MLC

Women are constantly told that experience makes them more valuable. New Indian data suggests the workplace doesn’t always agree. By 50, the career paths of men and women have diverged dramatically, and ambition isn’t the problem.

There is a reassuring story we tell ourselves about getting older at work.

In your 20s, you learn. In your 30s, you prove yourself. In your 40s, experience begins to compound. And somewhere around 50, after decades of meetings, deadlines, difficult bosses, office politics, maternity leaves, missed school events, restructurings and mysteriously urgent emails sent at 10.47 pm, you finally become the person whose experience commands the room.

For many Indian women, the data suggests something rather different is happening.

A 2026 study by Aon surveyed 1,500 corporate leaders, including more than 400 women, across over 30 Indian cities.

One number deserves considerably more attention.

Among leaders over 50, only 20% of women had advanced to senior roles within the same organisation, compared with 49% of men.

Not because women had suddenly lost interest in succeeding.

The study found comparable levels of ambition between men and women.

The paths available to them were different.

The Problem Isn’t That Women Stop Wanting It

This matters because we have spent years explaining the disappearance of women from senior corporate life through the language of choice.

Women want flexibility. Women prioritise family. Women become less ambitious. Women don’t put themselves forward. Women don’t negotiate. Women leave.

There may be individual truth in every one of those statements. But they can also perform a useful little trick: they make a structural problem sound like a collection of personal decisions.

The Aon findings point elsewhere.

Women were disproportionately concentrated in enabling functions rather than core business and revenue-generating roles. Forty-nine per cent of women leaders worked in enabling functions, compared with 37% of men.

The gaps become even more revealing when you look at the experiences that tend to prepare someone for the top job.

Ninety-one per cent of male leaders surveyed had P&L experience. For women, it was 68%.

Ninety per cent of men had worked in sales roles. Only 45% of women had.

By the time an organisation starts asking who has the experience required for its most senior jobs, decades of seemingly small decisions about who gets which assignment have already answered the question.

Careers Compound Too

We understand compounding when we talk about money. Put a little more away at 30 and, given enough time, the difference at 55 can become enormous. Careers work similarly.

One person gets the commercial assignment. That makes them eligible for the larger business role. The larger role gives them P&L responsibility. That experience makes them an obvious candidate for senior management. Then the board.

Another equally capable person is repeatedly given work at which she is excellent but which does not lead to the same destination.

Twenty years later, we call one person ‘leadership material’ and wonder why the other woman hasn’t progressed.

The difference did not necessarily begin at 50. Fifty is simply when it becomes impossible to ignore.

Women Are Moving Because Staying Isn’t Working

There is another fascinating detail in the research.

Women over 50 who had reached leadership positions were more likely than men to have advanced by changing organisations.

Women reported an average of 4.13 career transitions compared with 3.17 for men.

That complicates another familiar stereotype: the middle-aged employee who should be grateful for stability.

For women, leaving may sometimes be the strategy that creates progression.

The company that knows you as the dependable person who has performed one kind of role brilliantly for 12 years may have a surprisingly difficult time imagining you doing something else.

A new organisation sees the CV rather than the history.

This doesn’t mean every 48-year-old woman should resign on Monday morning. But it does mean loyalty deserves scrutiny when it is flowing in only one direction.

If you have been consistently valuable to an organisation without becoming more valuable inside the organisation, that is information.

Ageism Arrives Just As Women Finally Have More Room

The timing is particularly cruel.

For some women, the late 40s and 50s are precisely when the practical restrictions that shaped earlier career decisions begin to ease.

Children become more independent. Maternity leave is long behind them. The frantic logistics of very young children may have receded.

There may finally be more space to take the larger job, travel, lead the division or make the ambitious move.

And then another bias arrives: age.

Indian workplace research has already identified age as a major source of reported discrimination. Among workers who said they had experienced workplace discrimination in a Michael Page India survey, age was the most commonly cited factor. Workers in their 40s and 50s reported substantial levels of age-related incidents.

Women can therefore find themselves trapped in a particularly absurd career equation.

When they are younger, motherhood is treated as a potential interruption. When their children no longer require the same level of care, they are treated as older workers.

There appears to be a beautifully convenient ten-minute window somewhere around 38 when everybody is comfortable with a woman’s career.

So What Do You Actually Do With This?

Not ‘lean in’ harder.

A woman who has worked for 25 years does not need another instruction to become more confident.

A more useful question is: What experience is your next role actually going to require?

Not the role you have now. The one after it.

If every senior person in your industry has run a business unit, managed revenue, worked internationally or held a particular operational responsibility, look at whether your current job is giving you that experience.

Ask for it explicitly. And pay attention to what happens next.

A vague promise of ‘exposure’ is not the same as responsibility. Being invited into the room is not the same as owning the number.

Mentorship is lovely. Sponsorship is someone putting your name forward when the important job becomes available.

And if an organisation has spent years telling you that you are indispensable in precisely the position you already occupy, consider whether indispensable has quietly become another word for stuck.

Fifty Is Not The End Of The Career. It May Be The Point At Which You Stop Waiting

There is something liberating about reaching the age at which the rules become visible.

You have enough evidence. You know whether the promotion keeps almost happening. You know whether the important assignments keep going elsewhere.

You know whether your manager thinks of you as someone who can run the business or someone who can reliably make the business run for somebody else.

Experience should make women more valuable. But experience alone does not automatically produce power.

Sometimes you have to look at the career you have built and ask a deeply unromantic question:

Is this organisation still capable of imagining me bigger?

If the answer has been no for several years, perhaps the next stage of ambition isn’t proving yourself again.

Perhaps it’s taking everything you have already proved somewhere that knows what to do with it.

Images via Pexels | Used for representational purpose only