Am I Old Enough to Be Taken Seriously?
GK Hart/Vikki Hart/Getty Images/Getty Images
I started my career in New York City, working as an editorial assistant for one of the largest publishing conglomerates in the world. Fresh out of grad school with several years of internship experience in tow, I walked into the 52-story building with my head held high. I was to report directly to the senior vice president, an industry legend. She was poised and intelligent and I idolized her.
During my second week on the job, I received her email invitation for an in-person meeting. Heart racing, I dashed through the doors of her corner office that overlooked Broadway and West 56th. Expecting to receive my first real assignment, she looked at me and said, “Emma, I just received a package from IKEA. Would you mind assembling my new lamp? Let me know when you’re finished.”
I would love to dismiss this humiliating — yet humbling — moment as one bad thing that happened a very long time ago. But it still triggers me today: a woman approaching thirty with seven years of job experience under my belt. As one of the youngest people on my team by a decade, I’m often hesitant to assert myself in meetings or ask more seasoned colleagues for help out of fear of seeming naive. In these moments, I find myself back in the corner office, building my first boss’s IKEA lamp and trying to figure out her intentions. Was it because I seemed incompetent? Was it because my role included “assistant” in the title?
Or was it what I feared then — and still fear now — that my age makes it hard to take me seriously?
I needed to figure out if this insecurity has grounds in reality. Here’s what the research tells me: When you Google “age discrimination at work,” you’ll find article after article about bias against older employees and laws aimed at addressing this problem. In the U.S., the federal government has protections in place to prevent discrimination against workers age 40 and up. Companies can’t, for example, legally assume that someone isn’t qualified for a job because they are “too old” to understand how to use a certain technology or implement the latest innovations. That said, it’s questionable whether these protections always work. Ageism against older workers still runs rampant in some companies and industries.
At the same time, these protections don’t apply to young professionals. This is a problem. A recent study revealed that young adults are often more likely to report experiencing ageism at work than their middle-aged and older counterparts. It’s called “reverse ageism.”
On top of this, Glassdoor released a 2019 diversity and inclusion survey in the U.S., UK, France, and Germany that found younger employees (52% of ages 18-34) are more likely than older employees (39% of ages 55+) to have witnessed or experienced ageism at work.
“Ageism cuts both ways,” Professor Dominic Abrams at the University of Kent, told me. “It’s true that people often apply patronizing stereotypes to older workers and so they are often assumed to be less employable. But younger people tend to be more exposed to all forms of prejudice and discrimination than older people — racism, sexism, and ageism.”
According to my research, this is what reverse ageism can look like: More senior or experienced employees overlooking feedback from younger colleagues on projects. Seasoned employees assuming that younger colleagues can’t be trusted with important tasks. Or younger colleagues being the target of stereotypical age assumptions.
When I explore whether these examples fit into my own work experience, I’m brought back to one moment that took place before the pandemic got really bad in Boston. I was in the office, talking to a fellow 20-something-year-old coworker about an upcoming assignment. We were brainstorming ideas for a new product, when a senior employee turned to us and said, “Girls, can you please take your chatter elsewhere? It’s very distracting.”
My peer and I exchanged a glance — confused, and a little bit shocked. While our colleague may have thought he was just asking for quiet, there were assumptions embedded in his comment:
Assumption 1: That we are “girls,” not two grown women.
Assumption 2: Our discussion was “chatter,” as if we weren’t working on anything of importance.
So no, not all of it is in my head.
I understand how it might be easy for people to mistrust those who have less workplace experience than themselves, but this mistrust ultimately works against all of us and can lead to biased assumptions. When older workers doubt the competency of those younger than them, they fail us. They are not helping the next generations develop transferable skills. They’re building barriers of mistrust.