It’s the stereotypes, not older people, that are tired
|
Version 0 of 1. What sport the rhymesters have had this week with their “pale, male and stale” cabinet reshuffle barb. I am more likely to cry for Argentina than for Michael Gove or Owen Paterson, but I’ve been disturbed by the prejudice thrumming through much of the commentary – a prejudice that is all too socially acceptable. Welcome to middle-ageism. Implicit, if not explicit, in the reactions to the reshuffle are a whole troupe of assumptions about older workers. They’re technological dolts. They lack energy. Above all they’re inflexible – set in their ways. Stationed against them are the young, invariably seen as fireballs of energy and new ideas. Gove rather challenged these binary opposites: at nearly 47 he was certainly an energetic innovator – just not in a good way. The abolition of the default age of retirement in 2011 has done nothing to retire stereotypes about older workers. On the contrary, we’ve seen a cranking up of the rhetoric that older people have flourished at the expense of the young – the so-called intergenerational inequity argument advanced by the outgoing David Willetts in his book The Pinch. (The 58-year-old Willetts, he who helped deprive students of the free university education he himself enjoyed, has been replaced as minister for universities and science by Greg Clarke, 46: who’s now pinching from whom?) When things get tough, disadvantaged groups – women, ethnic minorities, young people, older people – all get played off against each other, as if one group is gaining at the expense of the other. But they aren’t. It’s true that 16- to 24-year-olds are more likely to be out of work than any other age group, but the over-50s currently unemployed are much less likely than any other age group to find work in the next year, according to Too Much to Lose, a 2012 report from the thinktank Policy Exchange. Indeed there are many more long-term unemployed over 50 than 18-24, even though they may have mortgages and dependent children. This is partly because the younger group have, so far, had less time to be out of work. But it’s also about cheap labour. In a zero-hours culture there’s a high “churn” of lower-paid, younger workers, who are flexible by necessity, not choice. (You wouldn’t want, in their place, an older worker who not only costs more but also remembers that distant nirvana when employees had rights.) But older workers are also dogged by the stereotype of rigidity. As sociologist Richard Sennett put it, “Corporate culture treats the middle-aged as risk-averse, in the gambler’s sense.” After a disastrous global crash caused in part by the recklessness of thrusting young and middle-aged executives, is risk-taking such an estimable quality? Is it something we should seek to encourage, above experience? Ah, experience – that most disparaged of attributes. When John Drummond, then controller of BBC Radio 3, objected to a change at the corporation, an administrator accused him of being “tainted by experience”. How daft that even in politics, where you’d think it would be prized, experience seems to count for nothing and you can become obsolete overnight. It’s certainly true that for an engineer or a lawyer, a doctor or IT specialist, the techniques you learned in college a couple of decades ago no longer last a lifetime – what Sennett calls “skills extinction”. At the same time (the double whammy of ageing) companies feel that it’s not worth retraining the over-50s because they won’t get a sufficient “return” on their investment. Yet this is precisely the age when people need retraining most. Most older workers, unless they’re in the most physically demanding jobs, not only want to continue working but need to. Ageism has been described as prejudice against your future self. How much more perverse, then, is middle-ageism since you’re going to arrive at this age even sooner. And how pernicious: a slew of studies have shown that we internalise negative perceptions of age and turn them against ourselves. Our memory apparently works less well if we’ve been fed a lot of stories about its inevitable decline with age. We walk less confidently after exposure to ageist propaganda. Becca Levy of Yale has even claimed that older people with a more positive perception of ageing live longer. Though it can’t be long before some politician blames the very old for thoughtlessly extending their lives through excessive ebullience. And yet, encouragingly, there are signs of the emergence of a counter-narrative. New initiatives like Trading Times, which matches employers with experienced and skilled local over-50s and family carers. Or the Age of No Retirement, a national debate and exhibition on the longer working life taking place in October. And a plethora of exciting projects under the aegis of New Dynamics of Ageing. A recent US study found that all ages prefer a mixed-age workforce. I don’t want to found a society for the preservation of the older white male. Nor do I wish to swap one stereotype – the enfeebled older worker – for another, all serenity and wisdom. In my experience (and yes, I have some), wisdom isn’t age-related. Indeed no quality is. This is what seems so hard for us to grasp: that there are more differences within age groups than between them. Journalists learn to always ask someone they’re interviewing their age. Shockingly, it may not be their most important characteristic. |