Bias against older and younger workers is bad for business

Two weeks after he and his wife locked themselves in a summer house, Kevin Berman was fired.

That was last September. Berman, who is 61, has since applied to more than 650 IT jobs.

He has decades of experience in the field. He doesn’t think his age was a problem the few times he got an interview.

But when Berman, who lives outside Detroit, doesn’t hear back after applying for a role he thinks is a perfect fit for his experience, he sometimes wonders if his years are working against him. One role had a unique job title – something Berman had done earlier in his career. He didn’t even get a screening call.

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

Berman isn’t alone in wondering why, with his experience, he never got a chance at a job. For those who have been working for a while – and those just starting out – it’s not unreasonable to wonder if age bias is undercutting their career trajectory or prospects, labor market experts told BI.

This is a problem in part because the workforce in the US and many other developed countries is aging.

The Pew Research Center estimated that about one in five people 65 and older in the U.S. worked last year. It was almost double the number of people of that age who had a job 35 years ago.

Having people of different ages in the workplace together can be good for business. In 2020, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development reported that promoting a multigenerational workforce and giving older people more opportunities to work could increase per capita gross domestic product by 19% over the next three decades.

Marjorie Powell, director of human resources and senior vice president at AARP, argued that people are working more, often out of necessity, to cover things like health care or housing costs.

“They also keep working 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 fired, his wife also lost her job due to corporate cutbacks. That left the couple with two mortgages and little income beyond severance and unemployment payments, which ran out about six months ago, Berman said. Although he is renting one of the houses, he is eating into his savings and investments, he added.

Berman tried to do some IT consulting. To stand out from other candidates, he obtained certifications in artificial intelligence management and cyber security. Both he and his wife are considering pursuing an MBA.

Powell said rapid technological advances could exacerbate prejudice against older workers because knowing the latest stuff is often seen as the preserve of the young.

“People tend to think that the only people who are technology adapters are those 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 ask job seekers when they were born and when they graduated, Powell said. She argued that with something like a degree, applicants should only say whether they completed it.

What Powell sees as harmful language and requests for extraneous data can be “red flags that some age bias might be involved,” she said.

In other cases, older workers may be told they are overqualified. What employers may not understand, Powell said, is that those with lots of experience aren’t always looking to keep moving up or get higher and higher salaries. Instead, she said, they may be drawn to the nature of the work or the mission of an organization.

“The bottom line is you’re either qualified to do the job or you’re not,” Powell said.

Being seen as overqualified is one of the many concerns driving Don Trautman’s job search.

At 67, he is old enough to retire but has been looking for part-time work since April after taking a buyout from a longtime employer.

Trautman is a certified public accountant and holds an MBA. He has spent the past 18 years managing purchasing and warehousing operations, although he would 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 of the data from his resume, as some recruiters advise. However, when he applies for jobs, he fills in the start and end dates for his roles.

“Once I started putting it on, I started my last job in ’99 and I’ve had several jobs before that, they’ll say, ‘Oh, wait a minute,'” Trautman told BI. It would be impossible not to infer it was an older worker, he said.

Plus, Trautman said, many employers advertise that they can offer room for advancement, but that’s not what they’re looking for.

“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 U.S. from her native Greece more than a decade ago, dreaming of starting a company, some of her family members questioned whether she was too old to do such a thing.

“I was 26 years old,” she told BI.

Stroponiati, now 41, said he saw the stealth touch of seniority at a previous venture fund he ran in the US. The few 50-plus founders she met tended to give the impression that they were out of place, she said.

“They were always shy and not as confident as 20-year-olds,” Stroponiati said.

In April, it started its fund for older founders so it can focus on an overlooked market and the ways people evolve throughout life.

“I offer 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 no one talks about the other generations. In fact, Boomers and Gen Xers are trying to do the same thing – disrupt retirement.”

The fund received over 600 applications. So far, she has invested in two startups. Both are run by women over 55 years old. 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 had not done enough to cope with an aging population and was now facing economic and social consequences. The US, she said, has a chance to respond.

“We need to think about what it means to have productive senior citizens,” Stroponiati said.

Michael North, 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-standing assumption in the US that people will retire around age 65.

Government safety nets like Social Security and Medicare “assume you’re not really supposed to work after a certain age,” he said. But apart from recent deviations due to factors like the pandemic, people in industrialized economies are generally living longer — and staying healthier while doing it.

North said many older workers are vibrant, skilled and educated. “There is a discordance between what our policies and expectations have in place and what older adults are objectively providing,” he said.

In turn, North said, some younger workers and those hoping to break into the job market may become frustrated that older workers won’t retire and create jobs.

In essence, 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,” North said.

Part of the frustration for many young people, he said, is that the challenges of paying for college, affording a home and starting a family are harder than before. North added that resentment of these conditions could cause “alarming” generational conflict.

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

For Trautman, who hopes to return to accounting, returning to a fixed schedule 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 work at Lowe’s or Home Depot, as some friends have suggested.

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