By Neil Patrick
This morning I dug out a report undertaken for the Third Age Foundation, entitled ‘Past it at 40?’, looking into the causes of workplace ageism and discrimination. You can find it here:
Whilst the research was designed to inform policy makers and
promote debate, it is just as relevant to individuals in my view. We need to
understand what we are up against and most importantly, how to respond. As you
will know from my other posts, I am a strong advocate of self-help and have
limited faith in government and quasi- governmental bodies’ ability to solve
these problems for us at the individual level.
The report was published ten years ago in 2002, so you might
justifiably ask ‘is it still relevant?’ Sadly, I’d say that little has improved
and that in fact, the onset of recession has aggravated the situation , so
things are actually getting worse. Apart from recession, the coalition’s
understandable focus on youth unemployment means that mature workers are not
likely to see much in the way of government priority for intervention.
The most interesting insights in this report come not from
the job seekers who are understandably frustrated, depressed, worried and
feeling helpless, but from the employers who reveal some of their attitudes to
this subject..
But let’s start with a quotation from a jobseeker in his
fifties:
‘A few years ago, I applied for a job and was interviewed.
There were three people in the room, all in their mid-twenties. I felt
uncomfortable - they talked about this
‘new, dynamic company’. It wasn’t said directly, but I could feel they were
trying to discourage me a bit. I don’t mind if I’m surrounded by younger
people, I was willing to learn and be as flexible as possible. As the interview
went on, I felt I wouldn’t fit in. They said, ‘Don’t ring us, we’ll ring you’
- and they didn’t.’
Now I confess I know
nothing about this person, the job in question or the firm concerned. But that
really doesn’t matter. Just read between the lines of the above quotation.
First the interview panel were all in their mid-twenties - therefore their
individual management experience was unlikely to be more than 5 years or so and
less if they were graduates. The comment about a ‘new, dynamic company’ is code
in my view. It means, ‘we are a hyped up bunch who like to work and party hard
and don’t really want slower, uncool mature people in our ranks.’ It’s a fact
that younger workers tend to like to blur their work and social activities
together. They are generally unmarried, do not have children and therefore
often like nothing better than to continue their work relationships on a social
environment out of office hours. And let’s face it, why would they want a more
mature person in their ‘gang’?
Another couple of
employers’ responses more or less confirm my prognosis:
‘Some industries are younger, and an older person may not
feel comfortable and will look out of place. They probably would not enjoy the
job either.’
‘In this industry (banking) you are middle-aged at
33!…There is a perception that if you are old (sic) and have not moved on, then
you cannot be good.’
I find these comments
quite shocking. ‘You will look out of place’ - what does that mean? And why is someone over 33 ‘middle-aged’? What
we are hearing here I think is that what we look like is a requirement for some
jobs. If we don’t look young, we may not be an attractive
employment proposition to some organsiations…
Whilst I find the above
comments depressing and outrageous, my experience does confirm that mature
people can genuinely feel out of place in some work environments. I have seen
many of these where in the attempt to create a ‘fun’ working environment which
motivates young staff, firms create instead a puerile one which really only
appeals to a juvenile’s outlook. And who creates these environments? It is of
course the same twenty-somethings who interviewed the job seeker I quoted
first. It’s therefore more or less inevitable that a more mature person will
feel out of place. So whilst this isn’t ageism per se, the work environment is shaped and determined by
younger people to reflect their own outlook and preferences.
Worse still, the situation
becomes a self-perpetuating circle. The young staff shape the work environment
to match their outlook and appoint people who are attracted to it. So more of
the staff are younger and the environment becomes dominated by a form of youth
culture. The older and more senior managers see that this environment is
appealing to the majority of their staff and so are reluctant to upset the
arrangements to suit a minority – i.e. the more mature workers. And so the
cycle perpetuates.
The key point I am making
here is that no amount of government or legal interventions can really hope to
tackle this sort of ingrained organisational behaviour. It is a form of ageism
for sure, but how could you ever legislate to change it?
All of this leads me back
to one of my core mantras, which is that once we get past 40, we are taking an
extreme risk with our lives if we assume that we can just carry on working in
the same careers that we engaged in during our twenties and thirties. For
reasons I’ve described above, I do not believe that employers’ reluctance to
hire older workers will recede anytime soon. So it is absolutely essential that
you have a plan B for the second half of your working life.
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