What Taylor Swift Taught Me About Aging

In 2014, I dodged many questions about my age (25). That same year, Swift proudly announced that, at 25, she wasn't too young for her own renaissance.

Photo by Stephen Mease on Unsplash

ALSO IN THIS POST…

• What you need to know about the ERA

• Children as young as six internalize gender stereotypes

This essay was first published on The Persistent: a women-led journalism platform whose newsletter, sent twice a week, examines politics, economics, business, art and culture through a gender lens. If you love this newsletter, you’ll love The Persistent. Sign up here.

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In 2014, the year I turned 25, I spent a great deal of brain power trying to figure out how to respond when someone asked me how old I was.

At the time, I was working in a major newsroom in the U.K, covering important financial news, read by important people. I’d established myself as a meticulous reporter and capable writer, but sometimes—when people figured out that the person behind the byline was just a few years out of college—the age thing threatened to topple my credibility.

“Dude,” I remember one inebriated banker telling his colleague right in front of me at an industry event, ”Josie was 12 years old when Enron collapsed.”

That same year, far, far away from source meetings and off-the-record comments about bond issues, Taylor Swift released an album grandly announcing to the world how old she was—which, as it happens, is the same age as me.

1989, the year we were both born, was the title of her fifth studio album, a Grammy-award winning masterpiece that showcased her genre-defying artistry and marked her as an international superstar.

I listened to 1989 when it first came out and while I didn’t end up identifying as a Swiftie, I liked it a lot. Swift’s songs took up residence in my brain and have stayed there ever since.

But mostly, I was taken by the name of the album.

I admired the unapologetic undertone, the audacity even, of what it stands for. She told journalists that she named the album after her birth year because it signaled a metaphorical rebirth of her image and artistry. Yes, Swift was saying, I’m about to turn 25 but I’m not too young for a renaissance.

On Sunday, Dec. 8, 2024, Taylor Swift concluded her Eras Tour in Vancouver, capping a 149-show run that earned more than $1 billion in revenue; that caused seismic activity in Seattle; and altered entire economies.

For these reasons alone, superlatives feel insufficient when it comes to quantifying Swift’s success. She’s dispelled all kinds of myths about the capabilities of a woman in show business. When her music label was sold in 2019 in a deal that gave control of her master recordings to an entity she didn’t approve of, she simply created new master recordings of the sold material: Taylor’s Version.

Yet, from my particular vantage point of sharing a birth year with her, the one thing I keep coming back to is that she never seemed to give a damn about her age. And though it sounds perhaps a little bit basic, that is one of the things I love most about her.

Truth is, there has never been and never will be a perfect age for women. Women are either too young (inexperienced, immature, naive, cute) or too old (tired, outdated, lackluster, unsexy).

And in the professional realm, that magical moment—when a woman has both the necessary youthful dynamism and that all-important gravitas that comes with experience—might not exist at all.

Is there research backing this up? You bet. A few years ago, Amy Diehl, Leanne M. Dzubinski, and Amber L. Stephenson conducted a study of 913 women leaders in which they concluded that many women suffer what they term the ‘never-right’ age bias. “In our research we found no age was the right age to be a woman leader,” they wrote in an article for the Harvard Business Review explaining their findings.

“There was always an age-based excuse to not take women seriously, to discount their opinions, or to not hire or promote them. Each individual woman may believe she’s just at the wrong age, but the data make the larger pattern clear,” they added. “Any age can be stigmatized by supervisors and colleagues to claim that the woman is not valued or is not a fit for a leadership role.”

I know, I know: Taylor Swift is hardly a middle-aged middle manager toiling away at spreadsheets or an account director pitching to win a campaign mandate. But hear me out.

A lot of us, Swifties or not, care about Swift. She’s the zeitgeist; she’s an icon, an advocate, an entrepreneur, a philanthropist, a businesswoman. Plenty of women look to her for clues on how to navigate this tumultuous, ugly world in which we live.

When, at the age of 11, Swift’s Dolly Parton karaoke covers were summarily rejected by record labels, she didn’t cower. She carried on. When Kanye West interrupted her acceptance speech at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards to tell the audience that “Beyoncé had one of the best videos of all time,” she wrote a song about it. The journalist Allison Stewart praised the song ‘Innocent’ in The Washington Post as “a small masterpiece of passive-aggressiveness, a vivisection dressed up as a peace offering.”

In more recent years, Swift’s taken any criticism and clapped back beautifully. “I stay out too late; Got nothing in my brain,” she sings. And guess what? The insults don’t trouble her. (Or if they do, she surely doesn’t let it show.) She just keeps “cruisin’” because she “can’t stop; won’t stop movin’” and she’s got music in her mind “saying’ it’s gonna be alright.”

When Swift endorsed Kamala Harris for president, she signed her Instagram post (11.5M likes), “Taylor Swift, Childless Cat Lady” throwing shade at Donald’s Trump’s running mate J.D. Vance who used the same phrase to disparage women without children. Talk about shaking it off.

Ten years have passed since I was ridiculed for being 12 at the time of Enron’s collapse. Ten years have passed since Swift released an album that changed the global music industry. I think we’ve both come a long way. She’s established herself as one of the most important recording artists of all time. I’ve become comfortable telling people how old I am. And though I’m not a Swiftie, I’m not entirely unconvinced the two aren’t connected.

I turned 35 in May. Swift turned 35 on Friday, December 13.

Haters gonna hate, she sang back in 2014, subtly urging me to take a leaf out of her book and not give a damn. Perhaps—just perhaps—I took it to heart.

This essay was first published on The Persistent, which you can subscribe to here.

Let’s Make Alice Paul Proud

Elsewhere last week, I kept a sharp eye on Washington.

A hundred and one years ago this month, Alice Paul and Crystal Eastman—two leaders in American women’s fight for suffrage—introduced in Congress what would later become the Equal Rights Amendment, a proposed amendment to the U.S. Constitution that would explicitly prohibit sex discrimination.

Over the decades that followed, the ERA became one of the most famous and embattled pieces of legislation.

In essence, one might argue that it’s inoffensive: equality between genders? How is that still even up for debate? But to this day—quite unbelievably—it still hasn’t been codified and adopted into law.

Now, as Donald Trump’s second presidential term looms, which could introduce a fresh wave of laws designed to chip away at civil rights and women’s rights, calls have intensified to finally, finally, codify the ERA.

As Mariana Alfaro recently wrote for The Washington Post, the House passed the ERA in 1971 by a broad margin of 354 to 24. Then, the Senate passed it in 1972, also by a huge margin—84 to 8. After that, however, it took almost five decades for three-quarters of U.S. states — a total of 38 — to ratify the amendment as was required in order for it to become law.

After Trump’s first election, Nevada ratified the amendment in 2017, the first state in decades to do so. Illinois followed in 2018 and in January 2020, Virginia became the 38th state to ratify the amendment. But all of that happened well past a 1982 deadline that Congress had set when it approved the legislation.

The question now, it seems, is whether that deadline is relevant at all. And many think not. More than a hundred House Democrats recently signed a letter addressed to President Joe Biden urging him to convince the country’s archivist—officially, the head of the National Archives and Records Administration—to recognize the ratification and publish the amendment.

“We must continue our efforts to fully affirm and recognize the equality of rights for all people, regardless of sex, as part of our Constitution, a vital effort that has never been more urgent,” the letter states. “This action is essential as we prepare to transition to an administration that has been openly hostile to reproductive freedom, access to health care, and LGBTQIA+ rights,” it adds.

For now it seems the legal fight over the ERA is unlikely to let up any time soon: ERA supporters say it’s just a question of publishing the damn thing. Others say it’s not that simple.

After the Virginia ratification, archivist David Ferriero declined to certify it citing a memo by the Trump Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) according to which the ERA did not meet that 1982 deadline and had therefore “expired and is no longer pending before the states.”

The OLC at the time also made the argument that Congress could not short-circuit the amendment process by extending the long-gone deadline. Instead, it said, the whole process would have to start from scratch (and as if that’s not complicated enough, questions also arose over whether five states’ attempts to rescind their original ratifications were valid.)

Either way, the countdown is on. Trump is due to assume office on January 20. And after that? All bets are off.

Sexism Aged Six

And finally, earlier this month I stumbled across some jarring research (in fact, it was a meta-analysis of research conducted across 33 countries shows) that—even as someone who has been reporting on gender inequality for many years—shocked me.

It showed that children as young as six years old are internalizing gender stereotypes in relation to technology, which could exacerbate inequality in a rapidly evolving labor market.

According to findings, which I wrote about for Forbes, the young participants generally considered boys to be more capable than girls in fields including computer science and engineering.

“The early emergence of these biases signals that kids acquire messages about computing and engineering stereotypes at home and in other environments before K‑12 schooling,” said David Miller, the lead author of the study, and a senior researcher at the American Institutes for Research, the nonpartisan, not-for-profit organization that conducted the research. “Parents, early childhood educators, and out-of-school-time programs have a key role to play in helping to reshape these narratives,” he added.

The research found that, across all of the 6-year olds questioned, 35% said that they thought boys were better at computing than girls, while only 22% said the inverse was true, and 43% said that there was no difference. For engineering, 52% said that boys were better, compared to just 10% who said that girls had an edge.

The findings, based on data from 145,000 children, are particularly concerning considering the extent to which new technologies are transforming the labor market and the nature of work. Artificial intelligence, or AI, is particularly slated to change the way we work. Goldman Sachs last year predicted that generative AI could displace up to 300 million jobs.

Analysis also done last year by the UNC Kenan-Flagler Business School established that eight out of 10 women—or about 59 million individuals in the US workforce—are in occupations that are “highly exposed to generative AI automation,” compared to about six out of 10 men. And more recently, studies have shown that women are generally slower to experiment with and adopt generative AI technologies.

The research done by AIR and published in Psychological Bulletin, a journal of the American Psychological Association, also found that for girls, the male-STEM bias increases considerably with age. At age 6, about 34% of girls questioned said that they thought girls were better at computing than boys, while 20% said that they thought boys were better. By age 16, however, only 8% said that they thought girls were better while a staggering 39% said that boys were.

Miller characterized this as evidence that “initiatives focused on ‘girls in math’ or ‘girls in STEM’ may [be falling] short of addressing the most entrenched male-biased beliefs.”

“These initiatives need dedicated attention on girls in computing and engineering,” he said. “Especially in early childhood, before these stereotypes set in.”

That’s all from me this week. I’ll be back in your inboxes January 6. Thanks for reading WOMEN MONEY POWER in 2024. It’s been a joy writing for you. If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter for free, I’d urge you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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Thank you and see you in 2025!

Josie

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