Career Women at Midlife: Sadder and Sicker

While women are securing greater power in the workplace, they are also growing less satisfied with their lives as they age

By Michelle Conlin

Kathy Caprino's life seemed the stuff of glossy-magazine perfection. The big deal marketing job, complete with roomy office, upbeat assistant, and lunchtime indulgences in retail therapy. The cool contemporary spread in Connecticut. The emotionally aware jazz percussionist husband frolicking with the two healthy kids.

What a photo spread: a mise en scène of Third Wave feminism, writ fabulous. Only as she powered through her prime earning years, notching promotions and amplifying her assets, Caprino began to ask herself why she felt lost and angry all of the time. She developed a chronic case of tracheitis. Life became about snapping at her husband, falling asleep around her kids, and loathing the deadened corporate machine she had become. At 38, Kathy Caprino had it all. She was also the unhappiest and unhealthiest she had ever been.

"The midlife crisis for women, you don't hear about it so much," says Caprino. "Life was becoming impossible and intolerable, and I had no idea why."

But to some researchers, Caprino's story makes perfect sense—and is all too common. Statistics from six recent major happiness studies reveal that as women grow older, they become, on average, sicker and sadder. This drop in happiness occurs regardless of whether women are married, have kids, are divorced, work incessantly, or live a life of leisure. Whether they are rich or poor. Gorgeous or average. Tall or short. American, Asian, or European. The trend holds true across the board, with the single exception that African American woman report being happier than they were in 1972. (For men, the surveys show, the opposite is true: they grow more satisfied with life as they age.)

"Over the last 50 years, women have secured greater opportunity, greater achievement, greater influence, and more money. But over the same time period, they have become less happy, more anxious, more stressed, and, in ever-increasing numbers, they are medicating themselves for it," says management thinker and author Marcus Buckingham, who tackles the subject in his upcoming book, due out in September: Find Your Strongest Life: What the Most Successful and Resilient Women Do Differently. "Better education and job opportunities and freedoms have decreased life happiness for women."

Feeling All Wrong

At first it seems counterintuitive. But then one need only look to the legions of 40'ish women who are popping Ambiens and antidepressants, contending with chronic health issues, and feeling all wrong but not having a clue as to why. Sociologists are finding that once women hit their 40s, contemporary life becomes slippery. This is black ice few are talking about.

One of the many theories Buckingham offers is that women in midlife are running up against the forces of destructive interference. In scientific wave theory, destructive interference holds that two colliding waves that are out of sync (think of those two waves, say, as the role of mommy and the role of manager) do not come together to create a larger, more formidable wave. Rather, they cancel each other out. So mom in the weeds at work, worrying about sick child at home, equals a woman who doesn't feel fully effective in either domain.

Corporate policies like flexible work, telecommuting, and compressed schedules were supposed to solve these conundrums. So was the co-CEO/split-duty marriage, day care, and nannies. But things like flex time are the existential equivalent of duct tape and bubble gum. Women often end up feeling more inadequate by buying into the myth that work-life balance is actually achievable—if only you juggled better, faster, and prettier.

What a crock, as Kathy Caprino now likes to say. It took getting unceremoniously canned for Caprino to finally rouse herself from her trance. She spent the first month after her layoff supine, the second despondent, and the third pouring her heart out in a therapist's office.

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