Episode 199: Age and Possibility
/Show transcript:
Welcome to The Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace, and success. I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte.
This time…different perspectives on what it means to be an older woman at work….
“As I’m now coming back into the workplace as a more senior-looking person I am seen as either, well, I must be past it, or ‘she’s not the one who needs to go on the leadership programs, we’ll just keep her where she is.”
“It’s time to start letting our hair go grey. I think it’s going to be one of the militant struggles of the next decade is to get women in power with enough confidence and courage to do it, and then just dare their workplaces to let ‘em go. We greatly need more role models of what positive aging looks like.’”
Age and possibility. Coming up on The Broad Experience.
This topic feels quite pertinent to me because I started The Broad Experience at 41 - I was one of the oldest by many years on the entrepreneurial journalism program where I launched the podcast. I’m now 52 and wrapping up the show after more than a decade. And of course, I’m thinking about what comes next - and how easy - or not - it’ll be to land work in a world that worships youth. I am hopeful but I’m not going to pretend that I’m not a bit worried as well. Ageism and sexism are often described as the double whammy that hits women later in life.
For Anthea Ogilvie, the negatives that can come with being an older woman at work came as a shock. She lives in Auckland, New Zealand. She’s in her fifties and she works as a facilitator at an infrastructure corporation - helping to support people coming into the company who are coming off unemployment or lost their jobs because of Covid. She’s not at the level or salary range she wants to be though - in fact she’s on half the salary she was on in her previous job in the world of sustainable business. But that was a while ago.
She came back to the workforce fairly recently after a long break.
Anthea and I spoke on Zoom across many time zones.
“I was not intending to be away for 12 years but that’s what it was in the end. I for various reasons decided to stay home with my daughter until school, and then she wasn’t quite ready for school so we ended up home schooling for a few years…and it wasn’t until she was ten that she went to school. My marriage broke up, we sold the house, everything kind of changed. It was a big moment of change.”
Suddenly Anthea was renting a home in an overheated housing market, looking for a job, and finding it WAY harder than she expected to get one.
She eventually landed her current job, which she enjoys in many ways…facilitating is something she got into as a volunteer during the years she stayed at home with her daughter. But it’s a lower level role than she’s used to. And she can’t help but think her age and sex have something to do with how she’s seen.
“When I joined an organization I’ve always had a lot of opportunities. I’m not experiencing that this time. What I’m experiencing is quite a lot of blocking, that if I have initiatives or ideas or strategic value that’s not kind of encouraged, because I guess I’m in a role where I’m part of the workforce, you know, they need me to deliver the work. And I’m learning quite a lot about that and I’m enjoying it, but it’s not really sustainable to me on this income because it doesn’t cover my costs. So I’m sort of eating away at my own capital with the view that this is the first step towards establishing a career as a facilitator.”
Anthea went on to say something about her past that I’ve heard from several listeners over the years, women in their twenties and thirties - that they are seen as too *young* to be in the role they’re in, or too young to get the role they want.
“I felt very much unseen for who I was as a young woman…and often overlooked for being too young and I looked quite young for my age when I was younger. And I think I spent a long time in my career feeling that I was seen as not ready yet…whereas the men would come in much, much younger and be seen as needing a step up to get going…and then as I’m now coming back into the workplace as a more senior-looking person I am seen as either, well, I must be past it, or ‘she’s not the one who needs to go on the leadership programs, we’ll just keep her where she is because she’s performing a good service there.’ And I think it’s just a kind of overlooking without conscious intent.”
As often with these things, the ageism can feel amorphous, something she can’t quite pin down. It’s in the way people respond to her. She says as she’s got into her fifties…
“I’ve started to notice people will expect different things of me, like I’ve always been an edgy kind of person, but people tend to see me more as quite motherly, that I’ll be interested in their concerns, that I’ve got time and energy to listen…that I will be a good listener for example. Those type of things suddenly are things I experience that I never experienced before.”
That said, there are some things she’s into at this new stage of her working life…and one of them is mentoring. She says no matter what your role is, as an older worker you can always provide support to people in different ways, and she is happy to do that.
Still, she is very aware that she’s effectively starting all over again - career wise, financially - at a time of life when she’d like to feel secure.
“I guess I really want people to know that it’s not you. We get told that it’s us. And that is the point of feminism for me is women coming together and sharing their experience and going, well this is happening to me too, yeah, this is happening to me too. And I’ve heard enough stories of women in their fifties feeling they’re ashamed that they’re not successful, that they haven’t been able to hold onto the family home or their high level occupation because they’ve made choices around - not that they’ve made choices but that’s what they feel, they feel ashamed.
And I think it’s…it’s an area of discrimination that’s clearly shown by the poorer outcomes for women in retirement. And I just want people to know that it is really hard, [laughs] it’s really hard to get a career back, and life doesn’t suddenly go easily. People continue to have things happen. Divorces happen, bad health can happen, mental illness, covid, pandemics! Things still happen to us, we don’t just reach this plateau of sort of middle aged comfort. There are plenty of people that are re-starting life in their fifties and older so I want them not to give up because I don’t feel I have a choice to not give up. I still want to have a rewarding career and contribute my skills.”
Something Anthea says she’s working toward every day.
Anthea is part of a growing number of women workers in their fifties and above. What my next guest calls the old demographic pyramid - with lots of younger workers at the bottom, fewer older ones at the top - is changing. But as she points out, the world is only slowing catching up with this new, untraditional reality.
Avivah Wittenberg-Cox is no stranger to The Broad Experience. She’s appeared on the show a bunch of times over the years. For the past few decades her focus has been on bringing gender balance to organizations. Lately, that focus has broadened to include age.
She says there are advantages for employers who wake up and embrace the reality of an older workforce, which includes more women than ever before - rather than fear it.
Avivah is 61, a Canadian based in the UK after years of living in France. She is just finishing off a leadership course at Harvard designed for those transitioning after a full career…to a new phase of working life.
AM-T: You say that the third quarter of women's lives can actually be incredibly fruitful career-wise. How so? What do you mean?
“Well, some of our younger listeners might not like this, but I actually think that adulthood for women starts at 50. So I think these are the best, not only career years, but life years, where I think women come into their own. I think this is not only for women, by the way. I think it's also very true for men who are interested in growing and evolving throughout what is now increasingly longer lives. But I always say that women get sublimated in our very male dominated societies around the age of, I don't know, it differs a little bit, but somewhere between six and 10 we get very disappeared, I think, by a culture that prefers other characteristics. And I don't think many women resurface for a long, long time. It takes a number of events during a number of decades, and then you generally see them popping back up again into their original selves, who they really wanted to be, what they were really like, the kind of dreams they might have really had, the personalities and spunk and innovations they held within. And I think you begin to hear a lot of that emerge at 50. So I'm with Michelle Obama, I think the fifties is all about becoming who we really were. But this is an old idea, right? Carl Jung said, ‘The sign of a good life is to become who we really are.’ And I think we start that phase in what I call the third quarter or around 50.”
AM-T: “You are an optimist and I love that about you. I always get new ideas from our conversations, but some of my listeners would kill me if I didn't mention what they would say is ageism which they've experienced. I mean, you know, I've heard from people who are in their thirties and work in tech, and of course they're considered old ladies at 35. But you are sometimes passed over for opportunities, promotions, seen as less than when perhaps you do reach your fifties or even younger. I mean, how can you ‘become’ if the place that employs you doesn't see you that way?”
“So it's not that I don't believe that ageism is rife. I absolutely think that both ageism and sexism are all about in the world. I've spent my career fighting the first I'll spend the rest of my career fighting the second, the issue is just, I don't necessarily see that when we bring the conversation to the table, that is the best way to frame the conversation. Of course, we're ageist and sexist because we're in a whole new world. We've never seen a world where women are educated and empowered as we have in just the last - remember how short this is Ashley, everybody keeps forgetting how fast this particular massive human revolution happened. And it's really less than a hundred years, which in human history is the blink of an eye, right? So we've never seen women as educated and powerful and rising as they currently are.
And then the same thing is true for age. I mean, this is new again, we have never in all of human history experience societies where there are as many old as young because the pyramid is, the demographic pyramid is shifting. We have fewer young people than we've ever seen before and more old people than we've ever seen before. Which means the generations are kind of balanced in a way that's entirely new. And our old ideas of old age are obsolete. But it will take quite some time to get used to this shift. And, you know, after our experience of watching the gender dialogue over these decades, it's a work of generations. It's not gonna happen overnight and it's not gonna happen in the next two years. It's gonna be a long haul effort from a lot of us to shift perceptions and educate and build awareness. And I just find that sometimes running in screaming about ‘isms’ is a good way of alienating the people you are trying to educate.”
She says ageism will eventually be as unacceptable as sexism and racism are now, but as she says, there’s going to be plenty of work to do to get there, something she knows first hand from her clients.
“I work with a lot of executive teams, they're not looking at this. God knows there are enough issues that they are looking at. And so we don't actually have to yell about ageism to raise awareness about the consequences of not having a longevity strategy in a company.”
A longevity strategy - an idea I had never heard before and something we’ll talk more about in a few minutes.
In the meantime though, most organizations do still seem to operate on the old model which very much fits all of us into ages and stages. And as I mentioned earlier, ageism works both ways. You may be young and feel boxed in because a manager has told you you’re too young to ascend to a particular role…or perhaps you’re incurring resentment as a young boss of older workers. These things reflect the fact that we’re often seen by employers as being in fixed places at fixed times in our lives.
But at least if you’re young, you’re perceived as having more road ahead, more turns to take. For people on the older side…
“Companies are still seeing fifties and especially sixties, which is kind of in many countries the legal retirement age, as a time of deceleration and imminent irrelevance and kind of want to nudge you out and get some younger, fresher, you know, all the stereotypes around old people as not creative and a little slower and a little more entrenched. And this is part of the ageist assumptions that we make.”
Some of which are held up by data. But Avivah says a lot of that data on older workers is from the past - and today’s older people often don’t resemble yesterday’s.
“I was in a workshop last week, there were several 80-year-old women who I really was, you know, and I'm suffering from the same ageism as as everybody else, right? They just knocked my socks off. They were unbelievable: smart, feisty, super creative, very innovative in their way of thinking. And I thought, wow, I mean this generation of ‘old’ people's gonna rebrand the category and help companies adjust, but we've got millennia of history where basically we've been looking at old people as done, finished, has beens, all of those ideas. It's gonna take a lot of leaning in from individuals to prove that's not true.”
AM-T: “You mentioning those women that you've been admiring lately does bring me to this topic. I mean, I can't talk about this without talking about the fact that women are judged on their looks a lot more than men are. And I think, you know, we are considered to look good, ‘ for our age’ - I'm doing air quotes here - if we remain sort of fairly slim and youthful looking. And I want to talk about, for a minute at least about gray hair and and appearance, because it would be remiss of me not to raise it.”
“Yes and I think - you know, we all have a lot of work to do, I think…What I find very interesting is it becomes a competitive advantage for individuals to not have been overly beautiful in their youth. I dunno about you, but I was not particularly attractive when I was young, or I certainly didn't feel that way. And so I never relied on that pillar. Women who were beautiful, I think suffer more of a loss at this time of life because it worked for them, right? And so I think it's a question of building other resources and other pillars to your perceived value to yourself and to others. And I think, we're getting a growing number of role models on the global stage who show just how extraordinarily impressive older women can be, wrinkles, gray hair and all. And I think, you know, the task we all have ahead of us is stop dyeing our hair…and that's one of the joys of being older. You know, there are different ways of being older. One, you hate it and you see it as a time of loss and elimination. The other is you love it because you don't care anymore what everybody thinks. And you have your agenda and you're gonna do it come hell or high water.”
But maybe ‘just doing it’ is easier for some women than others. I brought up the recent story out of Canada of well known TV news anchor Lisa LaFlamme. She was let go from her highly visible job at CTV earlier this year at the age of 58. During Covid she had let her hair turn its natural gray…and went on the air with - gasp - a glamorous head of grey hair. She was let go this past summer amid reports that her male boss had criticized the hair decision. Her firing blew up into a BIG news story. She’d worked at the company for over 30 years.
I asked Avivah about this.
“There were a lot of debates if you dug into the story, whether it was really her gray hair or whether it was a whole combination of factors. And I think it's probably as ever a whole combination. It wasn't really only because she went gray. Some somebody was in disagreement with her. I think there was a power struggle at the top. Um, the fact that some guy didn't think it was a good idea for her to go gray was probably a cumulative reaction to a number of her other ideas, her high pay, the usual complaints we have about old people, right? They're expensive, they're feisty, they know their minds, they dominate. She was very powerful. She had huge results and performance metrics. She was one of the most watched news anchors in Canada. And I think it was really an interesting case study of how extraordinarily willfully blind an organization and its younger male leaders could be to think they could just fire her in such a completely undignified way and think that that what? wouldn't be noticed, wouldn't create a fuss, would, doesn't matter ‘cause she's an old lady with gray hair? And for all the anchors out there and all the professional women, it's time to start letting our hair go gray. I think it's going to be one of the militant struggles of the next decade is to get women in power with enough confidence and courage to do it. And then just dare their workplaces to let 'em go even if they're on screen and visible. Cuz actually that's what we need, right? We greatly need more role models of what positive aging looks like.”
And I should say that Avivah is walking the walk. She is going gradually, and she says proudly, grey.
Now back to that concept Avivah mentioned earlier - a longevity strategy. She says all companies need one. As she put it in a recent Forbes piece, “age will be to the 21st century what gender was to the 20th century – a key global talent and market shift.”
AM-T: “I have plenty of people listening to this who are influential within their organizations. So what, if they haven't begun to think about the opportunity for longevity, what should they be thinking about? What are the things that all types of organizations can do?”
“Well, first thing is to evaluate the current situation that they are in, in both an internal issue - what does their talent look like and who's running the place? - and what percentage of their employees and managers and leaders are within five or 10 years of retirement? That's always an interesting metric to get an idea of just how much of your knowledge may be walking out the door without you having prepared for it and done all the strategies for knowledge transfers and succession planning. And two is to look at what kind of market are you serving and what proportions of your current or potential customers, buyers and decision makers, influencers, stakeholders of all kinds are of what generation, and what might their expectations be and what opportunities for new products, new services might there be if you have a better understanding of the massive growth of the over 50 market. It's huge.”
And of course it’s not just companies that’ll need a longevity strategy. It’s people. As you know I’m giving up the show soon and I’ve certainly begun to plot my next stage. Avivah says the trouble is most of us don’t start thinking about our next phases until we’re close to beginning them. She thinks of our lives as being in quarters and says the time to plan for the third quarter - the years between 50 and 75 - is when you’re still in your second quarter.
So if you’re in your forties and think you might want to start a business ten years from now - or make another kind of switch - start planning for that transition now.
“Most of the people I talk to start thinking about this in their late fifties or early sixties as they're kind of preparing for retirement. You can do that, but it's tricky, right? It's a little harder to be doing and preparing and pivoting at that age than if you're a decade younger and you start preparing that way just because you have a much longer runway. And it depends on the size of the pivot. And if you wanna continue in your own organization, the issue is just always the same, right? Delivering value, staying up to date, being trained and up-skilled and refreshed in whatever is gonna be the new challenges of organizations. And recognizing that usually what got you here isn't gonna get you through the next phase. And being very attuned to the shift in the kind of work you want to do and the kind of value you bring. You may not be, you know, what we were when we're young, which can be fast and super hard working and you know, physically leaning into very hard physical jobs. But we can be conveners, transfers of knowledge, collaborators, the grownup in the room, the emotional intelligence that a lot of places need. There are all kinds of different skills that we have to be able to evaluate in ourselves, build, nurture, and then sell to employers if we wanna work with them.”
AM-T: “Should we be paying for certain upskilling ourselves or should we be relying on our organizations to do that for us?”
“Well, listen, if they're not gonna pay for it, the choice becomes pretty stark. Absolutely. You have to keep learning and growing and networking, I'd say. So those are the three big things you wanna be keeping up. Keep changing - just personally for yourself, right? If you want to grow old well, you have to stay personally fit emotionally and physically. And that almost requires growth. Growth in your muscles. You have to keep up your muscle. I mean I've just been learning all about all the muscles that we lose as of age 60 at this kind of dramatically accelerating speed. So everybody, well people are beginning to really understand that we have to stay fit if we want to age well, I think the exact same true same thing is true for your career and your brain.
You gotta nourish it, build those muscles, grow them, learn new things, meet new people, get new challenges, stretch into stuff, have some fun, get challenged. And that doesn't have to be climbing Kilimanjaro, or learning a new language or something wildly dramatic, which is often what we see in the media, but it is about just keep developing brain cells and new things that you wanna learn. And I think a lot of that is new people, to not stay too anchored in the same networks, but to keep adding to them over time and eventually to shed some as well, right? Cause you can't manage everything…
AM-T: “Right.”
“You tend to have more time as you age, right? I mean, and for a lot of people listening to us who may still be in the middle, overwhelmed by multiple caring responsibilities and children and elders, there comes a time, let me tell you, where you aren't taking care of that many people. They've moved on and you have more time. And then it's a question of how do you use that time.”
Avivah writes about a lot of these issues around work and aging for Forbes - I will link you to some of her pieces under this episode at The Broad Experience.com. And I’ll point you to some of the other episodes I’ve done with her in the past.
And if this topic is something you’ve been thinking about lately I have done at least two other shows on this in the past - one specifically focused on the ageism that women encounter, that’s episode 146, it’s called Ageism, or Prejudice Against Our Future Selves…but it also features someone who found that starting a new career when she had some wrinkles worked quite well for her.
That’s The Broad Experience for this time. There are a couple more shows coming up before this series comes to an end. I hope you’ll be listening.
I’m Ashley Milne-Tyte. See you next time.