There is a deeply unsettling paradox in how aging women are represented today. The louder the discourse on inclusion and diversity becomes, the fewer women we see who actually look like women over 45. Women who age “normally”—who live in their bodies, with their features, their lines, their visible age—have almost vanished from public view. When women in their 50s or 60s do gain visibility, it is often with a body and a face that belong to the strange category of Forever 35: perfectly smooth, ageless, suspended in time.

This is not a trivial aesthetic issue, for it has major consequences for work, careers, and power. When women disappear from view as they age, they lose access to role models at exactly the moment when careers are supposed to stretch and evolve. If you are expected to work for 50 years but can only see the first 20 years of that life represented—in leadership, in organizations, in the media—then most of your working life remains unimaginable. There is no shared script for what professional authority,........

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