I’m 45 with decades of experience, but I’ve been turned down for 70 jobs

Kimberley Rowley, 45, from Bromley, Greater London, had her twins in her early forties after spending decades building her career in communications. She thought she had done the right thing by waiting until her career was established before starting a family, but she was made redundant at the end of her maternity leave. Two years later, she has still not managed to secure a new role. “Your forties are supposed to be your highest-earning years, and I’m not earning anything at all. I’m not paying anything into my pension, and I’ve got a huge mortgage. Most of us struggle in our twenties and thirties – it’s part of life. But there’s something really difficult about having your whole standard of living completely eroded in your forties,” she says. “People assume I like being a stay-at-home mum, but I don’t. I really want to get back to work”. With a background in senior communications roles, Kimberley has been strategic in the jobs she applies for. “I’ve probably made over 70 applications and have had around five or six first-stage interviews and reached the second stage once, but I still haven’t secured a role. It’s really shocked me how difficult the job market has become. Gone are the days when you sent off your CV to a recruiter and they called you up about a job.” Shorts Earlier this month, Kimberley was rejected for a role in which she has years of experience. “It was a head of communications role in a sector I know inside out,” she says. “This was not a case of, ‘I think I can do it’, or of transferable skills. I have literally done this job – twice!” “As women, we are constantly being told to be realistic, to be flexible and perhaps take a step back, to get your foot back in the door. But how far are women supposed to step?” A growing number of companies are using AI recruitment tools to sift applicants. However, recent research, including a study published by Stanford University in 2025, is finding that AI tools have an inherent bias against older working women. Journalist and artist Stacey Duguid, who has held various senior editorial roles over several decades, has spoken openly recently about the shame of being rejected for hundreds of jobs and claiming universal credit. While Duguid has “botoxed” her CV by stripping out some of her experience to disguise her age and improve her chances of getting through the recruitment process, Kimberley believes that simply optimising just to get through AI screening isn’t sustainable. “I work in communications. I know how to tailor my CV to an application. I think we need to talk more about what’s happening in the jobs market and recruitment itself, rather than continually assuming candidates just need to optimise harder,” argues Kimberley. “Employers need to be much clearer about when AI is being used, what role it plays in screening or ranking candidates, what has been done to test for discriminatory outcomes and where meaningful human oversight sits.” Laura Holden, a lawyer specialising in AI law at Bonsai Law, argues that there needs to be greater oversight of AI recruitment tools, so that AI companies have a clearer responsibility to identify and address bias. “There is a serious issue with a lack of transparency from these providers in proving that these tools aren’t biased,” she says. “At the moment, checking for bias is left to the employer using the tools, and you’ve got HR teams trying to do the right thing, but they’re not experts in AI. It’s a very technical and scientific area.” While there is some protection in existing law, including data protection law, which allows job applicants to challenge a decision that has been made solely by automated tools, and to ask for a review if they are not happy with the outcome of a decision, the onus is on the job applicant to start this process, says Holden. Kimberley believes that the ageism and bias faced by women is particularly acute for older first-time mothers. Research by the University of Liverpool, which found that women are invited to fewer interviews once they reach 40, supports this. The same research found that men do not receive “declines in callback rates” until their fifties. For older mothers, ageism can coincide with taking on care of elderly parents as well as the care of their children, adds Kimberley. “Women are not less ambitious; it’s not that we want to earn less, it’s that we are being pushed into doing unpaid labour.” “The job application process is so time and labour intensive now that it locks someone with young children out if you don’t have any childcare,” she says. “As an older parent, my parents are very elderly. My father has passed away, and my mother, who is 79 and has a heart condition, needs my support.” This was a big part of why Kimberley founded Resilient Mothers in late 2025, a network helping women to rebuild their careers after motherhood. Since then, she has met dozens of other women in their forties who are facing the same hurdles in the job market. “As mothers, we keep quiet about our other responsibilities in the workplace. We suck it up and pretend that we don’t have children, which means younger colleagues are quite shielded from the realities. They don’t see what’s going on behind the scenes, because we don’t talk about it,” she explains. For now, while she has not given up on returning to a senior role, neither is she prepared to put her ideas and ambitions on hold while she waits. “I’m still looking for the right senior leadership role, particularly around strategy, transformation and communications. I know I’m capable of working at that level and I’ve still got a lot to offer. But after nearly two years of job searching, I can’t just sit around waiting for somebody to give me a job,” she says. “I needed somewhere to put my ideas and energy, and I am building something of my own rather than waiting for the jobs market to decide what happens next.”