Ageism is rife in our culture, and especially the workforce, even as growing numbers of men and women want to continue working in their sixties and beyond. In this essay, I explore this theme and how I and many others are challenged by ageism—sometimes by trying to pass for younger.
I lower my voice to a whisper when I call my internist from my desk at work. I’m in an open office, three feet from the person next to me and the one behind me. It’s not that I care if they overhear me describe how I hurt when I pee and likely have a urinary tract infection. It’s my birth date I don’t want them knowing, and which I’ll have to provide to get an appointment.
I feel like the office crone. I’m a memory bank about good and bad bosses and assignments, whose advice about pay and job moves colleagues now younger than my daughter seek. But for all the counsel I dole out, I’m scrambling to keep up with tweegrams, Skype and other technology and social media they navigate so easily.
So much I do know dates me. I joined the workforce when help-wanted ads were gender-segregated into “men wanted” and “women wanted” lists, when becoming a “gal Friday”—a secretary with a college degree who was willing to fetch coffee for the boss and smile when handing him the cup—was my best chance for a job. Women, or “girls,” as even middle-aged females were called, were forbidden to wear pants to work. Nylons and heels were required every day. Dress-down Fridays didn’t exist.
It took me five years before I broke out of the secretarial pool in publishing and another four to go beyond proofreading and become a newspaper reporter. Even then, in 1979, I was the sole woman in the bureau where I worked, one of only about two dozen at a national paper that employed hundreds.
No one can accuse me of being sexist, after all the feminist marches I’ve joined, pro-choice petitions I’ve signed, and women I’ve hired. And I wouldn’t likely ever be judged anti-Semitic. I’ve kept my identifiably Jewish name when I could have easily traded it, as one editor urged me to do, for the much shorter WASP name of my first husband.
But I’ve internalized ageism. I’m in hiding, trying to pass for younger than I am. I don’t want to be considered “outmoded,” “hoary,” “antiquated,” or any of the other synonyms for “old” that pop up when I check my thesaurus. Why should I be ashamed of my age? I ask myself. After all, I’m one of a huge cohort. Ten thousand Americans are turning sixty-five every day and will continue to do so for the next fifteen years. And my generation isn’t aging quietly.
We wrote, spoke, and sang about how we were transforming politics, sex, and marriage in our teens and twenties. Now we’re sprouting books, blogs, podcasts, and conferences about how we’ll age with more verve, boldness, and grace than anyone who was ever old before us.
Every day, I read about another baby boomer accomplishing a feat they didn’t or couldn’t do when they were younger. Diana Nyad swam 110 miles from Cuba to Florida at sixty-four—her fifth try. “You’re never too old to chase your dream,” she said when she emerged from the ocean after fifty-three hours.
My friends exchange advice about hip and knee replacements, but they also chatter about how they’re reinventing themselves with encore careers and how being older means being free to do whatever you choose.
Except at work. Once you turn fifty, you’re a layoff target at a lot of companies and increasingly so with each passing year. Artists and therapists can work as long as they want. And it’s fine for Warren Buffett, who is chief executive of his own company, to insist he’s still sharp at eighty-eight and doesn’t believe in retirement. But tell that to a forty-year-old manager who’d prefer to hire two millennials for less money than the sixty-two-year-old veteran who reminds him of his mother.
No wonder career counselors advise Baby Boomer clients to pretend that half their working lives never happened by deleting jobs from their résumés that go back more than fifteen years, and eliminating college graduation dates. They also recommend avoiding words like “seasoned” and “experienced” during interviews and coloring gray hair, shaving gray beards and getting Botox injections.
I’ve tried Botox twice but would rather use the money it costs to travel, and don’t want the pain, risks, or expense of a face-lift—although, I have to admit, I’m a bit envious of how much younger some women my age who’ve had one look. Although I haven’t erased wrinkles, I did erase experience from my résumé when I was laid off from my newspaper job at sixty and thrust into the job market for the first time in twenty-nine years. I landed a new job, thanks to the help of a friend who steered me to an opening, but I don’t think it hurt that my new boss never knew my precise age.
I try to look youthful or at least not dowdy by dressing in the same black leggings as younger colleagues. And I wear bright-colored shirts and lipstick to try to offset the dark circles under my eyes.
None of that helped when a thirty-four-year-old editor, who was my boss’s boss, told me she’d attended the same college I had and asked when I graduated. Her eyes widened when I said, “a year before Hillary Clinton got her bachelor’s degree.” I imagined her thinking, Why are you still here? Haven’t you saved enough by now to retire—and am I going to have to work forever, too?
There’s the rub. Like a lot of people my age and younger, too, I’m worried about whether I’ll have enough money to support myself throughout my senior years. I’m more fortunate than most. Unlike sixty-eight million American workers who don’t have an employer-sponsored retirement plan, I have a 401(k) account. I’ve mostly funded this myself over the years, but my employers have contributed to it. And I’ve saved more than the median $120,000 balance in 401(k) accounts of men and women aged fifty-five to sixty-four. Those savings will provide just $4,800 a year, assuming they retire at sixty-five and live another twenty years. Boomers are expected to live at least that long if they’re healthy when they turn sixty-five.
My mother lived until she was almost 101. She retired at fifty-eight, and the pension she’d earned as a New York City school teacher carried her comfortably for more than four decades—twice as long as she worked. She never ceased to remind me of this, especially in her last years when the past was more present for her than the present.
“Tell me, don’t you have a pension like me?” she’d ask.
“Yes,” I’d answer sometimes, to avoid making her anxious. But other times, I’d answer honestly and tell her that hardly anyone these days has a pension that provides a guaranteed income for life, and most of us have to fund our own retirements.
“That’s terrible. What happened to the unions?” she’d always say.
With pensions mostly gone and 401(k) savings meager, it’s not surprising that one in four Americans plan to work well into their seventies and another fifteen percent say they’ll never be able to afford to retire. But unless they’re clever about concealing their birthdays, they may not be able to find full-time jobs with steady paychecks. Layoffs hit older workers harder, and once they lose a job they’re out of work twice as long on average than younger employees and typically must settle for lower salaries or contract work.
It isn’t only the need for a paycheck that’s keeping my generation at work, however. When I became a newspaper reporter, I felt grateful that I’d gotten the job I wanted, one that hadn’t been available to women older than me. What I never expected was how much I would care about work, how excited I’d feel when I broke and wrote a story or interviewed people who lived entirely different lives than I did.
So although I’ve left full-time journalism, I’m still a freelance reporter and writer and don’t consider myself a retiree. And more and more, I’m divulging my age. When the response I get is, “Well, seventy is the new fifty,” I say, “Seventy is seventy.”