New developments concerning age discrimination in the workplace

Abstract

Age discrimination is common and occurs in all types of industries, fields, and professions all across the world. The common misperceptions about “older workers” include hard‐to‐break habits, technological ignorance, and lack of energy and flexibility. Such attitudes, expectations, and perceptions of older workers should not exist in our professional community. Whether old or young, all people should be treated with respect and dignity. The purpose of this article is to understand the reasons behind age discrimination and ways to prevent it from occurring in the workplace. Removing age discrimination in the workplace lies in the hands of all organisations. First, they need to demolish the myths of age and realise its strengths, such as reliability, mature judgement, lack of impulsivity, timeliness, strong work ethics, and experience. Second, upper management should educate its chain of managers and supervisors about the effects discrimination has on the company’s financial situation as well as its reputation. The government plays a major role in enforcing the laws regarding age discrimination and punishing those who are unlawful.

Discrimination, Sexual Harassment, and the Impact of Workplace Power

“…A similar point can be made with regard to age and ageism. Although largely relegated to life-course scholarship and gerontological studies, there is now good evidence from both surveys of employers and case materials that age as a status and the essentialized beliefs undergirding it (i.e., aging bodies, brains, and capabilities) are often invoked in ways that generate hiring exclusion (Roscigno et al 2007;Rosen and Jerdee 1976;Shah and Kleiner 2005;Swift 2006).…”

New Digital Challenges for Learning: Training on and by Means of Web 2.0 with Digital Natives Support

“…blogs and web pages). Such analysis may overcome prejudice at work, where oldness is often associated with hard-to-break habits and technological ignorance [16].…”

Measuring Age Discrimination at Work: Spanish Adaptation and Preliminary Validation of the Nordic Age Discrimination Scale (NADS)

“…Though perceptions of older workers have changed markedly over the last decade [6], and negative and positive beliefs coexist [7], age discrimination continues in work contexts [8,9,10,11,12]. Persistent misperceptions and negative stereotypes about age, which generally associate older workers with scant motivation, less alert capacity and limited productivity, less flexibility, more resistance to change, unwillingness to learn, less reliability for health reasons, and poor technological and digital skills [7,13,14,15,16,17], all too often contribute to an age discrimination climate in organizational settings [18]. However, most of these age stereotypes have been refuted by empirical research, or at least they can admit many nuances, and conclusions are inconclusive [15].…”

“…Though the phenomenon is found in all sectors of the economy [16], there is no consensus among scholars as to the causes of age discrimination. In general terms, it has been attributed to imperfections in the labour market (e.g.…”