'We're having the time of our midlife': Meet the women whose dreams took off at 40-something

What motivates these ex-nesters as they’ve never been motivated before is a cocktail of age, life stage, hormonal changes and a gut feeling that, when it comes to achieving personal fulfilment, it’s now or it’s never. They’ve spent decades raising families, putting their children’s and their partner’s needs above their own and often treading water in their own careers – and now, as their offspring grow up and move on, they realise they’ve got one final, take-it-or-leave-it chance to do something big for themselves.

What’s more, they’ve reached a point in their lives where they’re better equipped than they’ve ever been to achieve their ambitions. Because towards the menopause hormonal changes, particularly a reduction in oestrogen, act to switch off their caring, nurturing ‘mummy brains’. That means the ‘male’ hormone testosterone is in the driving seat – putting these women, for the first time since puberty, on a similar hormonal footing to men. Instead of focusing on the needs of others, they’re geared to pay attention at last to their own situation and their own opportunities – and testosterone gives them more ruthlessness, more drive and more ambition than they’ve had for decades.

So, at precisely the age when a lot of men feel a bit jaded with the ‘same old’ elements of life, women emerge blinking into the sunlight of a morning when, suddenly, anything and everything feels possible.