If I said that “young people were irresponsible and lazy” there would undoubtedly be an animated response and I’d be told that such broad generalisations were ridiculous. Yet generalisations about older people and the acceptance of negative stereotypes is widespread in the Australian community.
I’ve just been reading a government funded research report compiled by Urbis, on age discrimination and the findings are pretty depressing. Clearly the majority of Australians’ views are based on data from the first half of the last century when people over 65 probably were “old”. The research shows that the terms “aging” and “older” trigger a series of negative connotations, particularly amongst younger Australians. Older people are seen as slow, forgetful, have difficulty learning new things, can’t handle computers, are bad drivers, prone to illness, grumpy and isolated. Not a pretty picture.
However if you think about the people you know who are over 60, you’ll probably agree that most of these descriptions don’t apply to them. These negative stereotypes are inaccurate and misleading. Older people are just like any other age group in society. They are diverse cross section of Australia ranging from fit, healthy and active through to sick and isolated.
While this silly stereotyping is mildly annoying is general terms, it gets to be a major problem when it comes to employment of older people. The research indicates that 50% of business decision makers agree that older employees are more likely to be retrenched and 36% believe that older workers are less likely to be promoted. There is still a widespread assumption that people over 55 are too old to be productive employees. Clearly these negative attitudes lead to a huge wastage of talented and experienced workers who could play a significant role in reducing the skills shortage that Australia is suffering.
It will be interesting to see how the baby boomer generation, who are now encountering this age discrimination, are going to react. Today’s 50s and 60s don’t consider themselves “old”, “past it”, or any of the other patronising terms applied to older Australians. Today’s younger retirees are trekking in Nepal, volunteering to build schools in developing countries, starting new businesses and spending lots of time on the net. The very opposite of the negative stereotyping that we see in the media.
Paul McKeon