Ageism at work

Andrius Banelis for BI

Two weeks after he and his wife closed on a summer house, Kevin Berman was laid off.

That was in September last year. Berman, who’s 61, has since applied to more than 650 IT jobs.

He has decades of experience in the field. He doesn’t think his age has been an issue the handful of times he’s landed an interview.

But when Berman, who lives outside Detroit, hears nothing after applying to a role he sees as a perfect fit for his experience, he sometimes wonders whether his years are working against him. One role had a unique job title — something Berman had done earlier in his career. He didn’t get so much as a screening call.

“Those were the ones that I’m like, OK, there’s something going on,” Berman told Business Insider.

Berman is hardly alone in questioning why, with his experience, he didn’t get a shot at a job. For those who’ve been working for a while — and those just starting out — it’s not unreasonable to wonder whether age bias is undercutting their career trajectory or prospects, labor-market experts told BI.

That’s a problem partly because the workforce in the US and many other developed countries is getting older.

The Pew Research Center estimated that about one in five people 65 and older in the US were working last year. That was nearly double the portion of people that age who had a job 35 years ago.

Having people of various ages on the job together can be good for business. In 2020, the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development reported that promoting multigenerational workforces and giving older people more chances to work could boost per capita gross domestic product by 19% over the next three decades.

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Marjorie Powell, chief HR officer and senior vice president at AARP, argued that people were working longer often out of necessity, to cover things like healthcare or housing costs.

“They are also continuing to work because they want to contribute,” Powell said.

Berman’s search for a new role in IT reflects a mix of necessity and desire.

Less than three months after Berman was laid off, his wife also lost her job to corporate cutbacks. That left the couple with two mortgages and little income beyond their severance payments and unemployment, which ran out about six months ago, Berman said. Though they’re renting out one of the homes, they’re eating into their savings and investments, he added.

Berman has been trying to do some IT consulting work. To stand out from other job applicants, he has obtained certifications in artificial intelligence management and cybersecurity. Both he and his wife are considering pursuing an MBA.

Powell said rapid technological advances could exacerbate bias against older workers because being conversant in the latest thing is often seen as the preserve of the young.

“People have a tendency to think that the only people who are technology adapters are those that are in younger demographics, which is not true,” she said.

Powell said other impediments to older workers could lurk in job descriptions with phrases like “digital native” and “high energy.”

Employers often also ask job seekers when they were born and when they graduated, Powell said. She argued that with something like a degree, applicants should have to say only whether they completed it.

What Powell sees as pernicious language and requests for extraneous dates can be “red flags that there may be some age bias involved,” she said.

In other cases, older workers might be told they’re overqualified. What employers might not understand, Powell said, is that those with loads of experience aren’t always looking to keep climbing or nab ever higher pay. Instead, she said, they may be drawn to the nature of the work or the mission of an organization.

“The bottom line is either you have the qualifications to do the work or you don’t,” Powell said.

Being seen as overqualified is one of several concerns animating Don Trautman’s job search.

At 67, he’s old enough to retire, but he’s been looking for part-time work on and off since April after taking a buyout from a longtime employer.

Trautman is a certified public accountant and holds an MBA. He spent the past 18 years managing buying and warehouse operations, though he’d like to return to the accounting work he did earlier in his career.

Trautman, who lives with his wife outside Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, has removed most dates from his résumé, as some recruiters advise. Nevertheless, when he applies for jobs, he fills in the start and end dates for his roles.

“Once I start putting in that I started my last job in ’99 and I had multiple jobs before that, they’re going, ‘Oh, wait a minute,'” Trautman told BI. It would be impossible not to deduce that he’s an older worker, he said.

What’s more, Trautman said, many employers advertise that they can offer room to advance, but that’s not what he’s seeking.

“I’m not looking to become a CFO,” he said.

This year, Katerina Stroponiati founded Brilliant Minds, a venture-capital fund for founders over 50.

When Stroponiati traveled to the US from her native Greece more than a decade ago with dreams of starting a company, some of her family members asked whether she was too old to do something like that.

“I was 26,” she told BI.

Stroponiati, who’s now 41, said she saw the stealthy reach of ageism at a prior venture fund she ran in the US. The few founders over 50 she encountered tended to intimate that they were out of place, she said.

“They were always shy, and they were not as confident as those in their 20s,” Stroponiati said.

In April, she started her fund for older founders so that she could focus on an overlooked market and the ways people evolve throughout their lives.

“I’m offering an alternative to retirement, to the old model.”
Katerina Stroponiati

“All the headlines are around Gen Z trying to disrupt the 9-to-5,” Stroponiati said. “But nobody talks about the other generations. Actually, boomers and Gen X are trying to do the same thing — they’re disrupting retirement.”

The fund has received more than 600 applications. So far, she’s invested in two startups. Both are run by women over 55. One is focused on using a large language model in e-commerce, and the other involves AI infrastructure.

Stroponiati’s goal is to invest in 15 companies by 2027.

“I’m offering an alternative to retirement, to the old model,” she said.

Stroponiati argued that Greece didn’t do enough to deal with an aging population and now faces economic and social consequences. The US, she said, has a chance to respond.

“We have to think what it means to have productive older citizens,” Stroponiati said.

Michael North, an associate professor of management and organizations at New York University’s Stern School of Business, focuses on the challenges of having five — or, by some estimates, six — generations working side by side.

North told BI that one difficulty for older workers is the long-held assumption in the US that people will retire around age 65.

Government safety nets like Social Security and Medicare “assume that you’re not really supposed to be working after that certain age,” he said. But apart from recent deviations owing to factors like the pandemic, people in industrialized economies are generally living longer — and staying healthier as they do it.

North said many older workers are vibrant, skilled, and educated. “There’s a discordance there between what our policies and expectations have in place versus what older adults objectively have to offer,” he said.

For their part, North said, some younger workers and those hoping to break into the job market can become frustrated that the oldest employees won’t retire and create openings.

Essentially, younger workers sometimes see older workers as “blocking their own opportunities,” he said.

“Whether that’s fair or not, it’s actually a pretty important debate to have,” North said.

Part of the frustration for many young people, he said, is that challenges in paying for college, affording a home, and starting a family are tougher than they used to be. North added that resentments over those conditions could tee up “alarming” generational conflict.

“It doesn’t seem like a recipe for a society that is increasingly multigenerational to have these sorts of frictions and frustrations on both sides of the age spectrum,” he said.

For Trautman, who hopes to get back into accounting, returning to a fixed schedule on some days would be ideal. Now he completes his morning routine and sits down at his desk, but sometimes he doesn’t have enough to do.

“In all honesty, retirement has been a struggle,” Trautman said.

He doesn’t want to go work at Lowe’s or Home Depot, as some friends have suggested.

But “if it came down to it, I could do that,” Trautman said. “The local grocery store is good about hiring people my age.”