Experience should open doors, not close them, regardless of gender. Sushmita Chowdhary examines why women’s leadership potential is questioned earlier than men’s, and how age, gender and entrenched workplace stereotypes continue shaping opportunity today.

The Leadership Clock: Why Women Run Out of Time Sooner

I spent years working in a school, and long before I ever held a title, that job taught me what leadership actually looks like. You learn it standing in front of thirty different personalities every morning, earning a parent's trust in one five-minute conversation, and making a hundred small calls before the first bell rings. Everyone I worked with, especially the women, was leading something every single day. Nobody just happened to call it that.

One staff meeting from those years has stayed with me. A senior male colleague, close to sixty, walked in late and the room simply adjusted around him. He listened to everyone else first, then spoke last, and whatever he said became the answer everyone worked from. People described him as wise. Nobody in that room wondered whether he still had the energy or the sharpness to lead his department.

A woman on that same staff, only a few years younger, had spent almost as many years running admissions and student counselling as he had spent running his side of things. Her work shaped hundreds of young lives, and her judgment was every bit as sound as his. But when the school restructured, she was told the department needed fresh energy. He stayed exactly where he was and was even handed an advisory role, so the school could keep drawing on everything he knew. Nobody called it bias. Nobody had to. The decision spoke for itself.

That meeting is really where this article comes from. A man can lead a company or a department at sixty and still be seen as fully capable. A woman can start facing quiet doubts about her place in leadership from her early forties. Same years put in, same effort given, yet a very different reception waiting for each of them.

Two Clocks, Running Differently

Think of it as two clocks ticking inside every workplace. For a man, the clock moves in his favour with each passing year. Grey hair earns him the label distinguished. A man leading a team at fifty-eight or sixty is described as someone who has been there and done that, someone whose age has quietly turned into proof of good judgment.

For a woman, that same clock starts working against her much earlier. By her early forties, she may already be asked, directly or through hints, whether she still has the energy for a demanding role. If she has children, people assume her attention has shifted elsewhere.

A widely cited Harvard Business Review study on women in leadership found that age-related bias followed women through every stage of a career, whether they were seen as too young early on or as past their most useful years later. The researchers noted there was no comfortable stage where a woman's age simply worked for her the way it works for men.

A Story From My Own Family

I saw the same pattern up close, outside of work, at a family gathering a few years ago. My uncle, around sixty-two at the time, announced he was starting a small consulting business after retiring from his job. Everyone at the table clapped. People called him full of energy and admired his drive to start something new so late in life.

A year later, my aunt, close to the same age, mentioned she wanted to start teaching art classes from home, something she had wanted to do for years. The reaction was completely different. Relatives told her to relax, spend time with her grandchildren, and simply enjoy her retirement instead. Nobody in that room meant any harm by it. But the gap between how the two of them were received, over almost identical announcements, was impossible to miss once I noticed it. One idea was called ambition. The other was quietly discouraged.

Sixty as a Beginning, Not Just a Stay

It would be too simple to say that men are only rewarded for staying put past sixty. Many are actually handed something brand new at that age, and the evidence for this is easy to find.

In 2022, Arun Kumar Singh was appointed chairman of Oil and Natural Gas Corporation, one of India's largest state-run companies, just two months before he turned sixty, making him the first person that age to be given charge of a major state-run firm. He did not simply stay on in an old role. He stepped into an entirely new one. This fits a wider pattern documented by researchers studying executive careers, who found that the average age at which someone becomes a company chief executive for the first time in the United States has climbed to fifty-five, up from under forty-eight two decades ago, with the average sitting chief executive today around sixty-one. Sixty, increasingly, is treated as a starting line for men rather than a finish line.

What is harder to find is that same door opening as often for women, though it does happen. Nonkululeko Nyembezi-Heita was appointed chairperson of Standard Bank Group in South Africa at sixty-two, becoming the bank's first Black woman to hold that position. Arundhati Bhattacharya, after retiring as head of the State Bank of India, moved into an entirely different industry in her sixties, taking over as chairperson and chief executive of Salesforce India, a technology company far removed from the banking world she had spent her career in. These stories exist, and they matter. But they remain far less common than similar stories about men, and they tend to get treated as remarkable exceptions rather than something ordinary.

Sixty clearly can be a beginning, for my uncle and for men like Arun Kumar Singh. The real goal is making sure it can be just as ordinary a beginning for women like my aunt, and like Nyembezi-Heita and Bhattacharya, instead of a rare headline.

Inside the Corporate World

A friend of mine works at a large private bank, and she once told me about a senior manager there, a man in his early sixties, moved into a special advisory role during a company restructuring. He was praised in the internal newsletter for his decades of service and asked to mentor younger managers. Around the same time, a woman in a similar role, only in her late forties, was quietly told her branch would now be handled by someone with more current thinking, after twenty years of service.

I have heard versions of the same story from people in IT firms, hospitals, and law offices. In one case, a woman with a stronger performance record than her male peer was passed over for a regional leadership role because management felt the client-facing position needed someone with more energy. She was younger than the man who eventually got the job.

Never Quite the Right Age

Men largely gain credibility as they age, and their years accumulate into authority almost automatically. Women are asked to hold two things together that rarely fit well side by side. Early in her career, a woman might be seen as too young to lead anything important. Later, the very same woman might be told she is out of step or lacking fresh energy. There is rarely a stage where her age is simply treated as right.

Appearance adds another layer. Women in leadership are often expected to look put-together and youthful even as the years pass. A woman with visible signs of ageing may be quietly judged as tired or past her prime. A man with the exact same grey hair is more often called distinguished. Comments about a senior woman often drift toward how she looks or whether her style feels current, even in jobs that have nothing to do with appearance.

Career Breaks and What They Cost

Maternity leave and caregiving duties also shape how a woman's career gets read by others. A woman who steps away to raise a child or care for an ageing parent often returns to find her timeline quietly compared against people who never paused. That break gets treated as a gap in ability rather than a gap in years spent doing something else important. Many women build their careers around caregiving responsibilities that men are rarely expected to carry in the same way.

Where Age and Gender Overlap

Ageism and sexism rarely operate on their own. They tend to combine, creating a form of bias that neither younger women nor older men experience in quite the same way. A survey by Women of Influence, covering dozens of countries, found that close to eighty percent of the women who took part had faced some form of age-related bias at work. Women of colour often report even higher levels of this combined discrimination, since race adds another layer on top of age and gender.

What Gets Lost, and What Can Change

Companies that push out experienced women lose more than a name on the staff list. They lose years of judgment built from handling real problems again and again. Senior teams also become less varied in thinking, since a narrower mix of age and gender produces a narrower range of ideas. Younger women, watching senior women disappear earlier than senior men, may quietly decide climbing the leadership ladder is not worth the effort.

None of this needs a dramatic overhaul to start shifting. Promotion decisions can lean more on documented performance and less on vague impressions about energy or fit. Simple training on unconscious bias can help managers notice when the same quality gets praised in a man and quietly questioned in a woman. Career paths that make room for caregiving breaks, instead of treating them as permanent marks against someone, would make comparisons between men and women fairer. And simply seeing more older women in visible leadership roles, the way my uncle was celebrated without a second thought, would help make that same sight feel just as ordinary when it is a woman.

A Different Way to Measure Leadership

I left that school years ago, but the lesson from that staff meeting has stayed with me. It taught me that age itself is rarely the issue. The issue is the story we attach to it.

When a man's years are seen as evidence of wisdom while a woman's years become a reason to question her relevance, leadership stops being about ability and starts being about stereotypes. Experience does not lose its value simply because it belongs to a woman over forty.

Perhaps the question workplaces should ask is not whether someone is too old or too young to lead, but whether they have the judgment, integrity, and skill to earn the trust of the people they lead. Those qualities do not belong to one gender, nor do they disappear with age.

The day we stop measuring men by their experience and women by their age is the day leadership becomes truly merit-based. Until then, the workplace will continue to run on two different clocks—one that rewards men for growing older and another that asks women to prove, again and again, that they have not outgrown their place.