Age-related Gendered Diminishment: Toward Understanding and Interventions for a Common Psychological Experience in Post-midlife Women

Saltz, Gail

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1535145

PERSPECTIVE article

Front. Psychol.

Sec. Psychology of Aging

Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1535145

Age-related Gendered Diminishment: Toward Understanding and Interventions for a Common Psychological Experience in Post-midlife Women

Provisionally accepted

Gail Saltz ^*

Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, United States

The final, formatted version of the article will be published soon.

Building from clinical observations with women at midlife and beyond, Age-related Gendered Diminishment (AGD) is presented as an integrated construct for a common psychological experience characterized by feelings of invisibility and inconsequentiality for women after midlife. Etiological contributors are suggested and aligned to existing literature describing frequent psychological challenges of women at this stage of life; potential evolutionary and social roots are discussed; and the question of why this complex of symptoms remains under-recognized in mental health contexts is evaluated. Finally, therapeutic interventions aimed at the construction of potential generative identities are proposed with a call for further research to better understand and address this phenomenon.

Keywords: Age-related gendered diminishment, ageist sexism, Mid-life, Women's Mental Health, Generativity

Received: 26 Nov 2024; Accepted: 10 Mar 2025.

Copyright: © 2025 Saltz. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

* Correspondence: Gail Saltz, Weill Cornell Medicine, Cornell University, New York, United States

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