Ageism was first defined only in 1969 as “prejudice by one age group against another age group”. The initial examples were of the middle-aged being negatively biased. They were biased against both the old and the young, who were both perceived as “dependent”. Later ageism was refined as discrimination by young people against the “old”. It was argued that ageism is comparable to discrimination based on sex, social class, religion and race. Other researchers have gone even further arguing that “the aged” should be treated as a minority and protected.

Workforce Discrimination

Over the last twenty to thirty years a lot of the focus within “ageism” has been on employment. For the older generation that has meant a focus on maintaining employment from 55 to 65. The current legislative and policy initiatives are having an impact on workplace ageism. The removal of the compulsory retirement age in many countries has helped reset expectations. So too has the disappearance of “early retirement schemes”. With them went the sense of retirement entitlement that comes with age. The biggest pressure will however come from the raw demographics.

Working age populations around the world are declining. To maintain the economy countries will need to ensure that more and more people over 65 are working. The result is that according to the EU “ninety eight percent of the increase in the overall labour supply since 2000 has come from those people between fifty five and seventy four.”

February 2022

There have been many theories that try to explain the occurrence of age discrimination. The alternative theories come from many different disciplines. They come from studies of the individual, the organization, the social network or even culture and society.

At the individual level, the most prominent explanation, is the “Terror Management Theory”. Older adults serve as constant reminders of our own mortality and vulnerability. They remind us of the process of ageing. They remind us of the 4 D’s of the Fourth Age: dependency, disease, disability, and depression. They threaten our self-esteem. They remind us that when we get old, we will have much less impact. The result is that we tend to define older people as a homogenous and inferior group to which we do not (yet) belong. According to this theory, younger adults will tend to avoid older people. People, even medical staff, want to distance themselves from a reminder of their own mortality.

“Social Identity Theory” has also been used to explain age discrimination. This general theory is based on the idea that people want to have a positive self- identity. We achieve this by becoming a part of a group which we then demonstrate to be better than all other groups. This can be a football supporters club or a a work group. It can be a racial group, a gang or even a nation. When it comes to ageism, young groups can make themselves feel superior by disparaging the middle and old aged. Young and middle-aged groups can disparage the old. Even the Third Age can feel superior by looking down on the Fourth Agers. Discrimination is therefore a naturally occurring phenomenon.

July 2021

Ageism can happen in the Head Office of firms. It can also happen in the middle of the restaurant, bar or call centre. At head office new product development teams and advertising groups are young. They focus on the youth market. Only recently has advertising started to even show older people. The offerings they design are not designed for the healthy ageing.

In the field there are teams who interact with customers on a day-to-day basis. It is they that turn the lights down in the middle of the evening. They may think in improves the ambiance. They can still read the menu, but the over 65's cannot. It is they that turn the background music up because they cannot hear it above the noise of the restaurant! Raising the noise level still further. Logically at that point they should be turning it down or off. It is they that show their obvious contempt for the older customer who cannot hear the daily specials because of the same background noise. It is they that that show impatience with people who take too long to answer questions on the phone.

July 2021

Our current stereotypes of what it means to be old are very recent. We have invented the working week, the weekend , holidays and even teenagers. They have all been constructed in the last hundred years. Coughlin in his book the Longevity Economy describes the emergence of the forces that shaped the stereotype. Driving the myth were two ideas. The first idea being that employment was a “zero sum” game – old people working took jobs from the young. The second idea was an efficiency argument that emerged in the first half of the twentieth century. This claimed that older people were less efficient workers. This might have been true in the case of agriculture and manufacturing labour. These sectors dominated the economy at that time, but this idea is less relevant in today’s service dominated world.

The emergence of public and private pension plans made possible the concept of “retirement”. It also enabled managers to also follow the efficiency and zero-sum arguments and get rid of the older employee with a clear conscience. In some countries in the world, governments even encouraged workers to take “early retirement”. All this encouraged the idea that retiree’s role in the economy was no longer to work productively but to merely consume. The result is the idea embedded, in the culture of Western society at least, that retirement is leisure. “Retired” people are not expected to work and indeed not encouraged to work through the tax system. They have a right to be supported by society.

February 2022

A recent book by an eminent Harvard professor suggests that humans did not evolve to retire. According to David Lieberman, an evolutionary biologist and anthropologist, there is a big question in human life expectancy. For almost every other species, evolution loses interest once the individual passes reproductive age. Chimpanzees, for example, seldom survive past the age of 50, soon after they have stopped being able to reproduce. In evolutionary terms they are obsolete and redundant. Why then did evolution decree that humans could live much longer?

The answer lies in the capacity of the human species to sustain a higher birth rate. This gave them an evolutionary competitive advantage versus other primates. A Chimpanzee mother needs to forage two thousand calories per day to maintain their own wellbeing and to feed their child. They can raise a single infant at a time. They do not fall pregnant again until that child is self-sufficient.

Archaeological research on early human hunter gatherers shows a typical mother with a six-month infant, a four-year-old child, and an eight-year-old juvenile. The only way that the mother could feed her family is with the support of the older members of the community. This is also shown in the few hunter gatherer societies that remain today. The grandparents are active foragers for roots and berries to the end of their lives, providing food for their “grandchildren”.

They never stop “working”. Lieberman argues that this is the reason they live so long. In these societies elderly humans are anything but “biologically obsolete” . He argues that because elderly humans are needed, nature has provided them with the ability to maintain their bodies. Not surprisingly hard work keeps the elderly hunter gatherer fit and allows them to live longer. The activity in which they engage stimulates recovery mechanisms in the body that also slow ageing. Retirement is not an evolutionary concept.

The latest population forecasts for China show a decline. The population has peaked in the last three years. Some forecasts show a precipitous decline. By 2100 the total population is forecast to decline by half. So too will the working population between twenty and sixty four. The numbers will return to a level last seen in the nineteen fifties.

The same is happening all over the developed world. How can economic growth be maintained without a workforce? Magnus in his book on the macroeconomics of ageing, argues that there are two places that governments can look. (This of course assumes that attempts to increase fertility fail). Increasing workforce participation in the existing population and immigration.

Let’s look first at immigration. To have a real impact on the declines in the working population the level of immigration will have to rise. According to Magnus, UK and Danish immigration would have to double. For the other Western European countries immigration would have to increase between five and twelve times. Socially and politically these levels of immigration are not viable. For example, Spain would have to see immigrants at forty percent of the population, so severe is the drop in birthrate.

Increasing labour participation implies getting more of the population into work. Prior to 2000 there was plenty of scope. Only between 70% and 80% percent of men between fifteen and sixty four worked. The rates for women are much more variable. They range from seventy three percent in the USA and fifty eight percent in the EU15.

The European Central Bank estimates that the effective male retirement age for the EU was as low as sixty one in 2000. For women between 1980 and 2000 it fell to just under sixty. There was a lot of unused labour capacity.

The phrase “the enemy within” was coined only at the start of this century. It refers to the impact of stereotypes of ageing on the way that the old view themselves. It highlights the dangers of people accepting the wrong stereotype of old age . It then becomes self-fulling.

Why would we adopt a stereotype to live our life by? To use a theatrical analogy. We play the part of a “young person” and later an “old person”. We need scripts. If we are not careful, we absorb the stereotypes of being old that have existed around us all our lives. This happens without conscious thought. We become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Older adults face a poor stereotype. They are seen as being incompetent, cognitively inferior, forgetful, and physically weak. These types of stereotypes can influence their performance a wide range of tasks.

Within a single generation, the period between “retirement” and becoming incapable of consuming has extended from a handful of years to up to two decades. The model of what it means to be in that age group is therefore not fully formed. We revert instead to the model of being old that they learnt from our parents. This model is twenty to thirty years out of date for many of us.

We do take some of our own stereotype from advertising and the media. Over many years’ researchers have looked at how different groups are portrayed. They have analysed print, media such as TV and film and advertising. It is now possible to look across many studies at how older people are depicted. It is improving.

Thirty years ago, the depiction of older people was very negative. They were described in their dotage. They were shown suffering the four D’s, dependency, disease, disability, and depression. On top of that the roles they portrayed were subservient. If they worked, it was a menial task.

Successive content analyses show improvement. The portrayal of older people starts to be as healthy, active individuals leading much more normal lives. Hopefully, this has started to provide a better stereotype for the older consumer. Unfortunately, what has not change was the roles played by these “characters”. They are seldom the lead in any sense and play a subservient role to a younger “actor”.

Firms seldom think about the impact of their media campaigns beyond their ability to generate sales. They run the risk of being accused of ageism if their “stereotype is out of date.

July 2021

As the over 65’s continue to consume then ageism may find a new focus. The everyday discomforts of consuming may become more and more annoying to a larger and “young at heart” group. They may forget to be satisfied and start to agitate. Consuming is part of being independent. If we cannot consume we may feel older. Feeling older is not good for our life expectancy.

Acts of ageism within any business will negatively affect the older consumer. If older people are reminded what the negative stereotype says, it affects them physically and mentally. For example researchers have shown that they score less well on memory and cognitive tests. That reminder can be direct or indirect.

In a typical experiment researchers set up two different settings to test the memory of older respondents. One setting sent positive age stereotypes. The surroundings were younger adults on a college campus . The introduction did not signal the results were for an age assessment. The other setting was a geriatric hospital. The participants were informed that the study was about the decline in memory with age. The “younger” the setting the better the older respondents did on the tests.

Ageists acts have been shown to reduce “felt” or “ cognitive” age. This is the age we feel inside that has nothing to do with our chronological age. It is always less than our birth certificate age. It has been shown to be a better predictor of the onset of illness and indeed death. Reducing someone’s felt age is life threatening.

There is as a disconnect. Few people or institutions would ever say that they were ageist, sexists, racist etc. In fact they would protest the opposite. Despite that, there is ample evidence that their behaviour does not match what they say. In a simple study of discrimination in hiring, researchers prepared two identical resumes. One was given a male name the other a female name. Faculty members in a science department were asked to select a manager to run one of their laboratories. Systematically they chose the “male” candidate. They even suggested a higher salary than the “female”. The startling thing was that these highly educated female and male faculty members displayed identical biases.

Ageism on Autopilot.

Attitudes apparently can by split in the same way as decisions. Psychologists suggest that:

 Explicit Attitudes are “thoughts and feelings about social groups that are relatively more controlled, deliberate and reflective, conscious personal values”.

Implicit Attitudes are “relatively automatic, uncontrolled and inaccessible to introspection”. Definitions mirroring the ideas of Kahneman on decision making in his book on "thinking Fast and Thinking Slow".

Researchers suggest that the IAT’s tap in to the underlying “culture” of an area. At the individual level there is often little association between explicit and implicit attitudes

They have gone further and developed a way of measuring those implicit biases. The Implicit Attitude Test (IAT) is available to test many different discriminatory biases. I recently took the Ageist version. (https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/takeatest.html).

The task appears simple at first sight. There are pictures of old and young people. There are lists of positive and negative words (for example “evil”,” laughing”). All you have to do is to assign the faces and the words to one of two categories as they are presented to you as quickly as you can. . The categories are the problem. They are defined as a combination of young or old and good or bad. All permutations are used. Assigning an old face to choice between old/good or young/ bad may be easy. When the category is old/ bad and young/ good it is more difficult. The computerized test measures how long it takes you to assign different words or faces. It assumes that the faster you can complete a task the easier it is for you. This in turn means a closer association in your mind between old and good or young and good etc.

May 2022

The Implicit Project at Harvard (implicit.harvard.edu) has now collect over 4.4 m results. Nearly a million of them for the Ageist test. If you do the test it will be added to the total. The results seem to have predictive validity. Researchers have aggregated it into geographic groups by state or county in the USA. They have then be able to relate the IAT score to examples of discrimination. There have been strong relationships between “regional scores” and discriminatory acts. They have predicted such things as gender gaps in maths tests and sexism. Racism has been related to the level of lethal use force used by the local police.

Can these communal implicit attitudes change? It seems that short run “shocks” can change the scores but that they then drift back to the norm. The naming of COVID as a “Chinese Flu” created anti-Asian sentiment. This showed up in the Implicit Database. After the initial “explosion” of sentiment the results drifted back to where they had been.

There is now enough data over a ten year period to look for long run trends. In the past decade “anti-gay”; “anti-black” and “anti-dark skin” sentiments have all become less extreme. Anti-gay bias has decreased by 33% over the period. If the trend continues this implicit anti-gay attitude will reach “neutrality” between 2025 and 2045. The changes are in all parts of the population. The results are consistent across men and women. Gay and non-gay, young and old and liberals and conservatives have all moved. The young liberal group has shown the largest tendency to move.

"Race" and "Skin Tone" implicit discrimination have moved towards neutrality by 17% and 15% respectively. This has accelerated since 2012/13.

Negativity towards one group has been increasing. The pro thin/ anti fat group has been growing. This in particularly the case between 2004 and 2010. It stands in opposition the explicit attitudes and advertising campaigns celebrating larger bodies.

The bad news is that negativity towards the elderly has shifted hardly at all in the last ten years. Implicit Ageism has declined by only 5% in that period. This may be due to the underlying causes. The social identity theory explains all forms of discrimination. We all need to belong to a group and to believe that our group is superior to all others. That could even be a source of implicit attitudes although there are many other theories. Ageism is more deeply rooted. We will all grow old and die. The Terror Management Theory suggests that old people remind us too much of our futures. We need to avoid them and the easiest way to do that is to denigrate them.

The researchers predict that it will take a long time for ageism to fade. If the current trends continue it will be 100 years before ageism implicit attitudes reach “neutrality”.

May 2022

Recently researchers have used big data study ageism from 1800. Their data base is broad but only covers America. The “Corpus of Historical American English” is a data base of 100,000 fiction and non-fiction books but also contains magazines and periodicals. It is only 400m words and covers the period 1810-2009!

They first needed to create a set of "target words" to cover "the aged". Three words were common across all decades: “aged”; “elderly” and “old people”. This was the core target group. There were another eleven words that were also used. For example “senior citizen” only appeared in 1949. Having created these two groups they looked for “qualifiers”. Were the “old” described in a positive way, for example “wise” or negatively for example “decrepit”. They rated all those qualifiers on a scale of how positive and negative they were.

Their results raise an interesting set of issues. Attitudes towards the old decline in a straight line from 1810. From a positive score in 1810 they decline to neutrality around 1890. They then continue to get more and more negative. The results are the same whether using the core three words as the target or the broader 11 words. Perhaps Samuel Johnson was only an outlier in a world which was generally more positive.

Why has Ageism Grown

The researchers looked at two different explanations using their data. They included in their analysis the number of people over 65 in each decade. Ageism can be related to dependency. The more old people, the more the feeling of a large group in need of “support”. Their statistical analysis suggests that the growth in ageism can be partly explained by the number of old people. Since the US population over 65 has grown by a third in the past decade, then ageism might be expected to have risen.

Their second theory was that ageism has been driven by the “medicalization” of ageing. Medical science has increased longevity over the period. The price is that ageing has stopped being a natural part of life. Instead it has been broken down by medical specialists. It has become a series of diseases in need of treatment. That focus has paid off. It has also generated an industry focused on the old and “selling” solutions to them.

They coded the words used in their analysis as medical or non-medical. Over time, but particularly since the turn of the last century, ageing has become more and more a disease. There is a association between ageism and this medicalization. Unfortunately this is confound by the passing of time.

The underlying psychology of ageism may have changed in the past two hundred years. The “Terror Theory” hinges on our fear of dying. To avoid being reminded of the inevitability of death we avoid the old. To do so with a clear conscience, we dehumanize them. In 1810 people were probably just as afraid of dying. However they might not have needed older people to remind them. Death of children was hugely higher. Many more women died in childbirth. Industrial accidents were more common. Death was much more a part of everyday life. Today we live in a world were death is much less visible. The sight of old people may have become a much more salient reminder.

The Social Identity theory of ageism suggests we want our age group to be superior. We look down on people older than ourselves. If there were many fewer older people in Society would we have bothered? In the UK in 1900 less than 5% of people were over 65. In 1800 it would have been much lower. Would we have thought of ourselves in age groups or as part of some other group.

The industrial revolution was arriving across this period of increasing ageism. The idea that old people were less effective workers becomes more important as we move from farms to factories. They idea that old people take jobs from the young probably makes more sense at that time. Certainly there were far more 70 year olds in the workforce in 1810. There are many explanations.

July 2022

This is the title of an article this month in Science Advances. It provides another perspective on to the barriers to solving ageism.

In any case of discrimination there is an advantaged group and a disadvantaged group. Sexism , racism or discrimination against the disabled all have an advantaged group. In a series of nine experiments the researchers focused on these advantaged groups. They measured their attitudes towards enhancing equality. It seems that they will protect their relative advantage, even if it is to their detriment.

The researchers looked at “policies” designed to reduce inequalities across various contexts. They looked at mortgage lending, salary, hiring and even start-up funding. They looked at race, gender, criminal record and disability discrimination. The participants were all from the relevant advantaged group. They selected white versus Hispanic or black, or male not female etc. In each case participants where first given an example showing discrimination. "Historically Hispanics with the same profile as White candidates are offered smaller mortgages". They were then offered rules designed to reduce inequality. In some cases the rule was set up as a zero sum game. “Hispanics will be given more mortgages and the money will come from white groups”. In other cases a zero sum was explicitly excluded. “This will make no difference to mortgage available to you”. In some cases the rule was set up such that there would be more funds available to both groups. Even though equality would increase. “This policy will increase the availability of mortgages to everybody”.

The results are fascinating. Most of the advantaged group saw any attempts to reduce inequality as “zero sum”. Indeed attempts to reduce inequality were seen by them as discriminatory. They were thought to threaten the advantaged group. This happens even when the rule explicitly excludes a zero sum outcome. It occurs when the rule would enhance the whole “pie”. The inequality reduction was a threat for many, even though the group would be better off.

The research team went so far as to generate novel new groups. Participants believed that they would be assigned to one of two groups based on a psychological test. In fact all participants were assigned to the “Rattlers” not the “Eagles”. They were given problem solving tasks to perform. They were told that there would be individual bonuses at the end of the session.

The Rattlers were made in to the “advantaged group”. It was announced that over many weeks the Rattlers had received more bonuses. The proposal was that this should be corrected in one of two ways. In the first instance 50 extra bonuses would be go to the “Eagles” and 5 to the “Rattlers”. In that case both groups would be better off but much more equal. The second proposal was to change the bonus based on the previous weeks results. 50 bonuses would removed from the “Eagles” and 5 from the “Rattlers". Both groups would be worse off but the inequality between the groups increased. The voting between the options was 50/50. Many of the participants perceived the first option as more harmful to their position. The best predictor of their choice was their belief that “If you rise, I Fall”.

August 2022

There is one absolute certainty about the future of ageism. We are going to hear a lot more about it. When ageism was first defined by American Robert Butler in 1969, there were under twenty million Americans over the age of sixty five. Today there are close to fifty five million. By 2060 they are forecast to reach ninety five million people. There will be five times as many people passed nominal pensionable age. There will be a much larger group of people to promote ageism.

Populations around the world are plateauing and declining. Those over sixty fives will be a bigger percentage of the total. In the US today they are already nearly seventeen percent of the population. In Japan they are close to thirty percent. They are an increasing part of those numbers. Physically and mentally they are active. They have spending power. All of which will influence the “ageing stereotype”.

Pew Research found that, the average American respondent believes that “old age” begins at sixty-eight. This average masks a wide, age driven, variation. Respondents in the age bracket eighteen to twenty-nine believe that a person becomes old at sixty. Only six percent of the over sixty fives would agree, their view is that old means seventy-four.

The eighteen to twenty-nine age group are wishing away the lives of their seniors. They are assuming that infirmity begins at sixty! Younger people, especially, are applying that stereotype twenty-five years early.

Only twenty one percent of respondents aged sixty-five to seventy-four say they feel old. Even amongst the over seventy fives only thirty five percent say they feel “old”. Clearly for people of any age “old” is somewhere in the future.

The Middle Age Squeeze

Results from a survey of over twenty-six thousand people in Europe show how being old depends on how old you are. Respondents were asked at what age “one starts to be regarded as old” and “when one stops being young”. The average results were just under sixty-four and fifty years, respectively. But there were massive variations across countries and age groups. In the Netherlands “old” starts at seventy-one. In Cyprus one continues to be young until you are nearly fifty-one years old!

Like their American counterparts the young Europeans believe that old age starts at the age of sixty. The older the respondent the later the average age of being regarded as old. Unfortunately, most front of house service staff and managers in service businesses are under forty if not twenty-five. They can turn the lights up or down or make the music loud or soft. These are the ones in face-to-face contact with the Third Age customers. They are viewing those customers through the lens of a stereotype which is twenty-five years too old for them.

No matter how old we are, at least in Western culture, our stereotypes of people older than ourselves are negative. A stereotype becomes discrimination if we act upon it. If we see ageing as a loss of physical or mental ability, we may not hire an older person. In our everyday life we may not respect their opinions or even feelings.

There is ample evidence of age discrimination in the workplace, in medicine and many other institutions. Work related ageism has received the most attention. In many countries, formal retirement ages have been legally removed. Legislation now demands equal opportunity in all major HR processes. Companies must ensure older people do not face discrimination in recruitment, promotion, training etc.

Much research has also focused on ageism within the health and care systems. Surprisingly older patients can be perceived to be of less value. Symptoms are ascribed to “old age” rather than to the presenting diseases. Researchers have shown disparities in diagnostic procedures and treatments offered with age across many specialisms. Disparities in care follow the negative stereotypes. For example, research shows that doctors do not adjust dosages for older patients. They then ascribe any resulting side effects to “old age”.

Research shows ageism is also manifested in the day-to-day behaviour of health care professionals. Doctors will involve older patients less in medical decisions than younger patients. Nurses are more likely to have curt, functional conversations with older patients.