Age and Unemployment: First in a Series
By Ronda Bernstein on 10/06/2010 @ 02:00 PM
On Saturday, October 2, 2010, No Limits Foundation partnered with the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers’ (IAM) initiative, UCubed to help put Americans back to work. Our Vice-President for Policy, Leecia Eve, spoke at a rally Saturday, October 2, at the One Nation Working Together rally in Washington, DC, a pre-event to the One Nation Working Together march.
We asked you to send in topics for Leecia to address in her speech. While she couldn’t touch on all of them, we will use some of the topics as the focus for a short blog series on unemployment. One issue we received was about age discrimination in hiring, particularly with women. It seems that an under-mentioned facet of the current unemployment crisis is the inability of women “of a certain age” to find jobs.
This phenomenon is often discussed in regards to Hollywood when established actresses find themselves passed over for roles given to the ingénue of the day, forcing them to have plastic surgery and the like to stay competitive. But what we’ve been hearing is that ordinary women are experiencing the same thing when applying for jobs after losing long held positions due to downsizing or company closures.
One woman shared that she has “pretty consistently run into not particularly covert prejudice” in her job hunt. Her stories include going on interviews only to be told she was "overqualified" or asked why she wasn’t retiring. One young woman interviewing her even told her she was old enough to be the mother or grandmother of many of the employees in her company and that she felt they would not be "comfortable" with her.
Another wrote to us saying, “Though I apply for 1-5 new jobs daily, and have done so at least 5-6 days weekly for the past two years, I am only told/understand that hundreds to thousands of others also apply for the same jobs, and typically those interviewed and hired are under 40, definitely under 55! Without required survival income, how do well educated, highly experienced, divorced/widowed women live?”
The New York Times also ran an article recently regarding the over-50 population looking for work. Their article touched on the financial disadvantage this age group finds itself in when forced to use savings to live, in loss income for Social Security calculations, and less time to build their retirement accounts to the level planned. They also discuss how a lack of certain technological skills can put the “pre-computer” generation out of the running. You can find this article at their website: For the Unemployed Over 50, Fears of Never Working Again.
There is some help available. In the DC Metropolitan area, for instance, The Women's Center in Vienna VA is specifically designed to help women that are trying to find work. Another organization, Forty Plus, helps both men and women by offering resume assistance, a speaker series and career counseling.
The over-50 population isn’t the only one having a tough time of it. In the next installment in this series, we will look at the state of the job market for young adults.
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