The Creator Economy Doesn’t Have an Age Problem — It Has a Gender Problem

Ageism in Podcasting

I recently joined Amy Stone and three other incredible women creators — Julie Marty Pearson, Jodi Krangle, and Gwendolyn Dolsky — for a Creator Roundtable about age, gender, audience and gender in independent media.

The conversation about older women in podcasting and YouTube keeps getting framed as ageism in podcasting. I’d like to respectfully push back on that. After twelve years of podcasting and this roundtable conversation, I’ve come to a different conclusion.

Ageism is a decoy. Gender is the actual issue.

The Question We Keep Asking Is Slightly Wrong

Every time a woman creator over 40 talks about visibility, discoverability, or audience growth, the conversation gravitates toward age.

Are we too old for the algorithm? Are younger audiences tuning us out? Is it too late to grow?

These are real concerns. But they’re the wrong diagnosis.

When I look at my own podcast data, something interesting shows up. My audio podcast audience skews 55–64, Gen X women, exactly the people I’m speaking to.

But my YouTube audience? They’re 25–34. Same content, completely different demographic finding me on a different platform.

Age didn’t stop younger women from finding value in what I create. Platform architecture determined who got served my content and who didn’t.

That’s not an age problem. That’s a design and discovery problem — and it lands differently depending on your gender.

Men Don’t Have This Conversation

Men, especially older men, don’t sit around debating whether their age makes them less credible as creators. The “wise elder” archetype is practically a career accelerator for men in media. Their age signals authority.

For women, it signals expiration.

That asymmetry is not about age. It’s about how our culture has always valued, and devalued, women’s expertise across every field, at every stage of life.

The creator economy didn’t invent this. It just inherited it and then turbo-charged it with algorithmic amplification.

Gwendolyn put it plainly in our conversation: society devalues women’s expertise wholesale. Age just gives people a more socially acceptable way to do it.

Advertisers Are Leaving Real Money on the Table

The business case against this bias is actually pretty simple, and Jodi Krangle made it clearly in our roundtable. Gen X has significant purchasing power, and advertisers consistently ignore them in favor of younger demographics.

This is not a niche complaint. Gen X (born roughly 1965–1980) is in peak earning years. They own homes, run businesses, pay for their kids’ college and their parents’ care simultaneously.

They are not broke 22-year-olds with brand loyalty that hasn’t formed yet. This is exactly the audience you’d want if you were selling anything of substance.

And yet the sponsorship market for creators who serve Gen X, especially Gen X women, is thin. The conventional wisdom says chase the 18–34 demo. That wisdom is wrong, and it’s costing brands real revenue.

Fast Growth Is Not the Same Thing as a Loyal Audience

I’ll admit, yes, younger creators often grow faster, especially on short-form platforms. TikTok and Instagram Reels reward novelty, trend fluency, and high post volume.

These things tend to favor creators who have fewer constraints on their time and whose cultural references are currently trending.

But fast follower counts are not the same as a community that buys things, shows up consistently, and recommends you to their friends.

I’ve been podcasting for over twelve years. I have listeners who’ve been with me for a decade. That’s not a vanity metric — that’s a business asset.

The audience I’ve built is smaller than some, but it’s loyal in a way that’s genuinely hard to manufacture.

That loyalty exists because my audience recognizes their own life in what I create. They’re rebuilding after disruption. They’re running businesses with real lives wrapped around them.

They are Gen X women who are tired of being told the tools aren’t built for them.

That audience didn’t find me because the algorithm delivered me to them. They found me because I kept showing up.

What Grandma Moses Understood That the Algorithm Doesn’t

At the end of our roundtable, we all agreed that if Grandma Moses were alive today, her Gen Z grandchildren would make her a viral YouTube and TikTok star.

Her story, starting her most celebrated work in her late 70s, is exactly the kind of narrative that does go viral when it gets distributed properly.

The content isn’t the problem. The gatekeeping is.

Grandma Moses didn’t have less talent because she was older. She had less access. And that’s precisely what women creators in the independent media space are navigating right now.

This is not a crisis of relevance, but a crisis of access to the distribution mechanisms that decide who gets seen.

The creator economy is not too young for us. It just hasn’t figured out what to do with women who know exactly who they are and exactly who they serve.

That’s its loss. We’re building anyway.

Stay Groovy!

P.S. Everything I talked about in this post — building a loyal audience, showing up sustainably, making a business that fits your real life — is exactly what we work on inside the Gratitude Geek Lab. If that sounds like your kind of place, I’d love to have you.