Women Experience More Crisis, Change and Transformation at Midlife

Here’s a reality check: usually stereotyped as happening to men, today more women than men are experiencing midlife crisis. In an ironic twist of circumstance, the gains of both higher occupational and educational status seem to increase the likelihood for midlife crisis, so that baby boomer women actually feel more oppressed than their mothers!


The rate of extramarital affairs is nearly equal to that of men, and midlife divorce rates – as well eating disorders – are steadily on the rise.

And yet women’s inflation-adjusted earnings have risen 17% in the last 15 years, while men’s have fallen. We’re enrolling in college at nearly twice the overall rate, And on average feeling 7 years younger than we really are, we have much greater expectations from our longevity. Wall Street Journal writer Sue Shellenbarger heard from many women who were radically changing course in search of greater fulfillment after writing about her own midlife crisis in her column. Reporting on her own research inThe Breaking Point: How the Female Midlife Crisis is Transforming Today’s Women she describes how increased education contributes to women’s higher expectations for a better quality of life. Yet women find the stress and exhaustion caused by working long hours, often repressing their feminine side to succeed at work, and the nonstop juggling with family roles, causes them to lose focus and feel their lives are too complex and out of control.

Because women can now afford to make career changes, and have skills and confidence to act upon their desires, they are taking the time to re-connect with themselves to shed their roles in favor of new pursuits in adventure, sports, sex, romance, education, and spirituality.

Shellenbarger writes that the common path of crisis either erupts as a Sonic Boom, or unfolds as a more hesitant, socially acceptable Slow Burn. She also describes women’s angst as propelled primarily by one powerful, repressed passion, a part of oneself that begs for expression and reintegration. She calls these archetypal drivers the Lover, the Leader, the Adventurer, the Artist, the Seeker, and the Gardener, reflecting our core human capabilities to love, to create, and to learn.

Posted by: k daniel