Will ageism be pensioned off soon?

Could the one form of discrimination awaiting everyone be about to disappear?

Photo by Peter van Eijk on Unsplash

I recently responded to an ad from an Australian start-up that wanted some fintech content created. I’d churned out a lot of the type of content the start-up wanted to start producing and someone high up at the start-up sent an enthusiastic response to my introductory email within 15 minutes of me getting in touch. While it wasn’t explicitly stated, the person I was corresponding with gave me the impression that I had gotten the gig and CCed me on an email to a more junior marketing person.

After hearing nothing back from the marketer, I chased her up a few days later. She sent me an email saying my portfolio was full of “brilliant, well-written articles” but that “we've decided to go with another writer at this point”.

I’ve received hundreds, probably thousands, of “thanks, but no thanks” emails over the decade I’ve been freelancing. At this point, I usually don’t give them much thought. But this particular rejection did make me wonder. The number of Australian content creators with as much experience as me at producing the type of blogs this business wanted could be counted using one hand. Most of those people would be booked up for months and not putting their hand up for extra work.

Did the marketer – who was no older than around 25 judging by her LinkedIn profile – opt for someone who was a poorer fit for the role in terms of domain expertise but a better ‘cultural fit’? That is, someone in their twenties or thirties, like most of the people employed by the start-up?  

That’s a thought that never crossed my mind when I started freelancing back in my early forties. It’s a line of thinking I try to avoid – after all, that way lies madness – in my early fifties but increasingly fall prey to.

I guess that’s part of getting old.     

Licit discrimination

It’s evidence of how little anybody cares about ageism that you probably didn’t know it was Ageism Awareness Day last week. I only became aware of it due to a media spat created by a younger writer – one who gets very worked up about racial and religious discrimination –unselfconsciously engaging in ageist discrimination.  

Long story short, Osman Faruqi, along with some similarly youthful peers such as Thomas Mitchell, bagged the ABC’s decision to give the sixtysomething Fran Kelly a show rather than provide someone around the same age as Faruqi and Mitchell with their chance to shine. I don’t have a dog in this fight and am on the record lamenting Boomers refusal to make way for younger generations. Nonetheless, I’m bemused that the type of journalists so committed to banging the drum for diversity draw the line when it comes to age-group diversity. (After all, it’s not like you see a surfeit of older women on TV, even on the ABC.)    

In what was presumably an attempt to leverage Ageism Awareness Day, advocacy group EveryAGE Counts recently released the results of a survey into ageism in Australia. Surveys from advocacy groups should always be taken with a large grain of salt. But few people on the wrong side of 40 would find the findings of this survey hard to believe.

As reported in The Australian, the survey found:

*Those in their fifties and sixties found ageism a more serious problem than those in their seventies and eighties. (This is presumably because those in their fifties and sixties are still in the workforce and need to worry about whether their boss or clients are starting to think they are past it.)

* A third of those aged 50-59 said they had been rejected for a job because of their age

*   A quarter of those aged 50-69 said they have “been made to feel like I am too old for my work”

*   70 per cent of Australians over 50 consider ageism a serious problem

EveryAGE Counts director Marlene Krasovitsky pointed out that even those who conduct surveys into ageism frequently fall into the trap of unconscious ageism. They typically lump everyone over 50 into one amorphous group, failing to realise that the life experiences of fiftysomethings, sixtysomethings, seventysomethings and eightysomethings differ markedly.  

The case for ageism

The harsh reality – and I write this as a man with more yesterdays than tomorrows – is that ageism makes sense. Young people typically don’t have the distractions of young children or ailing, elderly parents. They are less likely to have serious health issues than older people. They are more inclined to uncomplainingly put in 80-hour weeks in the hopes of establishing their career and rising up the ranks. They are less jaded than their elders and therefore more likely to be good company men and women, rather than rolling their eyes at whatever corporate fad they are being subjected to this week. They have modest salary expectations, at least in the short term. As a rule of thumb, digital natives have a more intuitive understanding of technology than their digital migrant elders.

It’s rarely mentioned in polite company, but it’s also the case that younger people are more attractive than their older counterparts. I’ve found you can almost always judge how wealthy the clientele of a business is by how attractive its customer-facing staff are. Step onto a super yacht, or go to an exclusive nightclub, or stay at a five-star hotel, or eat at an upmarket restaurant and you’ll find all the visible employees will be in the 7-10 range in the looks department. That’s not the case if you catch a ferry, or drink at a suburban RSL, or dine at McDonald’s, or stay at a Travelodge. (Strictly speaking, I suppose this is ‘lookism’ rather than ‘ageism’. However, given the nexus between youth and beauty, lookism and ageism are inextricably intertwined.)

From a cold-blooded business perspective, ageism makes sense. That is presumably why so many people who are themselves are middle-aged engage in it. After all, it’s usually fortysomethings and fiftysomethings in middle or upper management who decide who gets hired, who gets promoted and who gets made redundant. These people typically feel little compunction about discriminating against people the same age as they are. On the contrary, they are likely to boast about their role in getting rid of the ‘dead wood’ in their next performance review.

Might Gen X finally be about to get lucky?

Given a choice, employers and clients will reliably opt for younger rather than older employees and contractors.

The crucial words in that last sentence are ‘given a choice’.

At the risk of trying the patience of regular readers, let me once more lay out the demographic structure of most first-world nations. For economic and geopolitical reasons, not many children were born circa 1930-1945. A lot of children were born circa 1946-1964 (hence the term ‘baby boom’). Then things calmed down for a while until the Boomers started having their (Gen Y) kids.

Some boomers, such as Fran Kelly, and even some ‘greatest generationers’ like Kelly’s boss Ita Buttrose, are steadfastly refusing to exit stage left. But the overwhelming majority of their peers have either already drifted off into retirement or will do so soon. That means there already are, or soon will be, a lot of well-paid, prestigious, top-of-the-food chain jobs available.

It's possible – and this is the outcome Gen Yers would no doubt prefer – that Gen Y will simply leapfrog over Gen X and engineer a dizzying ascent from the lower levels to the upper levels of the org chart. (In much the same way many people used to argue that Prince William should ascend to the throne directly after Queen Elizabeth, with Charles being sensible and self-sacrificing enough to stand aside, I suspect plenty of Gen Y pundits will soon be arguing that Gen X’s time long ago passed and they should abandon their long-frustrated dreams of occupying a corner office.)

I imagine Osman Faruqi believes he could run the ABC better than Ita Buttrose and would be delighted to step into the role if Ita ever decides to retire or when she is called to her eternal reward. (If I’m overestimating Faruqi’s self-confidence, I’m sure there’s no shortage of other Gen Yers who aren’t so self-effacing.)

But even in a society as youth-worshipping as ours, I have my doubts that even a Labor (or Labor-Greens coalition) Government is going to appoint someone under the age of 50 as chairperson of the ABC. Likewise, I’m guessing there are a slew of senior positions that are now available or soon will be that can only be filled by people with at least three decades of work and life experience under their belt.

There is also the matter of the growing imbalance between the working-age population and the post-working-age population.

There have been token efforts to encourage boomers to delay their retirements. Nonetheless, I’m guessing the large majority of them retired in their mid-sixties and a significant minority called it quits in their fifties or early sixties. But with lifespans increasing and fertility rates collapsing, it’s just not going to be possible for post-boomer generations to enjoy 15-25 year-long retirements. The retirement age has already been bumped up to 67 and I’ve got a feeling many Gen Xers (and Yers and Zers) will be working into their seventies, especially if they are still attempting to pay off a mortgage and/or worried about a modest super balance.

It’s possible many Gen Xers will be ‘moved on’ from senior roles long before they reach retirement age and have to spend their sixties driving Ubers or working at Bunnings. However, I suspect this will increasingly become the exception rather than the rule. Professional services and law firms recently moving away from ‘encouraging’ partners to retire at 55, or certainly no later than 65, is a straw in the wind.    

Is ageism feasible in an ageing society?  

Gen X was less fecund than their boomer predecessors. Gen Y will be less fecund than Gen X. If all the stories I’ve been reading about Gen Zers being socially awkward, digitally addled celibates are true, it looks like a Children of Men/Handmaid’s Tale dystopia is only a few decades away.

The good news, such that it is, about the demographic realities facing first-world nations is that ageism is an indulgence those societies will soon no longer be able to afford. Employers’ prejudices won’t change. But they won’t have the option of ignoring all the job applicants/contractors over the age of 40 if there aren’t any job applicants/contractors under the age of 40 available.