Today’s topic is Your Feelings on Ageism. Hmm. Okay. The first thing that comes to mind is anything discriminatory ending with -ism sucks. Ageism is defined as stereotyping or discriminating against individuals or groups on the basis of their age. Mostly ageism affects older workers. But…you do hear a lot of people stereotyping and complaining about Millenials, so I think the problem will get worse before it gets better.

Ageism is alive and well in many places. At my current employer, I see a lot of older people hired into positions you wouldn’t expect to see them, many in manual labor positions. If they can pass the hire physical, they can do the job and we’ll take them. In other places, I’ve seen mass layoffs used to cull the herd of older folks. Of course the powers that be said age had nothing to do with it. I didn’t believe it then and I don’t believe it now.

I fully believe in equal opportunity. I’m not much of a people person. I taught my kids we do not dislike someone because of skin color or religion or disability. There are plenty of perfectly valid reasons to dislike someone. For instance being a complete asshat.

Sadly, with the job market being what it is today, I see ageism getting much worse. Older workers are staying in the workforce longer since pensions failed to pan out, Social Security is not enough to live on and 401K’s were cashed out to pay for other things. Millenials get a bad rap for being whiny and expecting something for nothing (which is not a universal truth). Generation X (that’s me!) is squeezed in between these two groups. Some of us made it into executive positions and rode out the recession  okay. Some of us went through  the layoffs/unemployment/new hire cycle. Whenever we start to make progress up the corporate ladder, there’s another layoff, another job search, and lower pay while starting all over again at a different company. Personally, I’ve done this three times now.

What’s the solution? I don’t know. Everyone knows ageism is wrong. They preach it at every orientation I’ve been to and it’s taught every year during annual training. Older workers bring us valuable insights and experience. We can continue to learn from them. Millenials bring a fresh energy and new perspectives. We can learn a lot from them, too. This Gen X-er just wants to do her job, get a decent paycheck for it, and not have to worry about all the different types of discrimination in the workplace.