JESSE POWELL writes:

The data I gave in the previous entry about older women being fired, and the analysis I provided explaining my tables, does not address the issue of women getting fired after they pass their reproductive years. It addresses the issue of whether they work after their reproductive years, whether they are valued as workers after their reproductive years, but it doesn’t look at whether a woman is likely to be fired when she hits the end of her fertile period. Data other than the tables I provide above is needed to answer that question. 

Thinking over the issue a bit more, however, I think it is likely Jean-Paul is onto something in his observations. Also, Laura’s observation, “Imagine allowing one’s emotional life to revolve so completely around a job that one has nothing left when it is over and shoots oneself as if betrayed by a lover,” may be more on point than she knows. Now, one may imagine, it doesn’t make sense to fire a woman after she hits 40 or 43 if she is a good worker and is valuable to a company because of her work experience. Why should her employer care whether she is still fertile or not? 

Focusing on these issues, however, may be too practical minded and may assume too strongly that the business of the organization is simply about profit and loss. The reality is, a work environment, especially a work place in the government or non-profit sector, where profit and loss is not so clear if it is relevant at all, may be more affected by the mood of the workplace or the “aura” of the workplace; and truth be told, a pretty young woman in the environment can be a booster in an otherwise drab office. 

If male managers or co-workers are single, the value of a pretty young and fertile woman is even higher as an “enhancement” to the work environment. However, even if no actual romantic relationships are taking place, and even if the office has many married men and no prospective romantic relationships might develop, it is still a mood enhancer to work with a pretty woman. A woman can project a refreshing aura and create a romantic atmosphere even without the actuality or potential of a sexual relationship. 

With this in mind, an attractive woman still in her reproductive years does provide a benefit to her workplace that goes beyond her actual productive work. Firing such a woman after she passes her fertile years is economically costly and disruptive to the organization, but in a non-profit or government setting, such monetary costs or declines in productivity don’t matter so much. 

So, it is very believable to me that what Jean-Paul describes is real, especially in a public government organization. The women who are being fired after they pass through their “sexual expiry dates” were hired and kept at their jobs in the first place because of their romantic and sexual appeal. They were part productive workers and part romanticized “pick me ups” and “hot prospects”. Once they pass their reproductive years, they may still be productive workers, but they are no longer fulfilling the other part of their “job” as mood boosters and desirable romantic prospects for the men around them. Hence, since they are no longer able to fulfill the dual role they had before; its time to fire them and hire a younger prettier woman who will be able to play the romanticized role the older woman is no longer suited for. 

As for the tragic story of the tall, blond, beautiful woman who killed herself two years after being fired from her previous employer of 20 years, Laura remarked that she was acting “as if betrayed by a lover.” Well, the reality is, her employer, the people she worked with, probably did treat her as a lover. Being “tall, blond and beautiful” she was probably romanticized in her work place. When she was fired because she was past her reproductive years, because she was not so beautiful anymore, she was indeed being rejected on a personal and romantic level. It may well be that women who are romanticized at their place of employment and then are fired when they pass their “sexual expiry date” take the loss of their job more personally than others who are let go for purely economic reasons, because these women, indeed, are being rejected on both a personal and professional level.

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