“It’s a great benefit to have gray hair!”: The intersection of gender,aging, and visibility in midlife professional women’s narratives

Midlife professional women’s aging experiences, especially the experiences of changing physical appearance, are examined in this study. A discursive-narrative approach is used to analyze interviews of women working in senior professional and managerial jobs in Finland. The decline narrative is not enough to capture the experiences of these women; noticeable signs of aging can indeed have a positive connotation. After looking older and less attractive (in a stereotypical sense), women are no longer being subjected to a sexualized gaze and are taken more seriously. Aging opens up possibilities for “doing” gender differently and transcending rigid gender dichotomies and relationships.