Ageism Awareness Day slips by to little fanfare

Australia’s take on the 1 October International Day of the Older Person was the launch of the inaugural Ageism Awareness Day, which was so low-key that it slipped by almost unnoticed.

This was quite sad, not because it was just one of those ‘days of’ that segues through your life as just another wrinkle on the information sine wave, but because it was a day that applied to me.

Or at least that’s what the not-for-profit campaign Every Age Counts (EAC) communicated on Ageism Awareness Day. Its co-chair, Dr Marlene Krasovitsky, told ABC TV that that over 50% of Australians reported they had been a victim of ageism from age 50 onwards. That’s right - 50!

So there it was. I qualified as an older Australian - by a margin. The sort of margin that would turn a Melbourne Cup winner into a legend. I am Jimmy Cassidy on Might and Power when it comes qualifying as older.

EAC’s research tells us ageism does not cut in as people pass through the white picket gates of retirement, but to those in the prime of their lives. People who have stepped through the home building battles of their 30s and hurdling the costs of the kids’ education through their 40s. They’re about to kick on down the straight and on to self-actualisation - ready to plant their feet firmly on the peak of Maslow’s triangle.

Focusing on ageism applied to older persons is valid, but it truncates the broader issue. Ageism has a barbell distribution, weighing against cohorts at both career entry and exit points and a few places in between. It’s young judging old and old judging young.

It is hard to know why it is nearly always discussed in the context of discrimination against older people. Perhaps those who are older now emerged predominantly from the boomer generation which, since the 1960s, has been founded upon challenging social norms and continues to articulate its grievances more loudly and, arguably, more effectively than any generation before or since.

For many over 50, the matter is prioritised and amplified because of the existential threat it presents to their prospects for employment and future financial security.

The fact that older people and their campaigners make the most noise about it is perhaps why Ageism Awareness Day does not receive the attention it should. It can too easily dismissed as a bunch of old boomers trying to hang in to maintain their relevance.

A more balanced perspective on ageism is gained from the Australian Human Rights Commission’s 2021 report on ageism that challenges the perception that ageism is about discrimination against older people. It’s multi-generational survey of more than 2,000 Australians of all ages reported that more than 90% of respondents claimed to have experienced ageism.

Ageism is covert. It is attitudinal and cultural. It flies in the face of evidence that challenges what are little more than perceptions and gut instinct. It fails to properly account for the value, diversity, perspective and energy that an individual can bring to an organisation irrespective of age.

In August 2020, Telstra appointed 32-year-old Expert360 founder, Bridget Loudon, to its board. The company’s announcement welcomed her experience in technology and organisational transformation. It made Ms Loudon the youngest-ever appointment to an ASX200 board and was long overdue for the nation’s leading telco, which must instil agility and innovation across its business to be sustainable.

In the not-for-profit sector, Melbourne Opera’s appointment of Anastasia Kogan, age 37, was inspired by her proven digital savvy and, unsurprisingly, her business connections. The ‘pale, stale and male’ firewall of Australia’s leading commercial and charity boards is being breached, if only in byte-sized chunks.

The Loudon and Kogan appointments represented a breakthrough from atrophied attitudes and thinking at board level about the value and potential of younger directors - particularly of people outside the tired and clubby clique that has traditionally been the source of directors for Australia’s top listed companies.

It has been much safer to hire a person who thinks and looks like you than be challenged by the energy and perspectives of someone new. It was inevitable in an unprecedented era of accelerated change that this sort of selection process would become an existential threat to companies and organisations. Darwinian business would inexorably lead to hiring the best adapted species.

At the other end of the spectrum, the octogenarian Ita Buttrose’s appointment as chair of the ABC board was an outlier rather than the rule for appointments to the top table. Paradoxically, as life expectancies increase, employment expectancies for proportionately diminish.

The problems for young and old are not confined to the rarefied air of the boardroom, but changes at that level are significant as attitude and culture start at the top. These trickle through executive teams, into management, supervisors and frontline staff.

At the ends of the ageism barbell are two extremes of attitude and application of ageism. While older people are affronted and confronted by the fact that their career has been prematurely terminated, the young battle to get a start.

This ageism polarity assures that we respectively have disenfranchised people with ‘too much experience’ and others with ‘insufficient experience’. These are euphemisms, excuses, lame artifices that define lazy recruitment practice.

The oft-cited ‘attitude to work’ as an obstacle to youth recruitment often reflects as much on the employer’s failure to keep up with changing views on work-life balance and expectations as it does on the applicant’s. It is ageism defined by a perception of an age demographic.

Eliminating ageism is not all about dealing with discrimination against the old. It’s about reconciliation between traditional and emerging values. It is about giving due recognition to the benefits and advances brought across the generations and that every age cohort sits on a continuum of evolving knowledge, understanding and culture.

Home, educational institutions, workplaces and communities are forums for drawing the best energy, experience, ideas and visions and, without exception, this means participation on merit and capacity to contribute. Age should not be a criterion for selection.

Photo courtesy of HR Magazine, UK