by Jacqueline (Jack) Perez, CEO & Founder of Kuel Life
There’s a field on a lot of online job applications that asks what year you graduated. Sometimes it’s a dropdown. You scroll past the birth year of the person who built the form. Then you keep scrolling.
It looks like housekeeping. I’ve spent almost ten years running a platform for women over 50, and I can tell you it’s rarely that simple.
I’ve Seen Where These Women Go
Over the last decade, hundreds of women have written for Kuel Life. A lot of them run their own businesses now. Ask how they got there, and the story often starts the same way. They were pushed out of corporate America in their fifties, or they tried to get back in and couldn’t. So they hung up their own shingle.
Most of that happened before AI was reading resumes. Back then, a hiring manager glanced at a graduation date and moved on. Now software does the glancing, and nobody has to own the decision.
The Proof is Already In
Researchers at Stanford tested what these models actually believe about us. Their study, published in Nature in October 2025, had ChatGPT write resumes from identical qualifications. The women’s resumes came out 1.6 years younger on average, with more recent graduation dates and less experience. Then the same model rated the resumes, and older men scored highest. Same starting point. He got credit for those years. We got carded.
That’s the bias AI picked up from us. Some companies skip the learning curve and write the rule themselves. In 2023, iTutorGroup paid $365,000 to settle with the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission after programming its hiring software to automatically reject women 55 and older and men 60 and older. More than 200 qualified applicants never reached a human being.
What We Can Do About It
These tips won’t fix the system. They’ll get your resume in front of a person, which is apparently the hard part now.
Start with the dates. Leave graduation years off unless the application forces you to include them. If you trim your history to the last fifteen years, add one line for earlier roles, so the person you eventually reach can find the rest of your career.
Write for the machine first. Screening software matches words, so use the language in the job posting. If they say “stakeholder management,” don’t call it “keeping the board happy,” no matter how accurate that is.
Explain the gap before the software decides what it means. Plenty of us have a caregiving year or two on our resumes. One plain sentence beats a blank space.
Then go around it. The application portal is where the filter lives. A former colleague or a direct note to the hiring manager puts you in front of a person, and thirty years of work means thirty years of contacts. Use them.
And if the door stays shut, remember what so many of my thought leaders did. They stopped knocking. Building your own thing isn’t the answer for everyone, and nobody should be forced into it. But some of the sharpest businesses I know were started by women whom a hiring system decided it didn’t need. For a lot of them, it turned out to be the better job.
A Word to The Founders Reading This
You’re the ones buying this software. Ask the vendor what it does with graduation years and employment gaps. Ask for its bias results by age and sex together, because measured separately, women over 50 can disappear inside both averages. Then pull a sample of rejected applications every quarter and actually read them.
Women over 50 hold an estimated $15 trillion in spending power. If we’re your customers, we’re also the people who understand your customers best. And the woman your software screened out this morning could be the founder you’re competing with next year.
I don’t expect that dropdown to disappear anytime soon. I’d just like someone on the other side of it to know what it’s doing.
Jacqueline Perez leads Kuel Life, a digital space created to change how we talk about growing older as women. Her work covers everything from navigating health changes and starting over professionally to managing relationships, starting fresh, and tapping into the immense financial influence of a demographic the culture constantly overlooks.
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