{"id":1481,"date":"2014-07-23T07:50:00","date_gmt":"2014-07-23T11:50:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.silvercentury.org\/2017\/09\/guess-whos-confronting-ageism-now\/"},"modified":"2018-05-02T08:56:33","modified_gmt":"2018-05-02T12:56:33","slug":"guess-whos-confronting-ageism-now","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/78.142.243.82\/~silvercentury\/2014\/07\/guess-whos-confronting-ageism-now\/","title":{"rendered":"Guess Who\u2019s Confronting Ageism Now?"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ageism in Silicon Valley has been all over the news lately. \u201cThe Brutal Ageism of Tech,\u201d a March 2014 feature story in the New Republic, <\/i>noted that some male techies, still in their 20s, are contemplating Botox and hair transplants, while middle-aged engineers, a swelling cohort of \u201chighly trained, objectively talented, surpassingly ambitious workers,\u201d are being sidelined \u201cfor reasons no one can rationally explain.\u201d Meanwhile, the New York Times Magazine<\/i> ran a cover story titled \u201cSilicon Valley\u2019s Youth Problem.\u201d <\/span><\/p>\n

Prejudice is irrational. The underlying industry premise that youth drives technological innovation is baseless. Age discrimination is illegal. And it\u2019s not new, so why the media attention now? Because for the first time in their lives, people at the top of the food chain\u2014smart, skilled, straight, well-paid, nondisabled, white guys\u2014are experiencing discrimination. It happens because they\u2019re old enough to have kids. Or mortgages. Or receding hairlines.<\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

In a terrific piece in New York<\/i> magazine called \u201cSilicon Valley Disrupts Discrimination: Now It\u2019s for Middle-Aged White Guys, Too,\u201d<\/a> Ann Friedman writes, \u201cWelcome, men, to the world of being hyperaware of how you\u2019re perceived, every moment of every workday.\u201d That would be the world of women huddled behind office doors, hooked up to breast pumps, trying to play down the fact that they\u2019re parents, not whiz kids, or reluctantly learning golf as a way to meet male clients. As she notes, the burden of trying to conform to the dominant culture applies doubly and triply for people of color, gay people and people with disabilities. Friedman also notes that when women face bias, we tell them to lean in, and when it happens to people of color, we barely notice, but when white men confront biases, we look for what it reveals about the bigger system.<\/span><\/span><\/span><\/p>\n

Ageism is still so unexamined that age doesn\u2019t make Friedman\u2019s short list of discriminatory categories. For her, the big win in all the media coverage isn\u2019t a focus on ageism, but a fresh take on \u201cnow-familiar Silicon Valley sexism.\u201d It never dawns on most of us that the experience of reaching old age\u2014or middle age, or even just aging past youth\u2014can be better or worse depending on the culture in which it takes place. (Hint: steer clear of the United States, especially Hollywood and Silicon Valley.) Like racism and sexism, ageism is a socially constructed idea that has changed over time and that serves a social and economic purpose\u2014to legitimize and sustain inequalities between groups. These prejudices aren\u2019t about how we look, they\u2019re about people in power assigning meaning to how we look. In this case, older tech guys have lost their grip on power merely because they are no longer in their 20s<\/i>. <\/span><\/p>\n

Friedman suggests that Silicon Valley may inadvertently have produced an innovation here by \u201cdisrupting\u201d discrimination itself. In industry parlance, a disruptive innovation unexpectedly displaces an established (older) technology. For the first time, people are looking at the underlying values of tech culture and questioning its obsession with youth-and-hipness. The Bay Area\u2019s extreme manifestation of this mind-set doesn\u2019t make it any more palatable than garden-variety discrimination on the basis of having dark skin or a wheelchair or a vagina or actual gray hair, but that\u2019s what finally garnered some attention. The coverage is revealing cracks in the \u201cmeritocracy\u201d that has served this elite group so well on all other fronts. Let\u2019s hope it jimmies them wide open and brings ageism into the discussion.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ageism in Silicon Valley has been all over the news lately. \u201cThe Brutal Ageism of Tech,\u201d a March 2014 feature story in the New Republic, <\/i>noted that some male techies, still in their 20s, are contemplating Botox and hair transplants, while middle-aged engineers, a swelling cohort of \u201chighly trained, objectively talented, surpassingly ambitious workers,\u201d are being sidelined \u201cfor reasons no one can rationally explain.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Guess Who\u2019s Confronting Ageism Now?<\/span> ›<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n

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