Twenty-Four Per Cent

Last week I told you that ageism is the mildest of my three discriminations. This week I want to show you what the mildest one actually does, because I have noticed something about the women who write to me about work. 

They almost always apologise first. 

I might be reading too much into this. It could just be that they had someone better. I don't want to be one of those women who blames everything on her age. 

Nobody sends me an email about sexism that opens with an apology for possibly having imagined it. Ageism is different. Ageism is the discrimination that arrives without a fingerprint — no slur, no comment, no moment you could describe to a tribunal. Just a slow cooling in a room, and then a silence where a phone call should have been.

So let me put some figures on the table, because I have watched what happens to a woman's face when the number arrives. She stops apologising.

Here is the one I cannot stop thinking about.

Australian HR professionals were asked, in a national survey, at what age they consider a worker to be "older". Nearly a quarter of them now say fifty-one to fifty-five. 

Two years earlier, one in ten said that. 

Read it again, because it is easy to slide past. In two years, the age at which Australian workplaces begin to think of you as old dropped so sharply that the proportion of HR professionals setting the line at fifty-one more than doubled. Not fifty-eight. Not sixty-five. Fifty-one — an age at which a great many women have fifteen or twenty working years in front of them, are finally out from under small children, and are for the first time in their lives able to give a job everything they have got. 

The same research found that eighteen per cent of employers said they would simply not hire anyone over sixty-five. Not "would prefer not to". Would not. 

And my favourite, in the way that a bruise is your favourite: when asked what older workers are good at, employers were generous about loyalty and reliability and coping under pressure. When asked about technology, one per cent credited them with superior skills. One. Seven per cent thought they had energy. 

Loyal, reliable, calm — and, apparently, tired and baffled by a laptop. That is not a description of older workers. That is a description of a grandmother, applied to a professional, by someone who has confused a stage of life with a personality. 

Two more numbers and then I will stop.

Nearly a quarter of older working Australians say they have experienced age discrimination since they turned fifty. Ninety per cent of us say ageism exists, eighty-three per cent say it is a problem, and sixty-three per cent have experienced it in the past five years — and more than half of Australians think a joke about age is more acceptable than a joke about race or gender. That last one explains a great deal about the tone of the average retirement card. 

And then the figure that broke my heart, which is not the big one but the small one.

Age discrimination makes up around five per cent of the complaints that reach the Australian Human Rights Commission. Five. Despite being one of the most commonly reported reasons people give for discrimination at work. 

Sit with the gap between sixty-three per cent and five per cent. That is not a gap in experience. That is a gap in what we are prepared to say out loud. 

I know exactly why it is there, because I have talked many women through it, and the reasoning is always the same three things.

You cannot prove a silence. Nobody writes too old on a rejection. They write We've decided to go in a different direction, and they are usually telling the truth about the direction and lying about the reason, and there is no document in the world that shows it. 

The process costs more than the job. By the time you have found a lawyer, filled in the form, told the story four times and waited fourteen months, the role has been filled by someone who is thirty-six and you are older than you were when you started, which is rather the point.

And the third one, which nobody says: there is a specific humiliation in standing in a room arguing that you are not too old, while everybody in the room looks at you and forms their own view. It is the only discrimination where making the complaint requires you to submit to a fresh assessment of the very thing you are complaining about. That is why women swallow it. Not because they doubt it happened. Because the remedy requires them to be looked at again. 

So they go quiet, and they apply for something slightly below their level, and then slightly below that, and after the fourth silence something worse begins.

They start agreeing. 

This is the part of ageism that does the real damage, and it has almost nothing to do with employers. A woman comes to my practice at fifty-seven and says, quite calmly, that she has probably had her run. That she should be realistic. That she cannot expect to be considered against a thirty-year-old. No one has told her anything of the sort. She has simply absorbed, over about two hundred unanswered applications, the room's opinion of her — and now she carries it for them, free of charge, and saves them the trouble of ever having to say it.

An employer can shut you out of a job. Only you can shut yourself out of the next twenty years — and ageism's real cleverness is that it gets you to do that part yourself. 

I said last week that the levelling happens at the door and not in the bank. Here is the bank. One in four Australians over sixty-five is living in poverty. That is not a story about bad choices. It is a story about what happens when you take fifteen of a woman's most productive years and quietly price them at nothing.

So here is what I want from this letter, and it is small and specific.

I want you to be able to say the sentence.

Not to a tribunal — to yourself, in the car, after the interview where the panel's faces changed. That was my age. I am not imagining it. A national survey says a quarter of them think I have been old since fifty-one. 

You do not have to fight it that afternoon. You do not have to complain, or post about it, or ring anybody. You only have to stop apologising for noticing. 

Because the women who keep their sight are the ones who are still in the room in five years. And the women who agree — who quietly accept the assessment and start describing themselves as past it,  those are the ones I cannot reach, and they are usually the most capable women I have ever met.

Next Sunday, I'll confess my own solution to all this: I stopped applying. I built my own door. And I want to tell you honestly what that cost. 

With love,

Faith

Routines and Rituals That Held Me This Week

An hour before anyone else wakes, kept for me alone.

For eight days I have been responsible for a group of women a long way from home: their rooms, their meals, their tears, their timings, and the moment someone goes quiet at dinner, and I need to notice. It is the work I love most. It is also the work most likely to make me forget I have a body of my own.

So every morning, before anyone else is up, I have taken an hour that belongs to nobody else. A swim, a hot drink, the light coming up over this extraordinary land, a hand on my heart, and one question: how are you, really? I wait for an honest answer before I go and ask anyone else.

I'm not doing it because I am serene.

Some mornings I was tired and ratty and wondering what on earth possessed me. It is useful because the woman holding the space for everyone else has to be held by something too. The carer who skips herself does not become more generous. She becomes brittle.

If you are the one everyone leans on, take your hour first. You are allowed to be held by the morning before you hold anyone else.