I thought this was interesting - its from the Times but I will post what I can
Stacey Duguid recalls the moment she “snapped”. Days before the 52-year-old was due to fly out to Majorca to stay with friends — having bought a £25 budget flight months ago — she realised that she couldn’t pay for any of it.
“I couldn’t afford the taxi to the station, the taxi from the airport or the lunches on the beach that the WhatsApp group were organising,” she says. “I had to ring my friend and say, ‘This is so embarrassing but I can’t come.’ She was so kind about it but I was like, ‘How can this be?’ So I put it on Instagram.”
That social media story — shared three weeks ago and which she says led to an outpouring of direct messages from thousands of women — was bracingly honest. Duguid also shared that she had been applying for jobs over the past 16 months with almost no replies or interviews. Since spring 2025 she estimates that she’s sent out 150 CVs and rewritten it about 15 times, even on Christmas Day. She’s applied for “everything from a brand director on six figures to a part-time job taking photos in a warehouse. I still heard nothing back”.
“People say that trite thing of, ‘Well, just get a job in Tesco stacking shelves.’ You try getting a job in Tesco stacking shelves. Good luck to you,” she says.
It’s even more surprising when you know Duguid’s CV: from a working-class background in Ashton-under-Lyne in Greater Manchester, she went from Harvey Nichols shop assistant to working for some of the world’s biggest fashion brands, from Prada to Harrods, Net-a-Porter and Paul Smith. She’s written a book and was a longtime magazine columnist. Her Instagram has always looked glossy and aspirational. Yet here she was, telling her followers that she’s on universal credit, has dramatically downsized her north London home and sold her jewellery on Vinted. There are, she tells me, summons over unpaid bills dropping through the letterbox, and the property in Menorca that was her de facto pension is on the market.
So what happened? On the surface a difficult perimenopause, the end of her marriage to the father of her two teenage children and a nervous breakdown that culminated in Duguid leaving her last job. After a couple of years freelancing and setting up a side hustle selling her paintings, she felt ready to throw herself back into employment. “I thought, right, I’ve got one more big job in me. The children are teenagers, my divorce is well behind me. Let’s do it.”
Then: tumbleweed. For more than a year she blamed herself. “I thought, this is all my fault, I’ve done something really badly wrong,” she says. “The situation was making me feel like I was being strangled. Sleepless nights, sore chest and grief stuck in the back of my throat that nobody knows I’m living this way and it’s too shameful to talk about. Keeping up the charade of being this ball-busting career woman was exhausting.”
She isn’t alone. Since her confession on Instagram (@staceyduguid), she has gained 30,000 new followers and received thousands of messages from women aged 40 to 65 in the same position: they have worked hard all their lives, paid tax and now find themselves shut out of a working world that appears to value youth over experience. They are applying for hundreds of jobs but being ghosted. In their youth they were told they were part of the generation who could “have it all”, but are now finding out that’s not true.
“The response was insane,” she says. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, this is not a me problem,’ which made me feel better. But it’s an everywoman problem and that made me feel angry.”
According to government data, the economic inactivity rate for women aged 50 to 64 is higher than that for men of the same age (30 per cent in 2025, compared with 22 per cent). We also know that roughly 60,000 women are out of work due to the menopause, costing the economy £1.5 billion each year, and that changes to the state pension age — another rise, to 68, has just been mooted — affect unemployed women over 50 more than any other demographic as they struggle to make ends meet.