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Tag: Age discrimination

  • How to Address Bias Against Older Workers

    It can start small—a joke about retirement, a skipped invite to a new client project, or a hiring manager saying we want “digital natives.” 

    One comment might be easy to overlook, and while not every frustrating moment is ageism, over time, these subtle patterns can add up to something bigger: age bias at work.

    According to Resume Now’s Age Disrespect Report, 90 percent of workers over 50 say they’ve faced discrimination because of their age. 

    For many professionals, that bias shows up as earning less than younger colleagues in the same role, being excluded from challenging assignments, feeling pressured to retire, or even being targeted during layoffs.

    Age doesn’t have to be a career setback. With the right tools, and a clear understanding of your rights, older professionals can navigate bias, advocate for themselves, and stay competitive in the workplace. 

    Employers also play a key role by addressing ageism and building more inclusive teams.

    To learn how to navigate the issue, I spoke with resume Now’s career expert Keith Spencer, and Florida employment rights lawyer Brett Kaplan on the most effective ways to address ageism head-on.

    The extended deadline for the 2026 Inc. Regionals Awards is Friday, December 19, at 11:59 p.m. PT. Apply now.

    Alyshia Hull

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  • What Age Do Leadership Abilities Peak? A New Study Offers a Surprising Answer 

    If you’re a fashion model or a professional athlete, you’ll probably reach your professional peak before age 30. Research confirms genius wonderkinds in fields like math also tend to reach the pinnacle of their careers early too. But how about leaders? At what age do leadership abilities peak? 

    It’s a question that doesn’t lend itself to a clear answer. Sprint speeds are simple to measure, and we all have firsthand evidence of the toll time takes on our bodies. But leadership excellence requires a complex bundle of skills, including raw intellectual horsepower, emotional intelligence, wisdom, and accumulated experience. 

    Measuring all those traits, figuring out at what age they usually peak, and bundling that information together meaningfully is a complex task. But it’s one a team of researchers recently tackled. The end result is an estimate of when leaders are generally at their best. The results might surprise you. 

    The 16 skills that make a great leader 

    What does it take to be a great leader? According to University of Western Australia psychologist Gilles Gignac, the answer is a combination of no less than 16 different traits and skills. For their recent research, Gignac and his collaborators sifted through previous studies to determine the key abilities for leadership success and compiled a list, including: 

    They then looked at previous studies that measured these traits at different ages to see when people’s performance peaked. The accumulated evidence showed that some, like raw intellectual processing power, are strongest when we’re young. Others, like conscientiousness, just keep going up well into our seventh decade and beyond.

    But when do we have the best bundle of mental abilities to give us the best shot at leadership success? Combining all these factors, the researchers were able to estimate the age at which people hit peak leadership ability on average. What did they find? 

    “Overall mental functioning peaked between ages 55 and 60, before beginning to decline from around 65,” reports Gignac in The Conversation. “Our findings may help explain why many of the most demanding leadership roles in business, politics, and public life are often held by people in their fifties and early sixties. So while several abilities decline with age, they’re balanced by growth in other important traits.”

    Leadership abilities peak at 55-60?

    In a culture that fetishizes youth (and allows some leaders to continue way past when they should), the fact that our overall mental and leadership ability peaks right before retirement age might come as a shock. But there is plenty of other research that suggests Gignac’s study isn’t some crazy outlier. 

    One of the clearest comes from the field of entrepreneurship. Top founders are often portrayed in the media and on magazine covers as hoodie-wearing twenty-somethings. But an analysis of exits of investor backed companies show the average age of a successful startup founder is actually 47. That’s a lot closer to Gignac’s peak than it is to the current cultural stereotype.

    Another recent Stanford study tracked the performance of individuals on various cognitive tests over decades and found that overall intelligence tends to peak in your 40s. If you continue to stay intellectually active your intellectual skills don’t decline until retirement age. Other research has found self-esteem, empathy, and conflict resolution skills all keep improving deep into middle age. 

    Time to check your biases

    All of this should comfort you if you’re worrying that you’re intellectually over the hill. Yes, we gain wrinkles, aches, and memory lapses as we add more candles to our birthday cakes. But science is pretty clear that, on average, we gain more than we lose intellectually. 

    But if the results are a comfort to middle-aged professionals hoping to stay on top of their game, they are also a caution to employers. Gignac stresses that his findings should nudge companies to take a hard look at any age-related biases in their organization. 

    If you’re running an NFL team, ageism might make sense. But in most instances, the idea that people lose a step as they get older is probably costing you talent. As Gignac concludes, “Perhaps it’s time we stopped treating midlife as a countdown and started recognizing it as a peak.”

    The opinions expressed here by Inc.com columnists are their own, not those of Inc.com.

    Jessica Stillman

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  • Michelle Yeoh Has The Perfect Response For People Who Think Women Have A ‘Prime’ Working Age

    Michelle Yeoh Has The Perfect Response For People Who Think Women Have A ‘Prime’ Working Age

    On Sunday, Michelle Yeoh won an Academy Award for Best Actress in a Leading Role for “Everything Everywhere All at Once,” making history as the first Asian actress to do so in the show’s 95 years.

    In her acceptance speech, the Malaysia-born 60-year-old made a point to call out gendered ageism and encourage those who want to follow in her path.

    “For all the little boys and girls who look like me watching tonight, this is a beacon of hope and possibilities,” she said in her acceptance speech. “This is proof that dream big, and dreams do come true. And ladies, don’t let anybody tell you you are ever past your prime. Never give up.”

    Throughout this awards season, Yeoh has used her platform to speak up about how she and other Asian actors have faced stereotypes and societal barriers in their careers. In a GQ interview, she called the role of Evelyn in “Everything Everywhere All at Once” “something I’ve been waiting for, for a long time.”

    The facts back up how gendered ageism is ever-present in Hollywood. In 2017, USC published a report that found that only two leading characters over 60 were featured in the 25 films nominated for Best Picture over the previous three years — and they were both played by the same white man, Michael Keaton.

    When older people were featured in Best Picture-nominated movies, men were playing leaders, while older women, and older people of color in particular, rarely got to wield power on screen, according to the report.

    “Occupational prestige is the province of male seniors,” the study stated. “The consistent portrayal of male leaders in film means that audiences across the life span do not see a portrait of authority and achievement that reflects reality by including females and people of color.”

    But it’s not just actors who face gendered ageism. Very few of us will ever become Oscar-winners, but unfortunately the harmful societal assumption that women have a fleeting “prime” working age is still alive and well.

    Too many women are told they are “past their prime,” in their careers, which is why Yeoh’s encouragement is so important.

    Although age discrimination in the workplace has been illegal in the U.S. since 1967, many women still report dealing with it on a regular basis. In fact, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission reported that since 2010, the number of women filing age discrimination charges has surpassed the number of men filing age discrimination charges.

    Just last month, CNN anchor Don Lemon got called out for suggesting in a TV segment that because of her age, 51-year-old Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley was not “in her prime,” which he later apologized for.

    Cynthia Pong, a feminist career strategist for women of color, said the implicit message that women have a “prime” working age is something her clients and people in her community deal with a lot. For them, it can show up beyond words as a “sense that a door is being shut in [their] face because they are a certain age or they present as a certain age,” she said.

    One 2019 report on gendered ageism from the nonprofit Catalyst, whose mission is to promote workplace inclusion for women, found that “in addition to societal biases that older employees are less innovative, adaptive and generally less qualified, older women face marginalization based on ‘lookism,’ gendered youthful beauty standards.”

    Pong noted that ageism can be a double-edged sword and can penalize women for either looking too young or too old to be respected and taken seriously. According to a 2021 AARP survey, about 1 in 3 women say they experience age discrimination, and women in the survey who were 50 years or older reported age discrimination at about the same rate as younger women.

    Even if gendered ageism hasn’t happened to you in particular, it can affect your career growth. Pong noted that simply witnessing ageism can cause a “chilling effect” in workplaces and make women of color in particular less risk-averse in their job moves.

    “They are worried that rug is going to get pulled out from under them as well,” Pong said, noting that a common message she hears is “‘I don’t want to rock the boat.’”

    Yeoh’s message to not give up in the face of these daily discouragements is a reminder that it’s critical to staying true to yourself. To individually cope with the societal problem of ageism, “The bottom line is to always make sure that you are clear about what you want to achieve or accomplish in your career if you are [any] woman or woman of color,” Pong said. That way, you can strategize on a plan and connect with people who can help you reach your goals.

    In worst-case scenarios, internalizing ageist messages can distract all women from their mission and cause them to give up on their career dreams altogether, Pong said, which is why Yeoh’s encouragement is so important.

    “That’s the underlying message of what Michelle Yeoh is saying: ‘Don’t give up and don’t accept this.’ Really, that’s the only way. If we can reach some kind of tipping point where this is no longer as much of a factor, that would ultimately be the goal,” Pong said.

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  • Court: Long sentence for Black man who killed at 17 stands

    Court: Long sentence for Black man who killed at 17 stands

    SEATTLE — The Washington Supreme Court has declined to reconsider an opinion that upheld a Black man’s virtual life sentence for shootings he committed at age 17, despite criticism that the ruling betrayed racial bias.

    The court upheld the 61-year sentence for Tonelli Anderson in September, abandoning a precedent issued just a year earlier in which it said — in the case of a white defendant — that such long terms for juvenile killers were unconstitutional because it left them no chance of a meaningful life outside prison.

    Anderson’s attorney, Travis Stearns of the Washington Appellate Project, sought reconsideration of the 5-4 ruling, writing that it reflected racial bias. Three civil rights organizations — the Fred T. Korematsu Center for Law and Equality at Seattle University School of Law; the Juvenile Law Center, based in Philadelphia; and Huy, which supports Indigenous inmates in the Pacific Northwest — also urged the court to reconsider.

    But such motions are legal long shots, and the court denied it Monday without explanation. The King County prosecutors had also opposed it, saying Anderson’s criminal history and belated acceptance of responsibility helped distinguish his case.

    Anderson, now 45, shot two women, killing one and blinding the other, during a drug robbery in Tukwila in 1994. An accomplice also shot and killed a man at the same home.

    Anderson was not immediately arrested and went on to commit other crimes as a young adult, including assault and robbery, and he wrote letters to girlfriends bragging about the shootings. It wasn’t until 1998, after investigators learned of the letters, that he was charged.

    He was convicted of first-degree murder in 2000 and sentenced to 61 years. He was granted a new sentencing hearing in 2018, following federal and state rulings that children must be treated differently by the justice system. But the judge gave him the same term, finding Anderson had not shown the shootings reflected “transient immaturity.”

    In recent years, the Washington Supreme Court has further restricted sentences that can be imposed on children.

    In 2018, the justices held that it violated the state Constitution to sentence 16- or 17-year-olds to life in prison without parole. That ruling came in the case of Brian Bassett, a white man who killed his parents and brother when he was 16. Bassett has since been resentenced to 28 years.

    In September, the court struck down a 46-year sentence for Timothy Haag, a white man who was 17 when he drowned his 7-year-old neighbor. In that case, a six-justice majority held that juvenile murder defendants must be given “a meaningful opportunity to rejoin society after leaving prison.”

    Bassett and Haag were both quickly caught and prosecuted.

    In Anderson’s appeal, Justice Debra Stephens wrote for the 5-4 majority that such virtual life sentences for juveniles are barred by the state Constitution only if their crimes “reflect youthful immaturity, impetuosity, or failure to appreciate risks and consequences.”

    Anderson’s was not such a case, Stephens said.

    The dissenting justices said it was nonsensical that the court would find a 46-year sentence for a white 17-year-old to be an unconstitutional “de facto” life sentence, while upholding a 61-year sentence for a Black 17-year-old. Justice Mary Yu wrote it would be “willfully oblivious” to conclude race played no role.

    The King County Prosecutor’s Office said the high court’s decision maintained the discretion of trial judges to weigh the facts of each case and apply an appropriate sentence.

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