This research didn't set out to confirm what we already know about women and work. The glass ceiling, the glass cliff, the wage gap — that research exists, and has for over 50 years.
What it hadn't fully captured was something almost invisible: what happens specifically because of age, when ageism layers onto the sexism women have already been navigating for decades. The word for that is gendered ageism. It starts earlier for women than for men, it operates below the threshold of what's easy to report, and it costs more than a job.
Career disruption at this life stage touches everything. Financial security, housing stability, retirement readiness, health (including the impact of perimenopause and menopause), mental health, and care responsibilities that fall disproportionately on women. It's an economic equity issue.
The consequences ripple outward across families, workplaces, and communities.
Not one woman who participated in this research reported being financially better off after her career was disrupted.
Less than 15% of women surveyed received severance packages substantial enough to give them time to transition. For the rest, the financial pressure was immediate, and for many, it compounded. One woman's income was the same a decade after her disruption as it was the day it happened. That number has never fully recovered.
The emotional and financial experiences were inseparable. Disruption didn't just change what women earned; it changed how they ate, what they could plan for, whether retirement was still a realistic concept, and whether they could stay in their homes.
"I went from close to six figures to around $20,000 in my first year."
"I went from making six figures to working for minimum wage at an animal shelter in order to preserve my sanity and self-worth."
"When I can barely keep food on the table, I don't feel like I can stop and have the luxury of pausing to plan."
Income loss at this life stage doesn't stay contained. It impacts retirement savings that don't get rebuilt, debt that follows women into their 60s, care responsibilities that can't be met, and health that deteriorates under financial stress.
Language reflects the systems, structures, biases and assumptions behind it.
Across 32 survey submissions and 10 interviews, the word "entrepreneur" appeared once.
ONCE.
That's not a footnote. The women who turned to self-employment after their careers were disrupted didn't see themselves as entrepreneurs. They saw themselves as people who had run out of other options. They built something because the door to conventional employment had closed on them, often quietly, often without explanation, and they needed income.
80% of women interviewed had moved into some form of self-employment or consulting after their disruption. The majority did so reluctantly, without business training, without startup capital, and without a network that allowed them to engage with the startup ecosystem they had accidentally entered.
"I could always sell everything else for everybody else… so I started my own business."
"I don't even know what that meant. I knew nothing about that world."
"The truth of that is, you have to have that entrepreneurial spirit, that driving force. And I don't think I had it enough."
Existing entrepreneurship support — accelerators, startup programs, business incubators — is built around language, timelines, and stereotypical ambitions of people who chose to start a business. It presumes motivation, runway, risk appetite, and a certain kind of identity.
Women building businesses out of necessity don't fit that frame. They don't self-identify as entrepreneurs, so they don't show up to entrepreneur programming. The support that exists doesn't reach them because it's speaking a language that doesn't invite them in.
The capacity to recover depends heavily on what resources people could access.
Finding 3:
Some women found their way through. it didn't look like a comeback story.
The dominant emotional vocabulary of disruption in this research was bleak: embarrassed, ashamed, burned out, humiliated. One woman, writing about being forced out of her legal firm, was still feeling it eleven years later.
So when some women described their disruption as ultimately positive, it's worth paying attention to how they got there, because it wasn't linear, and it wasn't easy.
One respondent had spent years in Fortune 500 companies. After her disruption, she had access to outplacement services and coaching (one of only a few women in the research who did). It bought her time that allowed her to realise that she didn't want to go back. She became a consultant. Then she started a second business.
Another respondent was reorganized out of a role she'd held for years. With a rare adequate severance, she went back to school.
"Two years later, I am now working in a new career I love that has great future potential. I now know that getting reorganized was one of the best things to ever happen to me."
One woman, whose startup journey included being dropped from a high-profile accelerator program described what it cost her, then chose to keep going anyway.
"I almost quit. I spent some time at home crying and feeling sorry for myself. Thankfully I received wonderful programming and counselling and have built resilience. I choose to stand a little taller and carry on. The business is going strong. We have a team of 8 now."
The women who moved through disruption most effectively had one or more of three things: financial buffer (severance or family support), access to coaching or programming, and emotional support from people they trusted. Remove any of those, and the path forward narrows considerably.
When a woman's income drops by half, or disappears, that cost isn't isolated. It spreads. Into public systems. Into family finances that were already stretched. Into the care economy, where women disproportionately absorb what paid work can't cover. Into retirement poverty that shows up 20 years later as a different kind of crisis.
Career disruption for women over 40 is not a personal setback that resolves itself. The research is clear that income loss at this life stage can take years to recover from, and for some women, it never does. That's a community cost and an economic equity failure. It belongs on the agenda of all levels of government, employers, social service organizations, and anyone thinking seriously about the future of work for Canadian women regardless of city size.
The finding that "entrepreneur" appeared in only one submission is not a footnote. It's a critical data point.
Any program, service, or policy response that uses startup ecosystem language as its default actively excludes the women who need it most.
Disrupted women don't Google "entrepreneur resources." They're looking for something, somewhere, that recognizes what happened to them, and meets them where they are.
There is an entire sector in Canada made up of employment and entrepreneurship support. The problem isn't that the infrastructure doesn't exist. It wasn't built with this demographic in mind.
Women who've been edged out of careers and are building something to survive can't afford to walk into 9 months of startup programming.
Programming built around ambition doesn't reflect the lived reality of these disrupted women. To be effective and impactful, it requires different entry points, different language, and different definitions of success.
If you recognise yourself in any of this
You're not imagining it. You're not alone. And you don't have to figure out what comes next by yourself. What happened to you has a name. It has research behind it. And it has consequences for women's economic equity that go well beyond your individual situation.
The Disrupted Careers Lab starts by helping you figure out where you actually are, and what that means for where you go next.
Women need a place to land after disruption that doesn't assume they already know what they want, doesn't push them toward entrepreneurship as a default, and doesn't ask them to fit a framework built for someone else.
If you work with women navigating this
Whether you're a community organization, an employer, a funder, or a researcher — if this data is relevant to your work, we'd like to hear from you. There's more to do here, and it works better when the people already in the room are in the conversation.