As Meta has poured hundreds of billions of dollars into outpacing its competition in the AI arms race, employees have been forced to get on board with its big bet. Meta employees have been asked to enthusiastically adopt AI and are now evaluated on th…
“Who are your enemies?”
I was asked this interview question throughout my entire career. And I’d always come up blank. Every time. No enemies.
And when I failed to produce an impressive enemy list, the reaction was always the same: How can you c…
For most of the last century, we believed human potential could be measured through intelligence, and we built whole institutions around that belief. IQ was the metric. If you were analytical enough, technically proficient enough, quick enough on your…
Below, Dan Pontefract shares five key insights from his new book, The Future of Work Is Grey: The Untapped Value of Age in the Workforce.
Pontefract is a six-time award-winning author and a leadership and corporate culture strategist. He has spent …
For decades, the conversation around gender equality at work has been dominated by one glittering metaphor: the glass ceiling. We count women in boardrooms, track female CEOs, and debate the glass cliff awaiting women promoted during crises. But for millions of women over 45, the problem isn’t getting to the top. It’s getting unstuck from the bottom.
While elite professional careers dominate headlines, the reality for much of the female workforce is the sticky floor: a structural trap that keeps women concentrated in low-paid, low-mobility jobs America depends on but refuses to properly value. And with age, the glue hardens. The intersection of sexism, ageism, and unpaid caregiving creates a cumulative vulnerability that threatens women’s financial security precisely when they should be consolidating it.
When midlife turns into economic decline
In theory, experience should increase a worker’s value. In practice, this is more often true for men than for women. Research shows that gender inequalities widen dramatically with age. In France, where I studied the sticky floor in a report for the Fondation des Femmes, we calculated that women between 45 and 65 lose roughly €157,000 (or $184,000) in earnings over 20 years compared with men their age.
The same pattern exists in the United States. Highly educated professional women have made gains. But women without college degrees—especially Black and Hispanic women—remain heavily concentrated in low-paid “aging work”: home care, retail, hospitality, administrative support, and personal services.
The sticky floor is not simply about earning less at one moment in time. It is a system of low lifetime mobility. By 55, many women have already absorbed decades of the motherhood penalty. Then comes the menopause penalty, followed by a pension shortfall.
America depends on work it refuses to value
The sectors growing fastest in the U.S.—eldercare, healthcare support, and social assistance—are precisely where the sticky floor is strongest. These jobs are deemed essential. They are also systematically underpaid because they are associated with historically feminized labor: caring, cleaning, emotional regulation, and coordination.
In these sectors, experience rarely translates into meaningful wage progression. A woman may spend 20 years as a home health aide and still earn close to entry-level pay. Professional careers reward seniority. Service work often punishes it—with more physical strain, unstable schedules, and burnout. Your back is broken before your experience is valued.
The care trap just never ends
The engine of the sticky floor is unpaid care work. The motherhood penalty is well documented. But the care penalty continues long after children grow up. Women between 45 and 65 often belong to the “sandwich generation,” supporting adult children while caring for aging parents, sick spouses, and/or grandchildren.
Grandmotherhood itself remains a major blind spot in workplace discussions. Many women become grandmothers while still fully active professionally. In a country with insufficient childcare infrastructure, grandmothers often become the invisible shock absorbers of family life. They reduce hours, reject promotions, or move into more flexible (but lower-paid) jobs in order to provide unpaid care so that their daughters are able to work full time.
Of course, this work is performed out of love. But it comes with a brutal economic price tag. Women represent 60% of part-time workers in the United States—not necessarily because they prefer reduced hours but because it is the only way to manage caregiving responsibilities.
Part-time work creates a triple penalty:
- lower immediate income
- fewer promotion opportunities
- permanently reduced retirement savings and Social Security benefits
The consequences accumulate over decades.
The double jeopardy of aging
Ageism is not gender-neutral. Women suffer a “double standard of aging”: Older men are often perceived as experienced and authoritative, while older women are more likely to be seen as obsolete, expensive, or less adaptable.
In many customer-facing jobs, women also face pressure to conceal visible signs of aging in ways men rarely do. The result is a form of double jeopardy: gender discrimination compounded by age discrimination. A woman over 50 who loses her job after a caregiving interruption, health issue, or layoff often discovers that the labor market no longer “sees” her.
The ultimate consequence of the sticky floor is a growing gray zone of women who are neither fully employed nor fully retired. This is called the NER zone (neither employed nor retired). These women have often been pushed out of work by caregiving demands, health issues, or age discrimination, but they’re still years away from pension eligibility. This won’t come as a surprise: A majority of people in this category are women.
This period is a form of economic purgatory that cements poverty later in life. Because their careers were fragmented by part-time work and unpaid caregiving, many lack the earnings history necessary for financial security in retirement.
Cleaning the sticky floor
The solution will not come from hustle culture or individual empowerment alone, though these may help individual women. But when a labor market systematically undervalues feminized work, telling women to “lean in” often simply produces more exhaustion.
The sticky floor requires structural solutions.
- Wage floors should be raised in feminized sectors like home care and eldercare. If care work is essential, compensation should reflect its social value. Maybe the market sometimes corrects this when labor shortages become severe; but in many cases, the invisible hand does not reprice undervalued care work on its own.
- Retirement systems and households must recognize the economic dimension of caregiving. Social Security calculations should account for years spent caring for parents, spouses, or grandchildren.
- Employers need to rethink workplace design for an aging workforce. Universal design—ergonomic flexibility, better acoustics, hybrid work, predictable scheduling—benefits everyone, but becomes essential as workforces age.
- Organizations must address the intersection of gender and age bias directly, especially in hiring and customer-facing roles.
- We need more ambitious models of part-time and hybrid work. Flexibility should not automatically mean career stagnation.
The demographic revolution is already on its way. Americans are living longer, working longer, and caring longer. They can no longer afford to treat midlife women as an invisible safety net for a failing care system—and as disposable talent once they pass 50. It is time to stop focusing only on the glass ceiling and start cleaning the sticky floor. Because if we don’t, we are weakening the future of work in its entirety.
Imagine hiring every all-star on the market, paying top dollar, and then finishing sixth in your division. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s what happened to Sinan Aral’s beloved Liverpool F.C. last season, and it’s also, he argues, an almost perfect metaphor for how most organizations are deploying AI right now.
Aral is a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and one of the leading researchers on human-AI collaboration. His lab has spent the last several years running large-scale, real-world experiments on what actually happens when humans and AI work together… and the results should give every leader pause.
“In about 85% of the studies we’ve seen,” he told me, “while adding AI to human beings improves human beings alone, most of the time it’s better to just let the AI do it alone.” That data point is what Aral calls the rational fork in the road: if AI alone outperforms human-AI teams, the logical managerial move is to replace employees with automation.
But that, he insists, is exactly where the logic goes wrong.
When good enough becomes a trap
In one landmark study, Aral’s team randomized roughly 2,000 teams (some human-AI and some human-human) to create marketing ads for a real organization. The human-AI teams produced 50% more ads per worker, with higher-quality text. By conventional productivity metrics, that would be a clear win. But the ads also looked strikingly similar to one another. “Ad copy starts sounding the same. Ad images start looking the same,” Aral explained. He calls this “diversity collapse”, the slow homogenization of output that occurs when AI, trained on the same publicly available internet, starts flattening the edges that make creative work distinctive.
The more a team delegated to AI, the more productive they became- and the more vulnerable they were to this collapse. Short-term gains masked long-term creative erosion. Diversity collapse is a thinking problem.
The skills we’re quietly losing
Aral’s most recent paper, which he calls the “AI Augmentation Trap,” reveals something even more unsettling. Cognitive offloading to AI (the act of outsourcing tasks you could do yourself) erodes the very skills you’re handing off. Workers who lean heavily on AI for writing lose writing fluency. Junior employees de-skill faster than experienced ones, who have the professional reserves to retain their capabilities. “It leaves the worker worse off than if AI had never been adopted” in the long run, Aral said. The short-term productivity boost is real. So is the long-run trap.
This maps directly onto what I’ve been writing about in my own work: productivity, as we’ve inherited it from the First Industrial Revolution, is an either/or model that values speed, efficiency, and measurable output. It misses what happens during dormancy- the marination, the synthesis, the slow cultivation of judgment that makes truly original thinking possible. Aral’s research gives that perspective empirical teeth.
What leaders should do instead
The fix, Aral argues, isn’t to avoid AI because that’s not a real option. “This is possibly the most disruptive technology ever developed in human history,” he said, and burying your head in the sand is not a strategy. The fix is to get intentional about human-AI collaboration design.
His prescriptions are practical: measure human skill levels independently of AI output; build in structured, unassisted practice so workers regularly perform tasks without AI assistance; extend performance evaluation windows so managers aren’t seduced by short-term productivity spikes at the expense of long-run capability; and design workflows where workers review, evaluate, and reshape AI outputs rather than simply accepting them. Keep human judgment in the loop, not as a formality, but as a discipline. And I’d go one step further- incentivize that human judgement during review periods.
A second line of Aral’s research offers another lever: personality pairing. When his team matched approximately 1,300 participants with AI personalized to complementary Big Five personality traits (not mirroring, but complementing) both productivity and creative output improved, and diversity collapse was reduced. Just as with human teaming, who you pair together matters. The best partners aren’t identical, they’re complementary. This appears to be true even when one of those partners is an algorithm.
The counterintuitive imperative
Here’s what Aral’s data ultimately points to, and what I think every leader needs to hear: the organizations that will win in the Imagination Era are not those that replace the most humans with AI, but those that become genuinely excellent at human-AI collaboration. That’s a skill. It requires investment, design, and a willingness to resist the seduction of the easy productivity win.
Creativity has always required what I call the rigor of ambiguity: the courage to sit with uncertainty rather than reaching for the fastest, most frictionless answer. AI offers a very compelling shortcut. The leaders who understand that the shortcut is also a risk, and who build organizations capable of holding both the power of AI and the irreplaceable texture of human thought, will be the ones who are still competitive a decade from now.
Liverpool, Aral notes, is figuring out how to make their expensive roster fit together. So should we.
All writing is autobiographical. Even if you’re not explicitly writing about your own experience, it shows up in the topics you choose, the details you focus on, even the things you leave out.
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