Ageism - The Great Leveller

I'll start with the thing I am least proud of thinking.

A woman in our community — clever, accomplished, sixty-one — was telling me about a job interview. She described the moment the panel's faces changed when she walked in. She said it had shaken her more than anything in her working life. And somewhere underneath my listening, in a place I am not proud of, a small cold voice said: Is that all? 

I want you to sit with how unattractive that is. I run a community built on refusing ageism. I have spent years arguing that women over fifty are not finished, not invisible, not decorative. And still, for half a second, I heard a woman describe her first real experience of being refused a room, and I thought, you should see the other one. 

It has taken me a while to understand what that voice actually was. It was not contempt. It was a ruler. 

Because I have been measured three times, and the measurements are not the same.

I am a Black woman. I am a woman. I am sixty-something. Racism, sexism, ageism — I have had all three handed to me, sometimes in the same afternoon, and if you asked me to rank them by the damage they did, I would not hesitate, and the order would not be the one people expect. Racism first, and not close. Sexism second. And then, far behind, ageism.

That is a strange thing for me to write. It is a very strange thing for the founder of Silver Sirens to write. 

But I have never been able to build anything honest on top of a thing I do not actually believe, so here it is: for me, ageism has been the least painful of my discriminations — and it is also the only one I have ever seen make an ally out of a stranger. 

Let me tell you why the ruler reads differently.

Racism sorted me at one year old, before I had any say in it, and it has never once let go. It sorted me in Nigeria, and it sorted me in England, and it sorts me here in Australia. Sexism did the same thing along a different line. Both of them put me permanently on one side of a border, and the people on the other side would never cross it, not in either direction, not ever. They would never wake up one morning and find they had become me. That is the particular loneliness of it. You are dealing with people who are structurally incapable of ending up where you are standing. 

Ageism does not work like that. 

Ageism is the only prejudice in the world that recruits its victims from every single group. The young man on the hiring panel who slides my CV to the bottom of the pile is not on the other side of a border from me. He is in a queue. He is thirty-four, and he is absolutely certain that this will never be him, and he is wrong, and the only thing standing between him and my chair is time, which is the one thing nobody has ever successfully argued with.

Racism and sexism sort us into camps. Ageism puts us all in the same one, and only staggers our arrival times.

Which brings me to the man I keep meeting. 

He is white. He is fifty-eight, or sixty-one, or sixty-three. He was somebody — a senior manager, an engineer, a partner. He was made redundant eighteen months ago and he has applied for eighty jobs and has had two interviews and he cannot work it out. He is not stupid. He is not underqualified. He keeps saying the same sentence to me in slightly different words: I don't understand what's happened.

And here is the thing about him that took me years to see clearly, and that I now find almost unbearably poignant.

This is the first time in his life that a door has been closed on him for something he cannot change.

He has never had this before. Not once. Every previous closed door came with a reason he could work on — not enough experience, wrong sector, better candidate. He has been refused things, of course he has. He has never been sorted. And so at fifty-eight he is going through, for the first time, the thing I have been going through since I was a child, and he has none of the equipment. No language for it. No community that already knows. No mother who sat him down at nine and explained what was about to happen and how to hold his face when it did.

I have watched women in our community enjoy that. I understand the impulse. There is a dark little satisfaction in now you know. 

I am asking us not to.

Partly because I am a therapist and I know what contempt costs the person holding it. But mostly for a colder, more strategic reason: that man is the most convertible ally in the room, and he is the only one who has just been handed the evidence.

Ageism is the great leveller. It is the only door that every one of us will eventually stand outside — the CEO and the cleaner, the man and the woman, the white woman and me. That is a grim sort of democracy. It is also the single greatest organising opportunity any equality movement has ever been handed, and we are largely wasting it, because we are running it as a grievance instead of an alliance.

Now. The other half, because I refuse to let the tidy version stand.

A shared vulnerability is not a shared history. It is levelling, and it is not justice.

He and I may both be refused the same job at sixty. We do not arrive at that room carrying the same load. I arrive having been refused twice before, over forty years, in ways that cost me promotions and pay and the compounding that comes with both. He arrives with a full working life of being believed. When we both lose that job, his superannuation and mine are not the same number, and they were never going to be. The levelling happens at the door. It does not happen in the bank.

So both things are true, and I am not going to resolve them for you, because they do not resolve.

Ageism is the mildest of my three. It is also the one I have chosen to spend the rest of my life fighting — not despite being the mildest, but because it is the only one where I can look at almost anybody and say, with complete honesty: this one is coming for you too, so you may as well help me push. 

The prejudice that hurt me least is the only one where the whole room is on my side eventually. I intend to get to them before it does.

Next Sunday, the numbers — because there is a particular kind of gaslighting that only stops when you can put a figure on the table, and Australia has produced some extraordinary figures in the last eighteen months. 

With love,

Faith

The six am swim, and the fact that nobody in the water knows what I do.

I have been getting into the sea at Coogee before the light is properly up, and what holds me is not the cold, though the cold certainly makes an argument. It is the anonymity. In the water I am not a founder or a therapist or anybody's matriarch. I am a woman with a swimsuit and a plan to get to the end of the pool and back.

There is a group of us, the regulars plus my swim buddy — nobody has ever exchanged surnames. Last week one of them, who must be eighty, overtook me. She did not make a thing of it. She simply went past, and I laughed out loud in open water, which is inadvisable.

I have noticed that I write better on the days I have been in the sea first. I have stopped asking why.