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When I turned 50, I encountered some corporate turnips whose mission was to humiliate me for being biologically a few years older than them. In a crowded lift one day, a colleague to call “Steve” asked if I had considered Botox. He often steered office chat around to who was the oldest (knowing it was me), at which point to excuse myself and place an online order for a voodoo doll with extra large pins.
Thanks to Steve and others, I imposed a total social media ban on any birthday posts. And I kept things vague when people asked how old my kids were (that is, I hoped they would go to university, rather than admitting they were there already).
Things are no better for my professional friends deep in the job-searching trenches. One in her early 50s was a corporate high-flyer for most of her career then took a consulting role for a few years while her kids were in secondary school. When she decided to resume her corporate career, she found jobs had all but dried up thanks to an algorithmic bias that deems 45 as over the hill.
Researchers say job ads use phrases like “fast-moving” and “a fresh perspective” as code for “not for anyone middle-aged”. While opaque recruitment processes make it impossible to know whether it’s people or AI tools that are disadvantaging midlife women, AI seems to be accelerating bias and discrimination in the workplace.
“I have applied for dozens of jobs I am 100 per cent qualified for, and am lucky to even get a rejection letter,” my corporate friend said. “Mostly it’s just radio silence.”
“In one interview they talked about needing to replace a leader who was loads of fun and good for the team culture and vibe. I was down to the final two for that role and I guess they thought a 50-plus year-old woman couldn’t be fun.”
In fairness, it isn’t fun to smash up against powerful ageism forces that leave women anxiously underemployed despite having to work for longer to boost their super. But there is a strong argument to be made that employers are backing the wrong horse – one 25 years younger than me – and overlooking the numerous reasons why midlife women make great employees.
With more than 30 years of professional experience, we can do our jobs using a fraction of the brain power required by our greener counterparts. Many of us have stopped performing our roles for an audience of colleagues and managers, to focus on what’s needed to meet a goal or raise the bar.
Our susceptibility to brain rot is much lower thanks to analogue childhoods spent developing imaginations and thinking skills. Our younger colleagues are fighting the forces of excessive screen time, washed down with brain-sapping energy drinks.
Meanwhile, if we’ve had kids, they have grown older and so there are no more dashes to school to pick up a sick one, or to take them to a dentist appointment or make them dinner. The only driving that happens is when they pick us up from the pub after one too many sauvignon blancs.
We are experts at office banter, one-on-one communication and talking to actual humans on the phone.
Our professional ambitions have changed too. Instead of switching jobs to climb the corporate totem pole, we are likely to stay longer in roles that interest us (depending on the quality of the boss).
McKinsey & Company agrees, advising governments to remake work and use technology to keep older workers in the economy longer and turbocharge sluggish productivity levels.
Productivity will continue to languish if employers write off older employers as inflexible, resistant to change and difficult to manage. In fact, Gen Xers have lived through transformative technological change. Their frank and unfiltered feedback is a strength in environments where it is “safe to speak up”, but no-one does.
As AI recruitment technology becomes more commonplace, the researchers caution older workers are “likely to face growing barriers to gaining and staying in work”. They argue the burden should be placed on organisations rather than employees to address discrimination and check for bias in automated tools.
Yet I’ve heard reports some women in their 50s are guilty of Hunger Games -style discrimination against their own in interviews. As former United States secretary of state Madeleine Albright once declared: “There is a special place in hell for women who don’t help other women.”
If another saying, “culture eats strategy for breakfast” is true, then to strongly recommend hiring 50-plus women to improve the office vibe, inject some wisdom and encourage more diversity into the workplace.
But at the end of the work day, those of us in our sixth decade are embryos on a galactic scale. The difference between 25 and 55 is negligible when compared to planet Earth’s 6 billion years in the cosmos. If only AI and recruiters understood this.
Annie Lawson is author of Stoic at Work and Stoic in Love, published by Murdoch Books.