GENDERED AGEISM AND MICRO AGGRESSIONS IN THE WORKPLACE

Abstract

The intersection of gender and age discrimination has formed an important facet of research concerning barriers to prolonging working lives. With increasing public policy interest in integrating later retirement into successful ageing frameworks, research has sought to understand whether workplace age discrimination is experienced differently by men and women at later career stages. While simplistic additive or multiplicative effects of being an older woman on experiences of workplace discrimination have been posited, research has been inconclusive. While some studies report gendered ageism affecting older women others find that older men appear to struggle with what has been argued to likely be their first experiences of workplace discrimination as they pass beyond what have traditionally been the ‘prime working years’. Attempting to overcome the common methodological error of measuring discrimination with leading, unsophisticated self-report items, this presentation draws on nationally representative data from a survey of 3000 Australians obtained using the ‘everyday discrimination’ approach to measuring workplace discrimination. Binary logistic regression was used to assess the probabilities of experiencing 12 workplace discrimination behaviors across age, gender and functional capacity while controlling for employment type and socioeconomic position. The results replicate some studies’ findings of counter-intuitive patterns of workplace discrimination across gender and age group, with discrimination more frequently reported by younger men. It is argued that a more nuanced approach to considering the intersection of age and gender is required and that in considering policy approaches to supporting longer working lives the role of age discrimination should not be overstated.