Perez Invisible Women research which shows how women are subject to massive health inequalities, both in terms of research into our bodies and funding. So yes I am all for Davina McCall’s menopause campaign and making a fuss about how we need a revolution.

BUT and it is a big but - I don’t want to be branded menopausal. Just as my teenagers would hate to be described as menstrual, we amazing midlife women are far more than our biology. In fact the survey that Noon did with Vision Express last year as part of our SeeYourselfDifferently https://www.noon.org.uk/see-yourself-different-in-midlife/in Midlife campaign with Jo Whiley found that 68 per cent of women 45-60 did NOT want to be described as menopausal.

So Liz and I said we would do the talk but only if we could rename it, so we did Queenagers; not walking hot flushes, waking up to the power of the midlife woman. We had a good turn out, thanks so much to the Noon Newsletter fans who came along and to our friends at Adweek for the free passes. And this was kind of what we said:

What is a Queenager?

Whatever you want it to be! That’s the whole point – we are fit, financially independent, have agency – in our fifties we have the freedom that generations before us lacked. We can do what WE want… We are a pioneering generation, a new crop of women hitting midlife, there have never been women like us at this point before. In 2019 women over 40 started earning more money than those under 40 for the first time EVER – before women mostly quit work to start families so their earning power fell away. Now we are hanging in there – we are behind over 90 per cent of all household spending decisions and outspend millennial women by 250%. Forbes calls us Super Consumers.BUT brands don’t want to talk to us

Why is the midlife woman so invisible in our culture?

Male lens of the media – not interested in older women. Narrative that older women are like peaches, one wrinkle and we’re out, while men age like fine wine, getting better with age. Older women have been sidelined, not longer fecund or fanciable so cease to matter. But we matter to ourselves and we should matter to brands not just because of equality but because we have cash to spend but in our NOON research 41% of women 45-60 say they don’t feel represented by wider society and a wopping 54% say they would be far more likely to buy from brands who represent them

What is the gap between the media version of older women and the reality?

There is a huge disjunct between the women I know and see – starting up businesses, rediscovering their passions, moving into their prime and their power and the representations in the media – that is why I set up Noon to create a more optimistic narrative. For instance  25 % of educated Queenagers DON’T have children. 40 per cent of them have CHOSEN not to be mothers. These women describe themselves to us in the Focus groups as ‘disposable incomer-arama’ but they are never represented or spoken to. One woman a partner in a law firm said to me ‘I just feel kind of invisible, like I don’t exist – I hate it’

Liz talked about the power of her own recommendations, how thirsty women are for information they can trust (we see that on Noon too). And we talked about how the Noon Queenagers research shows that women want relateable role models, not those like Amanda Holden who look freakishly young.

What about all the current menopause conversation? The mainstream media are not ignoring that..

Women want access to the right treatment and information but 68 per cent in our NOON survey don’t want to be seen as ‘walking hot flushes’ – or defined as menopausal, or by their biology (that was the whole point of feminism for women not be seen as hysterical collections of hormones and wombs) . You can’t blame them.  It’s like saying to men, welcome to your Viagra years – I can’t see many men liking being defined as going a bit floppy… the limp dick years. We want the right medicine or advice so we can feel good during the hormonal changes and get on with living our best lives. Midlife is when we come into our prime,when we become the women we are supposed to be.

Liz talked about this being about HER time, how you want to optimise the next 50 years of your life, how you spent 25 years looking after everyone else – now it’s about you… particularly poignant on her bithday!

That is backed up by our Noon research too: now the women see this as THEIR time: the moment when they come into their prime, get to explore their own dreams. In our research we found that for Queenagers Work/life balance 16x more important than status at work; Time for themselves more important than partner, job they love, friends or active sex life; Enjoy money and will spend it on what matters to them.

But it’s not all fun and games at the point in life is it?

No, at Noon we talk about the Queenagers as Forged in Fire – over half of them have experienced at least five big life events – divorce, bereavement, redundancy, mental or physical abuse, teens with anxiety, self-harming or eating disorders, elderly parents coming to bit, their own health issues, menopause (25 per cent can have suicidal feelings). But what our research shows is that it is the women who have really been through the mill who are now happiest, who have re-made their lives so that they are exactly as they want them who now reap the benefits. Like my friend Sam whose daughter died, marriage broke down, lost her job, moved to a new place – but now says at 60 she is the happiest she has ever been. We saw that a lot. That is the hard-earned wisdom the power in the room

Women in midlife deserve joy, fun, sex, laughter – all the good stuff. But we never see that modelled in our culture, or very rarely, hardly ever in advertising (only 2 per cent of adverts show women over 45, even though we are behind 95 per cent of all household spending decisions).

Ends

I’m really interested to know how this resonates with all of you and what you think… which brands do you think actually cater for women in midlife? We were asked which ones were doing it well… what do you think?

And if you’d like to support what we do at Noon around changing the narrative on the later stages of women’s lives (and get a free book every month for our book club) please become a paid subscriber to this newsletter. It helps us fund all we do.

Lots of love

Eleanor