Source | blog.shrm.org | Lawrence R. Samuel, Ph.D.
HR and DEI people have the opportunity and responsibility to end ageism.
It is hardly news to report that the American workplace is not friendly towards older people. For as long as it has existed, in fact, our corporate culture has been less than welcoming towards people of a certain age. Even in today’s litigious climate, where many lawyers are happy to take a case in which a company appears to have illegally discriminated against a person based on a physical attribute, blatant (although hardly ever mentioned or acknowledged) ageism is present in many, if not most, corporations. (Winning an age-based case is difficult for a variety of reasons.) It’s important to note that while Big Business is moving slow to end ageism in the workplace, if it is moving at all, small businesses, which fuel much economic growth in the United States, are more willing to employ older, experienced people, at least in leadership positions.
Unless he or she has an inside track, the odds of a baby boomer landing a managerial position as a new employee are long. Job applicants with college degrees from the 1970s and 1980s are typically eliminated from consideration promptly (often by a bot) even though they may be otherwise ideally qualified for a management position. If anything, one would expect people of different ages to be eagerly welcomed into organizations as a fair reflection of the population distribution of our society (over half of American adults are 45 years old or older) but this is simply not the case. It’s safe to say that far fewer than half of the new managerial hires at larger companies are people 45 years old or older despite the obvious tipping of our demographic scales.
The unfortunate truth is that discrimination against older people in the American workplace is commonplace (and illegal) a product of our deeply embedded cultural aversion to people considered past their prime. Pervasive myths about older people have much to do with ageism in the workplace. Those in their third act of life are likely to be physically debilitated in some way, many think, or perhaps in cognitive decline. Having already lived “the best years of their lives,” such folks are believed to be focused on the past and generally unhappy people. They are, additionally, deemed not curious and Luddites who are resistant to learning new things, especially in the digital world.