"Somehow, people around 45 years old (and females especially) REALLY lose their ability to problem solve or learn concepts."
I've been writing software for over four decades now. And since I'm currently building iOS apps using Objective-C and Swift on top of a noSQ backend, I'm a bit disappointed by someone who says us old folk people can't learn new concepts. In fact, it's pretty much a massive overgeneralization, on the order of someone my age saying that young people lack decent work ethics, perspective, initiative and that they spend way, way too much time chatting on Kik.
(Okay, the later is probably true.)
At any rate, about a little less overgeneralization, and perhaps spending a little more time judging individuals as individuals, based on their respective strengths and weaknesses?