Millennials are becoming victims of ageism
And why it's more complicated than you think....
Hello, Welcome to MajorRelate. I break down the key trends shaping how we live, work, and consume, offering sharp insights and fresh perspectives you won’t find anywhere else. For more, visit my website for info on speaking and courses, and follow me on Instagram for video content. Subscribe now to cut through the noise and stay ahead.
I’ve been filming all week, working on a project about how different generations think about their careers and life beyond work. Fascinating stuff. I’ve also had two speaking events, so this week’s essay is a repost from last year which went viral and inspired much discussion about how millennials are becoming victims of ageism in the workplace.
Millennials are becoming victims of ageism
Why ageism is more complicated than you think and what we need to do about it
What does the idea of ageism conjure up for you? Discrimination against pensioners? The above image is what generative AI gave me when I asked it to visualise ageism in the workplace.
"When people think of the victims of ageism they tend to think of the over 50s," Michael O'Reilly tells me who is head of the Age Diversity Network, adding "people are surprised when I tell them that it actually starts at 40."
Michael, in his sixties, set up the Network after struggling to find work and being the victim of what he now sees as endemic ageism in the corporate workplace. Michael helps individuals get back into work and companies expand their thinking when it comes to the issue of ageism. His observation is backed up by Professor Lynda Gratton who has stated that ageism begins at 40 for women and 45 for men. We know that the gender pay gap is sharply forming into a pregnancy penalty i.e. only impacting women who have children and not those that don’t. But what about age?
How many millennials - some now hitting their mid-forties - are considering how their age might start to play a role in their career? Once seen as youthful disruptors, millennials are now in danger of being victims of ageism. Perhaps this pill will be easier to swallow if we ditch the term 'older workers' in favour of 'experienced workers.'
I work with businesses all over the world about the multi-generational workforce, and predominantly that means talking to a room of high-level over 50s about the under 25s. This fascination with youth is understandable; crudely speaking, young people are cheap digital natives, ready-made for the future. And while I’ve seen a growing interest from businesses (and of course government) in considering their more experienced employees, too often this is focused on the over-50s and their current economic situation and trajectory; getting them back to work or working longer. The truth is that scrapping pension allowances, hiring them as gig economy workers, or even pushing corporate returnerships or mid-life MOTs, are all responses that, while worthwhile, underestimate how companies need to respond to an ageing workforce over the next twenty years.
It has become a common trope that ageism is the last acceptable form of prejudice. People say things about our age they would never say about our gender or race. Pandemic aside, the last ten years have seen a steady growth in older workers, but this has resulted in more ageism, not less. Why? The increasing digitalisation of the workplace lays bare the ever-widening gap between digital and analogue-grown employees, and this has certainly been exacerbated in the age of hybrid working. Zoom may have turned us into equal-sized squares on a screen but it also exposed the tech-savvy from the Luddites. The phrase of 2020, "You're on mute!" was quite often the young shouting to the more experienced.
But there's also a prevailing boardroom perception that the ways of yesterday cannot solve the business challenges of tomorrow. Strikingly, PWC’s global CEO report in 2023 found that 40% of CEOs believed their businesses would not be economically viable in ten years because of unprecedented disruption from technology, geopolitics, labour market forces, and even climate change. The sense of instability is palpable, as is a need to be thinking disruptively (which rightly or wrong is synonymous with youth). Perhaps the business obsession with youth is just pragmatic; as if young people today are a good insurance policy against the disruption of tomorrow. But how many CEOs look at their over-forties employees and think it’s the future of their business? In demographic terms alone, they absolutely are and employers need to recognise this. These employees could be around for the next thirty years….
The culture wars are playing a part here, too, creating a clear dissonance in values between the generations. Many older men, in particular, feel professionally silent, unsure of acceptable workplace etiquette. Workplace wellbeing programmes are better versed in dealing with burnout than high blood pressure. Even the mantra of DEI to ‘bring your whole self to work’ is felt by many to be conditioned by youth priorities. As one man in his forties confided in me, "If I brought even 10% of my whole self to work they'd fire me." Businesses can’t afford to ignore the fact that in a changing cultural landscape, many experienced workers feel invisible, underinvested and misunderstood. This is because most of those in senior leadership positions are often made up of those who will have reached a level of financial and career stability to enable an early exit, potentially in their mid-late fifties. Many of them just aren't considering a working environment beyond that age.
Retirement is also being disrupted; less than 20% of UK Gen X’ers expect a hard retirement. Do our employers understand that? But that doesn’t mean they will want to simply continue working; people are looking to downsize their careers like they downsize their homes. They want greater autonomy and more time. That is now, but it will look very different in twenty years’ time when many workers won’t be able to afford to make that choice. Businesses would do well to look to their millennials, who do not have the same amount of savings or property wealth to retire as early as previous generations; and who need support now with AI skills, career development, even physical health and caring responsibilities.
The onus will also be on individual employees, too, who will not only have to work longer but arguably will be less able to ‘ride it out until retirement’ as has been the case for previous generations - the security is simply not there. Unless you’ve had a stellar rise, there are very few that have reached the type of financial and professional security that once typified your average corporate male employee. That means staying agile, self-learning and having financial flexibility to enable your partner to do the same in a dual-income household.
The good news is that some are suggesting that AI will actually benefit more experienced employees. As AI relies on less digital skills, what is needed to operate it is more human critical thinking to work in alliance with rather than in subservience to algorithms. In a digital age, human skills are reaching a premium too; stuff that older workers tend to be better at.
As tech disrupts the once-fixed assumption of age determining your place in the workforce, the future is one where age is more fluid than ever. This is one of the reasons why I now run courses for Gen Z’ers helping them empathise with and work alongside their more experienced colleagues, of all generations, because that empathy has to happen both ways and that is predominately how their career and network will grow. Age diversity is vital for future-proofing a business, but so too is supporting employees at all ages and stages of life. After all, the one thing that unites us is that we are all young once and we all grow old eventually.
Thanks for reading,
See you next week
Eliza