For this episode, I interviewed fellow Ad woman Jane Evans. Jane is well known in our industry, she was one of her generation’s most successful advertising women, winning tons of awards for her creative campaigns. BUT and there is a big but here, in her fifties, she was made to feel completely invisible by the advertising industry.
This became a big problem. She quickly realised that there is a huge issue of unemployment and invisibility for all midlife women. Emails and calls were ignored by every ad agency and personally, she didn’t know how she would make ends meet – she ended up having to go to food banks and even being evicted from her home.
This led to her creating the Uninvisibility project. A platform dedicated to highlighting this issue, showcasing brilliant women, and creating opportunities for women to return to the workplace.
And god, I thank her for it. We all should. As Jane points out during our conversation, this is a huge societal issue and one that we should all be concerned about. She makes the very good point that we've been basing our lives on the fact that we're going to live to around about 70. Yet we're probably going to live to 90 or 100. So being in your 50s is not the end, it's actually the middle of our lives. And women are bearing the full brunt of this neglect, with unemployment at an all-time high. This is an issue that we discuss at length including the ways in which we can start to bring about change.
We also talked about another important issue and that’s how we talk about menopause. Because let’s face it, that’s been and still is taboo. Though Jane attributes her lack of confidence to menopause she also says one thing that women don’t realise is that although you may have a difficult time with it, there is also a huge part no one talks about and that is the surge of energy and confidence you get afterward. Why? because suddenly you have testosterone in your system.
There is, of course, a lot more that we discuss, and if like me you are a fan of all of what Jane says then you can continue to hear more about her story through her wonderful book that she co-authored with Carol Russell called ‘Invisible to Invaluable. Unleashing the power of midlife women’ https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B08JY58CYJ/ref=dp-kindle-redirect?_encoding=UTF8&btkr=1
