editorial
Take a look around your office for a moment and think back to all the new employees you can remember joining the company since you started. You might have already become attuned to how many women or people of colour are being hired (or perhaps, not being hired). But what about these newbies’ ages? Is almost every single one of them a recent college graduate? Are even the more senior and management roles being filled by shooting stars in their 20s, 30s, and may be 40s? Would you literally have to go two floors up to find someone over 50 and exit the building to find someone over 60?
“By avoiding older workers, employers are missing out on workers with the most experience, who are likely to stay with companies longer than their younger counterparts, who usually understand the ethic of work and the cultures of workplaces, and who are likely to reward your faith with strong motivation to excel,” says Ruth Finkelstein, executive director of the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging and a professor of urban public health at Hunter College. With age as with other characteristics, she adds, “the research is clear: diverse work teams are more successful as they incorporate multiple perspectives.”
While laws prohibit age discrimination in hiring and other aspects of employment, ageism is incredibly common. A 2018 survey of 3 900 workers ages 45 and above found that 45% of older workers cite age discrimination as a major reason they believe they would not be able to find another job quickly (and an additional 31% said it was a minor reason), and 16% reported that they would personally been passed up for a new job they applied for because of their age. And several studies (like this one and this one) have proven, empirically, that age discrimination is a problem in hiring.
But “formal complaints are rarely filed, and even more rarely proven,” Finkelstein explains. And a 2015 survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers found that only 8% of organisations addressed or planned to address age as a dimension of diversity and inclusion in their talent strategies.
“Everyone knows it happens every day but hardly anyone does anything about it,” says Cathy Ventrell-Monsees, senior advisor to the chair of the EEOC and co-author of Age Discrimination Litigation. “Our society is pretty ageist,” she explains. “People have to recognise that and work to break down the assumptions they may have and may not know they have.” If you are involved in hiring — whether you are a recruiter who spends all your days focused on finding new talent, a manager searching for a fantastic new addition to your team, or a co-worker taking part in the interview process — and want to make an effort not only to avoid illegal age discrimination, but also to push for and benefit from age diversity, here are several ways you can go about it.
l Make sure any plan for diverse hiring includes age
As the PwC study found, very few companies include age as a component of their talent diversity and inclusion strategies. But “if you do not have age on your radar screen, how do you address the issues?” says Patricia Barnes, an expert on employment discrimination and author of Overcoming Age Discrimination in Employment: An Essential Guide for Workers, Advocates, and Employers. “Maybe the first thing a company should do is do an evaluation.
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What are we doing with respect to older workers?” she says. “If we are doing nothing we are making the problem worse.”
So if you have a formal or informal plan around diversity in hiring, make sure age is part of it. Because it will do good not