We Need More Stock Photos of Middle-Aged Women Kicking Ass

Stock photo sites, much like society, treat middle-aged women as largely irrelevant

I couldn’t find a photo of a middle-aged woman kicking anything except carbs, so I had to settle for this one. Photo via Canva.

I’m a 41-year-old woman of average height and healthy weight. I wear a little makeup, but I don’t get my nails done. I work full-time, but I don’t wear suit jackets or button-down shirts. I have children, but I no longer carry them on my hip.

I have to search pretty damn hard to find a stock photo of a woman who looks like me. To be clear, by “stock photo,” I mean free or highly affordable stock photo. And by “look like me,” I don’t necessarily mean that the woman physically resembles me — just that she’s around my age and the lines around her eyes haven’t been airbrushed or Botoxed into oblivion.

Search for “woman” on most stock photo sites and one might get the impression that “woman” means a female between the ages of 25 and 35. If you want to see some gray hairs, you’ll have to search for “old woman,” and then you’ll see a sparse collection of beautifully coiffed retirees who are busy living their best lives on bank websites.

Search for “middle-aged woman,” and the results are downright paltry.

When I made a commitment to myself to write one story a week, I calculated that I could set aside about 45…