You're How old? We'll be in touch...
It might not seem that Hillary Clinton and Donald J. Trump
have much in common. But they share something important with each other and
with a whole lot of their fellow citizens. Both are job seekers. And at ages 68
and 70, respectively, they’re part of a large group of Americans who are
radically upending the concept of retirement.
In 2016, almost 20 percent of Americans 65 and older are
working. Some of them want to; many need to. The demise of traditional pensions
means that many people have to keep earning in their 60s and 70s to maintain a
decent standard of living.
These older people represent a vast well of productive and
creative potential. Veteran workers can bring deep knowledge to the table, as
well as well-honed interpersonal skills, better judgment than the less
experienced and a more balanced perspective. They embody a natural resource
that’s increasing: the social capital of millions of healthy, educated adults.
Why, then, are well over a million and a half Americans over
50, people with decades of life ahead of them, unable to find work? The
underlying reason isn’t personal, it’s structural. It’s the result of a network
of attitudes and institutional practices that we can no longer ignore.
The problem is ageism — discrimination on the basis of age.
A dumb and destructive obsession with youth so extreme that experience has
become a liability. In Silicon Valley, engineers are getting Botox and hair
transplants before interviews — and these are skilled, educated, white guys in
their 20s, so imagine the effect further down the food chain.
Age discrimination in employment is illegal, but two-thirds
of older job seekers report encountering it. At 64, I’m fortunate not to have
been one of them, as I work at the American Museum of Natural History, a truly
all-age-friendly employer.
I write about ageism, though, so I hear stories all the
time. The 51-year-old Uber driver taking me to Los Angeles International
Airport at dawn a few weeks ago told me about a marketing position he thought
he was eminently qualified for. He did his homework and nailed the interview.
On his way out of the building he overheard, “Yeah, he’s perfect, but he’s too
old.”
I’m lucky enough to get my tech support from JK Scheinberg,
the engineer at Apple who led the effort that moved the Mac to Intel
processors. A little restless after retiring in 2008, at 54, he figured he’d be
a great fit for a position at an Apple store Genius Bar, despite being twice as
old as anyone else at the group interview. “On the way out, all three of the
interviewers singled me out and said, ‘We’ll be in touch,’ ” he said. To his
disappointment, he didn’t hear anything immediately, and he says that he called
to follow up. Though he did get an email from a recruiter some days later to
set up a second interview, he stopped pursuing the opportunity.
Recruiters say people with more than three years of work
experience need not apply. Ads call for “digital natives,” as if playing video
games as a kid is proof of competence. Résumés go unread, as Christina
Economos, a science educator with more than 40 years of experience developing
curriculum, has learned. “I don’t even get a reply — or they just say, ‘We’ve
found someone more suited,’ ” she said. “I feel that my experience, skill set,
work ethic, are being dismissed just because of my age. It’s really a blow,
since I still feel like a vital human being.”
A 2016 study by the National Bureau of Economic Research
found “robust” evidence that age discrimination in the workplace starts earlier
for women and never relents. The pay gap kicks in early, at age 32, when women
start getting passed over for promotion.
Discouraged and diminished, many older Americans stop
looking for work entirely. They become economically dependent, contributing to
the misperception that older people are a burden to society, but it’s not by
choice. How are older people supposed to remain self-sufficient if they’re
forced out of the job market?
Not one negative stereotype about older workers holds up
under scrutiny. Abundant data show that they’re reliable, handle stress well,
master new skills and are the most engaged of all workers when offered the
chance to grow and advance on the job. Older people might take longer to
accomplish a given task, but they make fewer mistakes. They take longer to
recover from injury but hurt themselves less often. It’s a wash. Motivation and
effort affect output far more than age does.
Age prejudice — assuming that someone is too old or too
young to handle a task or take on a responsibility — cramps prospects for
everyone, old or young. Millennials, who are criticized for having “no work
ethic” and “needing to have their hands held,” have trouble getting a foothold
in the job market. Unless we tackle age bias, they too are likely to become
less employable through no fault of their own, and sooner than they might
think. The Age Discrimination in Employment Act kicks in at 40.
The myth that older workers crowd out younger ones is called
the “lump of labor” fallacy, and economists have debunked it countless times.
When jobs are scarce, this is true in the narrowest sense, but that’s a labor
market problem, not a too-many-old-people problem.
A 2012 Pew Charitable Trusts study of employment rates over
the last 40 years found rates for younger and older workers to be positively
correlated. In other words, as more older workers stayed on the job, the
employment rate and number of hours worked also improved for younger people.
Progressive companies know the benefits of workplace
diversity. A friend in work force policy calls this the “shoe test”: look under
the table, and if everyone’s wearing the same kind of shoes, whether wingtips
or flip-flops, you’ve got a problem. It’s blindingly obvious that age belongs
alongside race, gender, ability and sexual orientation as a criterion for
diversity — not only because it’s the ethical path but also because age
discrimination hurts productivity and profits.
Being part of a mixed-age team can be challenging. Betsy
Martens was 55 when she landed a job as an information architect at a start-up
during the heady days of the tech boom. Decades older than most of the staff,
she found it invigorating. “When it came time to talk about the music we loved,
the books we’d read, the movies we saw and the life experiences we’d had, we
were on different planets, but we were all open-minded enough to find these
differences intriguing,” she told me. Things shifted during an argument with
her boss, “when he said exasperatedly, ‘You sound just like my mother.’ That
was the moment the pin pricked the balloon.”
“Culture fit” gets bandied about in this context — the idea
that people in an organization should share attitudes, backgrounds and working
styles. That can mean rejecting people who “aren’t like us.” Age, however, is a
far less reliable indicator of shared values or interests than class, gender,
race or income level. Discomfort at reaching across an age gap is one of the
sorry consequences of living in a profoundly age-segregated society. The
Cornell gerontologist Karl Pillemer says that Americans are more likely to have
a friend of a different race than one who is 10 years older or younger than
they are.
Age segregation impoverishes us, because it cuts us off from
most of humanity and because the exchange of skills and stories across
generations is the natural order of things. In the United States, ageism has
subverted it.
What is achieving age diversity going to take? Nothing less
than a mass movement like the women’s movement, which made people aware that
“personal problems” — like being perceived as incompetent, or being paid less,
or getting passed over for promotion — were actually widely shared political
problems that required collective action.
The critical starting point is to acknowledge our own
prejudice: internalized bias like “I’m too old for that job,” and that directed
at others, like “It’s going to take me forever to bring that old guy up to
speed.” Confronting ageism means making friends of all ages. It means pointing
out bias when you encounter it (when everyone at a meeting is the same age, for
example).
Confronting ageism means joining forces. It means seeing
older people not as alien and “other,” but as us — future us, that is.
Correction: September 6, 2016
An earlier version of this article included a quotation by
JK Scheinberg, a retired Apple engineer, saying he was not contacted after an
interview for a position at an Apple store Genius Bar. Mr. Scheinberg and Apple
now say that the company did send an email asking to schedule a second
interview.
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