Last Updated on 14 hours ago
Black women were lied to about work.
Not always loudly. Not always on purpose. But over and over, we were taught that if we worked hard, stayed loyal, got the credentials, kept our names clean, and became the dependable ones, work would make room for us.
We were told to be excellent.
Be prepared.
Be professional.
Be twice as good.
Don’t be difficult.
Don’t burn bridges.
Don’t let them catch you slipping.
Get the degree.
Build the résumé.
Stay useful.
Stay ready.
And now a lot of Black women over 40 are looking around like:
So why is it so quiet?
Not quiet because we don’t know how to work.
Quiet after the applications.
Quiet after the interviews.
Quiet after the follow-ups.
Quiet after the referrals.
Quiet after the résumé refreshes.
Quiet after the “we were impressed with your background” emails that still somehow don’t become offers.
That kind of quiet can mess with your spirit.
Because when you know you can do the work, when you have the experience, when you have years of proof behind you, silence doesn’t just feel like rejection.
It starts feeling personal.
We were told experience would protect us
There was a bargain many of us were raised to believe in.
If you do what you’re supposed to do, work will reward you.
If you stay loyal, somebody will notice.
If you build experience, it will count.
If you become the person people can depend on, there will always be a place for you.
And for a while, that seemed true enough to keep believing.
You worked.
You learned.
You adapted.
You showed up early.
You stayed late.
You figured things out without being taught.
You held departments together with a spreadsheet, a prayer, and the kind of emotional restraint that should come with hazard pay.
You became the one people trusted.
The one who knew the history.
The one who could fix the thing.
The one who remembered why that process existed in the first place.
The one who had already survived three leadership changes, two restructures, and at least one manager who absolutely should not have been in charge of humans.
And after all of that, you thought experience would mean something.
Because that’s what they told us.
Then the market got quiet
There’s a particular kind of confusion that comes when you’re not new, not unqualified, not irresponsible, and still not hearing anything back.
You apply for jobs you know you can do.
Some of them, you could do in your sleep. Not because the work is beneath you, but because you’ve lived enough professional life to recognize the shape of it. You know the meetings. You know the systems. You know where things usually fall apart. You know how to get people moving without embarrassing them.
And still, nothing.
Or almost nothing.
A recruiter reaches out and disappears.
A hiring manager says they love your experience, then ghosts.
An application portal thanks you for your interest so politely you want to fight the software.
You get the rejection email at 2:13 a.m., which is rude. At least reject me during business hours like a professional villain.
And after a while, you start wondering if the market is seeing something in you that you can’t see.
Am I too old?
Am I too expensive?
Am I overqualified?
Am I underqualified in some new way I don’t understand?
Did my industry move on without me?
Did my experience stop translating?
Did I miss the memo?
That’s the part we don’t talk about enough.
The silence doesn’t just make you question your résumé.
It makes you question yourself.
When experience starts feeling like a liability
Experience used to feel like evidence.
Evidence that you could be trusted.
Evidence that you knew how to solve problems.
Evidence that you had judgment.
Evidence that you had seen enough to not panic every time somebody sent an email marked urgent.
But somewhere along the way, for a lot of women over 40, experience started feeling like something you had to explain, soften, shrink, or disguise.
Too much experience can make them assume you cost too much.
Too many years can make them wonder if you’ll “fit the culture,” which is often corporate-speak for “will you pretend this mess is innovation?”
A long résumé can start feeling like a confession instead of a credential.
And that is disorienting.
Because how did the thing you worked so hard to build become the thing you’re afraid might count against you?
How did loyalty become stagnation?
How did wisdom become “not agile enough”?
How did being seasoned become something you have to rebrand so nobody gets scared?
That is the broken bargain.
Not just that jobs are harder to get.
The deeper wound is realizing the rules changed after you spent decades playing by them.
Kimberly knows this silence
In Episode 718 of The Dope Black Chick Podcast, Kimberly names this directly.
She talks about what it feels like to do what they told you to do and still arrive at a place where work no longer feels guaranteed.
She asks the question many women have been carrying quietly:
What happens when you do everything that they told you to do?
What happens when you build the experience?
What happens when you give years to an industry, a company, a role, a career path, and still find yourself standing in uncertainty?
Kimberly talks about job loss, about industry shifts, and about the unsettling moment when hard work and reliability don’t protect you the way you thought they would.
And that matters because this conversation is not theoretical.
This isn’t somebody sitting at a distance analyzing “workforce trends” with a dry little chart and a blazer.
This is lived.
This is what happens when a woman who has always known how to work suddenly has to confront a market that acts like it doesn’t know what to do with her.
That kind of thing can shake you.
Not because you don’t believe in yourself.
Because you did.
That’s what makes it hurt.
Turns out, it’s not just you
One of the most important parts of this conversation is that Kimberly did not stop with her own story.
She asked other women what they were experiencing too.
And the responses were heavy because they confirmed what so many women have been feeling privately.
One woman shared:
“It took me seven months to find a job with 19 years of experience and two masters.”
Another said:
“I’ve been looking for three years. Before this, I had never been without a full-time job for more than a month.”
That is not laziness.
That is not lack of ambition.
That is not somebody refusing to work.
That is a woman with receipts sitting in a job market that keeps acting like her receipts don’t count.
And when you hear stories like that, something in you exhales a little.
Not because the situation is okay.
It is not.
But because you realize you are not imagining the pattern.
You are not the only one refreshing your inbox.
You are not the only one reworking the same résumé for the fifth time.
You are not the only one wondering why your experience used to open doors and now seems to make the room go quiet.
Sometimes the group chat tells the truth before the market admits it.
Job-market silence can make you question your whole self
For a lot of Black women, work has never been just work.
Work has been survival.
Work has been independence.
Work has been the thing that allowed you to leave, stay, provide, help, build, cover, recover, and keep going.
Work has been identity.
Not because you worship your job.
But because when you have spent years proving yourself in spaces that were not built with you in mind, your competence becomes part of how you survive.
You learned how to be good.
Then you learned how to be better.
Then you learned how to be calm while being underestimated.
Then you learned how to explain the obvious without sounding irritated.
Then you learned how to carry the work and manage the perception of how you carried the work.
So when the job market gets quiet, it can hit places deeper than employment.
It can make you wonder:
Who am I if nobody seems to want what I know how to do?
That question is tender.
Because it touches the part of you that has been responsible for so long.
The part of you that built a life around being capable.
The part of you that may not even know how to rest because rest feels unsafe when stability is uncertain.
And listen, there is nothing wrong with wanting work.
There is nothing wrong with wanting security.
There is nothing wrong with wanting your experience to matter.
The problem is that too many Black women were taught to tie their worth to their usefulness, then punished when the market decided usefulness had a new definition.
The lie was not that work matters
Work does matter.
Money matters.
Benefits matter.
Security matters.
Purpose matters.
Being able to take care of yourself matters.
Being able to breathe without calculating every bill in your head matters.
So no, this is not one of those “just follow your passion” conversations.
We are grown.
The electric company does not accept vibes.
The lie was not that work matters.
The lie was that work would love us back if we gave enough of ourselves to it.
The lie was that loyalty would guarantee loyalty in return.
The lie was that excellence would keep us safe.
The lie was that if we became valuable enough, the system would never treat us as disposable.
And that is a painful thing to admit.
Because if you built your life around being dependable, what do you do when the system you depended on starts acting funny?
You grieve.
You tell the truth.
You stop letting a broken bargain narrate your worth.
Their silence is not the final word on your value
This is where we have to be careful.
Because I do not want to hand you some shiny little sentence and pretend it fixes what is real.
Job-market silence is real.
Age bias is real.
Racial bias is real.
Industry disruption is real.
Being overqualified and still overlooked is real.
The emotional toll of applying, waiting, interviewing, and hearing nothing is real.
So no, this is not the part where I tell you to just believe harder.
You have probably believed plenty.
This is the part where I remind you that silence is not always truth.
Sometimes silence is poor hiring systems.
Sometimes silence is ageism wrapped in culture-fit language.
Sometimes silence is an algorithm that does not understand your career path.
Sometimes silence is a company wanting senior-level judgment for entry-level pay.
Sometimes silence is a market in transition trying to convince experienced women that they are the problem.
And sometimes silence is just silence.
It is not a verdict.
It is not God saying you are done.
It is not proof that your work no longer matters.
It is not the final word on who you are.
Maybe the question has to change
When the market gets quiet, the first question a lot of us ask is:
What is wrong with me?
But maybe that question is too small.
Maybe the better questions are:
What changed around me?
What parts of this market no longer work the way I was taught?
What support do I need in this season?
What skills, relationships, or language need to be updated?
What am I grieving?
What do I still know to be true about myself?
What kind of work honors the woman I am now?
Because you are not just looking for a job.
You are standing in the middle of a shift.
A shift in the market.
A shift in your identity.
A shift in what work means.
A shift in what security has to look like now.
And yes, that is a lot.
No wonder you are tired.
No wonder the silence feels loud.
No wonder part of you wants answers and part of you wants to throw the whole laptop into a respectful body of water.
But before you decide that the silence means you are no longer valuable, pause.
You have not lost what you know.
You have not lost what you have survived.
You have not lost the years you built.
You may be in a market that does not know how to properly value what you carry.
And that is different.
Listen to Episode 718
Episode 718 of The Dope Black Chick Podcast is the fuller conversation behind this reflection.
Kimberly talks about job loss, experience, silence, identity, and the uncomfortable realization that the old bargain many Black women believed in is not holding the way we were told it would.
If you are over 40 and wondering why your experience is not opening the doors it used to, this episode is for you.
If you have been applying and hearing nothing, this episode is for you.
If you have been asking yourself whether you are the problem, this episode is for you.
If you are grieving the version of work you thought would protect you, this episode is for you.
Because Black women were lied to about work.
But that lie does not get to define what your life becomes next.
Listen to Episode 718 of The Dope Black Chick Podcast here
Stay close to this conversation
At I Hear That Girl, we are making room for the conversations Black women over 40 are actually living through.
The work shifts.
The body shifts.
The friendship shifts.
The faith questions.
The identity changes.
The quiet grief of realizing the old rules no longer fit.
If this felt like somebody finally said the thing out loud, join the I Hear That Girl email list.
Not for more noise.
For honest words you can return to while you are becoming.
