Retaining senior female talent: a strategic decision

From the age of 50, many women begin to disappear from the radar in the professional and managerial field. Not because they perform less or because they lose ambition. The problem is very specific patterns of inertia: they stop receiving promotions, strategic projects or training in new skills. Age affects everyone, but combined with gender it acts as a double filter that pushes out talent and hinders careers just when accumulated experience can be most valuable to the company. That is why it is so important to keep boosting the visibility of female talent in these age brackets too.

The double filter of age and gender

Bias does not appear suddenly or at an exact age, but many studies place 50 as a common threshold. Many professionals are no longer considered a bet for the future. There is less investment in their training and their career. In the case of women, these brakes are usually applied earlier and more strongly. Motherhood or caring for family members may have interrupted their careers, and the company often interprets these breaks as a lack of commitment. The result is perverse: profiles with experience and judgment are written off just when they could provide more value. This is where it makes sense to insist on the importance of lifelong learning for women throughout their entire professional career.

L’Oréal: experience as a strategic asset

L’Oréal values the experience of older professionals and does not see seniority as the beginning of the end of a career. Instead of assuming that senior profiles “have already given their best”, the cosmetics company has implemented specific programs so that they keep growing within the organization. In Spain and Portugal, 22% of the workforce is over 50 years old, and the group has created programs so that this knowledge is not lost or wasted.

In practice, it has translated this into:

• Continuous training and reskilling to update knowledge throughout the entire career
• Internal mobility and role changes also for those over 50
• Cross-mentoring programs between juniors and seniors to exchange experience and new skills
• Internal promotions also for senior professionals (14% of the total promotions in Spain and Portugal were of people over 50)

This is exactly the logic of reorganizing work to attract and retain talent: when a company changes its internal rules, experience stops being a label and becomes an asset.

AXA: a formal commitment with the Landoy Charter

AXA has addressed this challenge through mobility between areas of the insurance group and training for the acquisition of new skills. It is a commitment formalized from top management with the signing of the Landoy Charter (2023), an agreement to promote the employability of senior talent signed alongside other large companies such as, precisely, the aforementioned L’Oréal. The Landoy Charter includes follow-up metrics —mobility, retention, promotion and access to projects— and periodic reports to management so that these policies are measurable and accountable.

Cases like this remind us that talent in the new economy is not only about attracting junior profiles: it is also about retaining and developing those who already have a track record.