Eleanor Mills: We need to talk about Dame Karen Pierce – the midlife woman pushed out of her job for Peter Mandelson

In her timely piece for The Independent, Eleanor Mills uses a current political moment as a lens to reflect on how mid-life women can find their experience questioned or reconfigured, even after long records of achievement — and what that reveals about gendered assumptions that persist beneath the surface.

These dynamics aren’t confined to politics. Her own travails at The Sunday Times followed a similar pattern: credibility was judged, opportunities taken away and experience devalued despite a successful career in journalism, leading to a mid-life pivot.

Closely attuned to how the same script plays out at scale, Eleanor uses her keynotes to help audiences make sense of less readily welcomed shifts in their own lives — how confidence can wobble mid-career, how experience is reinterpreted, and why change at this stage can feel disorienting rather than linear.