Fighting Ageism in the Workplace (and why we need to) with Ashton Applewhite
Welcome to We Are Human Leaders. In today's conversation we explore the issue of Ageism and the critical importance in dispelling it in the workplace. We look at generational stereotypes and why they are harmful, and learn practical ways to debunk ageism at work.
This conversation with Ashton Applewhite will challenge your preconceptions and have you viewing the statement 'act your age' in a whole new way!
Ashton Applewhite is the author of This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism and the co-founder of the Old School Anti-Ageism Clearinghouse. An internationally recognized expert on ageism, she speaks widely at venues that have included the TED mainstage and the United Nations, has written for Harper’s, the Guardian, and the New York Times, and is the voice of Yo, Is This Ageist?. Ashton is at the forefront of the emerging movement to raise awareness of ageism and to dismantle it. In 2022 the Decade of Healthy Aging, a UN + WHO collaboration, named Ashton one of the Healthy Aging 50: fifty leaders transforming the world to be a better place to grow older.
links:
This Chair Rocks: A Manifesto Against Ageism
@thischairrocks - Twitter
@thischairrocks- Instagram
For accessible access, view the podcast with closed captions below and access the full conversation transcript.
Episode Transcript:
Spk0 Alexis Zahner Spk1 Ashton Applewhite Spk2 Sally Clarke
[00:00:09] spk_0: As the saying goes, age is just a number and yet we use age and generation to better understand each other almost constantly, even to stereotype and prejudice often without consciously doing so. In today's conversation. We speak with Ashton Applewhite to dispel age old myths around age and generation. Ashton Applewhite is the author of this chair rocks a manifesto against Ageism and the co founder of the Old school anti ageism clearinghouse. She's an internationally recognized expert on ageism and speaks widely at venues that have included the ted main stage and the United Nations. Ashton is at the forefront of the emerging movement to raise awareness of ageism and to dismantle it in 2022 the decade of healthy aging un and W. H. O. Collaboration name Ashton, one of its healthy aging, 50 50 leaders transforming the world to be a better place to grow older. So settle in and listen up and let us challenge your preconceptions of what it means to act your age. Let's dive in. Welcome to the We are Human Leaders podcast action. It is a delight to have you here. Can you tell us a little bit about your own personal journey and what's brought you to your incredible work as an anti ageism activist.
[00:01:36] spk_1: I will say that I'm not the most self aware person in the world, but I warned you about that, but I will say that I came to thinking about aging because in my mid-50s, which was 15 years ago, it dawned on me that this getting old thing was happening to me. I think it's hard to imagine getting old, especially when we're young we age slowly. And I realized I was really apprehensive about it in this sort of vague, free floating way. So being me, I decided to look into longevity and I started interviewing people over 80 and I realized in a matter of months if not weeks That everything I thought I knew about what it was like to be old was way too negative or not nuanced enough or flat out wrong about later life. So I became obsessed with why we only hear one side of the story. I will also confess that if you had told me 15 years ago I would become obsessed with aging, I would have said Dick, you know, why do I want to spend my time thinking about something sad and creepy and depressing and it's anything but for a generalist like me, aging is not something annoying and sad that old people do. It is how we move through life and it affects every conceivable area of thought of being human and it just gets more interesting all the time.
[00:03:04] spk_2: I love that you mentioned you almost had a little bit of sounds like an internalized bias yourself. Coming to the concept of aging and seeing it is kind of creepy and icky Is that is that something that you realized at some point as well that wow, this is not something that is inherent to the human experience. This is something I've taken on and internalized
[00:03:20] spk_1: hugely. I mean, I think I'm not going to sugarcoat the fact that there are aspects of growing old that are hard and not unwelcome, but they have to do almost entirely with what might happen to our minds and our bodies. And that's actually aged based. It's not ageism, it's able it's prejudice and stigma around mental and physical capacity. So, and some part of your body is going to fall apart. That is inevitable, cognitive decline is not inevitable. The only other inevitable bad thing about aging for everyone is that people you've known all your life are going to die. So I don't want to say that there's nothing hard about getting older. We worry about getting sick about ending up alone, about running out of money and in countries with no solid social supports were isolated. Those are legitimate fears. But again, why don't we hear the other side of the story? We are bombarded with negative messages about how awful it's going to be to get old, how tragic it's going to be to encounter any kind of incapacity. And unless we stop to question them, they become part of your identity as you just said sally and that's true of all of us. We are all ages. We're all biased in all kinds of ways. I think we have not spent as much time thinking about age by us as we have about other forms of bias and it's essential that we do exactly what you just put your finger on think, oh crap, a lot of these ideas have taken up residence inside my head and that doesn't make you a bad person, it makes you human and it makes you, you know, a member of an ageist and biased society, but we can't challenge bias unless we're aware of it. So the very first most essential part is to do just what you said is to look at your own attitude towards age and aging. And it's not fun to realize that you're biased. But the next part which is inevitable is once you see it in yourself, you start to see it in the world around you and that is really liberating with the one comes the other like, oh yes, I'm complicit in this in some way, but it is because of the society I live in, it is because of social and economic forces larger than me, and that means we can come together and do something about it. Yeah,
[00:05:40] spk_0: it does feel in Western culture almost like an imbued part of our collective culture. We don't even notice it because there's just this idea that as you get older, you can do less things, life gets worse, life gets harder, Perhaps you become burdened for those around you and it's almost like our entire society is kind of just internalized this narrative around what it means to age. Well,
[00:06:03] spk_1: yeah, because if prejudices learn kids aren't biased, but we start to learn this stuff really young, you know, in early childhood, starting with Children's books. But of course that means that we can't unlearn it, not that is easy, but it does, it does surround
[00:06:19] spk_2: us. And you touched on a couple of other forms of discrimination that people face in a society and also in the workplace. Ashton, I'm curious to know what makes ageism uniquely challenging to
[00:06:31] spk_1: combat. That's a good question. And I think there's a paradox here, or maybe it's just an apparent paradox that's not dwell on that. Which is ageism is any form of prejudice, any judgment on the basis of age, including you're too young. Although older people bear the brunt of it by far, because we live in such a youth obsessed society, but everyone, it casts a shadow across our entire lives, especially for women. Women are never the right age, especially in the workforce. So with other groups, you have sort of an in group and an out group, even if you're the goth kids in the school cafeteria, you're up against all the street people or the cheerleaders, you can define yourself in opposition to another group. And with age there is no such out group because you fall into a trap if you pit it as old against young, because everyone experiences it, right? And so it's a little harder to figure out what you're up against. On the other hand, it is this universal aging is the one universal human experience and its effect on each of us which depends always on our own individual identities and circumstance, you know where we live, how we were raised, how much privilege we enjoy, the color of our skin etcetera etcetera etcetera. But everyone moves through growing older. I'm incredibly interested in using age and age bias as a lens through which to address all these other forms of bias and how they show up in each of our lives in different ways. I think of it as sort of a big tent if you will. That you know because everyone does experience. It is often the first form of prejudice that white men encounter. It's the first time they bang into the idea that O. G. S. You know, not A. Level playing field out there. Well, welcome to our world and I speak as a privileged white woman. You know, think what it's like for women of color who face much more barriers to access and equity and then if you have a disability and so on and so on. The barriers mount up.
[00:08:34] spk_0: Mm. And you've said in your work ashton that ageism serves as a social and economic purpose to legitimize and sustain inequalities between groups. It's not about how we look, it's about how people in power assign meaning to how we look. So can you help us unpack this a little bit more then.
[00:08:52] spk_1: I mean it's not a complicated idea. You could sum it up as divide and conquer. Don't make no pretense to having red marks. But I know that he made an example of different groups of low wage fact three workers competing against each other instead of joining forces to demand the livable wages from the person who owns the factory. Another example is mothers in the paid workforce arguing with stay at home moms about who's better mother instead of joining forces to close the gender wage gap. So women could choose whether or not to stay home. So you can see how those tactics benefit the person running the factory. And it does of course, have to do with capitalism. You know, capitalism requires pitting people against each other in order to squeeze as much as they can out of workers everywhere. So that is the purpose of all prejudice and ageism is no exception,
[00:09:46] spk_2: really nail that the action. It's it's almost a tool to disenfranchise and therefore disempower. And it's one of many tools
[00:09:53] spk_1: and to distract us. If we're arguing about whether greedy old people stole all the good things and didn't leave anything for young people or whether climate change is all the fault of old people, that's not going to help all the people of all the ages. You know, in all the countries who are suffering under climate change, where some of whom care about the climate and some of whom don't, some of whom are conservative, some of whom are progressive, dividing us into old versus young camps adjust distracts us from the necessary solidarity. We need to address all the wicked problems confronting humanity today.
[00:10:29] spk_2: I think we see it even in consumerism, don't we? In the way that the ideal of the younger body, the younger skin is so idealized and I feel like if I look at my life and the amount of time that I've spent wasting, you know, worrying about my wrinkles and I don't think it's actually been that much time, but there's certainly been some time feeling insecure about my appearance on the basis of age. If you total that up and you think about the impact that has on reducing the time that we could be spending working together to change systems and to create more equality. Like it does definitely feel something that it's working. It's
[00:11:00] spk_1: a distraction. The whole thing around women's appearance. I mean it's the fixation with women's appearance is not about beauty. It is also about power. It is about whether we are able and willing to spend money and effort. Of course the costs mount up for women who have less money. And there's a thing called the pink tax. It is the fact that products for women clothing, dry cleaning, you name, it cost more even though we earn less, you know, so that's an example of how the inequities pile up the whole emphasis around youth Equaling beauty is exactly such a thing. This stuff is socially constructed, which is a fancy way of saying we make things up. I had to learn it the hard way, but there are so many voices telling women what we should wear, what we should like, what would look like, what we should put on our skins, what we shouldn't put on our faces. And I have stepped back from that entire higher lee because it is really hard to pass through life in this complicated world. And we women in particular need to support whatever decisions we make. We each need to navigate this stuff in our own way and in our own styles. But you know, the harshest judgment of women I think comes from women because power structures patriarchy capitalism, They ca modify our appearance and the people, the women. And I guess probably in this more gender loosey goosey universe, we should really make it people and not just women, but who conform to this highly commodified commercialized standard, which means then young white for the most part, you know, and so on. They enjoy the most privilege in that world. And unless we step back from that as we are seeing happening with the body acceptance movement and with any anti racist work with any anti stabilized work with any anti Agius work saying no, we don't buy that as a system for sorting humans into hierarchies of value. We reject that, but it takes courage to reject it. It takes principle for younger people to ally with older people on that basis for non disabled people to ally with disabled people. What we end up with is a better world, but it's 1000 decisions and trade offs in the moment that we each have to navigate. Yeah, I hope that made sense.
[00:13:24] spk_0: I totally know it totally did. And what's so interesting, I was reflecting as you were speaking there, Ashton and even back to Sally's prior comment around how she's felt it impacted her. You know, interestingly, as, you know, as a privileged white woman of the millennial generation in this sort of workforce setting for me, I almost feel like the youthfulness of my appearance has worked against me and as such, I've needed to feel like I had to overcompensate in terms of my intellect to sort of prove my point in the workforce. And it almost feels like maybe the only place where that actually works against us, but because I do look quite young even though I'm in my thirties now, I felt that to legitimize my position in the labor force and the roles that I hold, I need to have higher qualifications. You know, I need to have my master's degree that I need to have all of these certification certificates, proof of my worth to validate the position that I hold in the workforce because of
[00:14:19] spk_1: the way I look and a man of your age would not be asked to supply the same evidence. I mean in the workforce in particular, women are never the right age first, were too young and sexy to be taken seriously and then we're too fertile in the U. S. Women stop being promoted to managerial positions at age 34 because we all know your uterus and your brain cannot work at the same time and then five minutes later you're not sexy or fertile anymore. Boom. No it's not fair. But you know, no discrimination is fair but it's so destructive and damaging. But I want to be clear that speaking of learning things the hard way, I've never forgotten a woman who came up to me, I did a conference just for women and I was a little more judgy about this stuff and she came up to me afterwards and she said if I didn't dye my hair to cover the gray, my boss would figure out how old I am and I would lose my job and I've got Children to support. And I never said a word about it. Again, we have to be feel safe, economically safe, physically safe in order to take these risks, which is why it is so important for those of us with more privilege to support people, especially women, especially people of color, especially people with disabilities who have less privilege and are more at risk and have more at stake in standing up to the system. I hope I don't sound preachy. I really do believe this And I try and do it and I'm sure the worst thing you can do is not to try at all. I think a lot of people are hesitant like I'm going to screw it up or I don't know how to behave. The only mistake you can make is not to try truthfully.
[00:15:54] spk_2: And I think I love what you said as well because it reminds me Ashton that the last thing we want to do or I want to do is to Have someone feel ashamed because of their behavior because they are operating in a system of ageism or whatever ism is impacting them at that time because as you mentioned, these are forces that come from outside of us. We are not born ages. My dad was 54 when I was born and it took me, I remember being a little kid and just not getting that. You know, the first days at school seeing everyone else's parents looking really different. Like it was I was five, you know that I wasn't born thinking this guy is an old man. But
[00:16:28] spk_1: shame is just never any good. I mean I just tweeted this morning like I have no shame about shaming corporations for bad behavior, but shame. It isn't helpful. I started doing a lot more thinking about my own racism in the last few years, spurred on by the Black Lives Matter movement and one of the things I learned early on was people of color are not interested in how ashamed you are of the hideous history they want to know if and what you are going to do about it and we have to operate in our own way. But when you catch someone behaving in a way you don't approve of, it's really important to think you need to say something if you want to change the culture. But it's important to do it in a way that I've heard it like calling it in calling people into the cause rather than calling them out for being fill in the blank is right. It's your goal to shame or is your goal to change the way people think about something
[00:17:23] spk_0: and I think not to digress too much, but this is sort of where the whole cancel culture moved really takes us further from the objective of bringing people together. And actually in a lot of ways folks doubled down on their behavior when they have experienced that kind of level of public shame as well. They feel defensive totally.
[00:17:42] spk_1: Yeah. And when you put someone on the defense of they stop listening. I mean a really good all purpose response to a comment that feels ageist or sexist or whatever is, what do you mean by that said in a spirit of genuine? It's really hard sometimes to avoid the snark. Sometimes I don't manage it, but then the person has to think about what they did mean. You look great for your age. Well what do you mean by that? Here you go young lady, what do you mean by that? You know? And we have to think about why what they intended as a compliment doesn't feel like a compliment and that's when the gears start to change and you know, and that changes the culture. One pause in one person's mind helps change the way they think about this and they're going to think about it a little differently next time, you know, change is incremental, it's slow
[00:18:31] spk_2: and you're highlighting such an important part of communication is certainly for leaders but for all of us really that rather than and it is it can be hard to mitigate the snark if we bring curiosity and compassion that that person presumably had the best of intentions but didn't make that statement or that question consciously allowing planting that question and holding some space for them to think about that in a compassionate way is such a beautiful way of opening up a conversation rather than shutting it down. So I love that, I love that tip
[00:18:58] spk_1: most viruses unconscious. Yeah, I mean it doesn't let you off the hook, you know intent but it matters, you know, if you're yeah,
[00:19:05] spk_2: like let's shine a light on it, let's have a look at it and then we can unpack it and maybe change what the manifestation of your intention is
[00:19:12] spk_1: and change it just a little bit. I've never been a patient person. But oddly this work has made me more patient. You know, you can't people say when will your job be done? Well in a million years from now when we've undone all these things because you can't get rid of ageism without addressing sexism for all the reasons we've already talked about and without undoing able ism for the reasons and racism and so on. I think that humans, there's always going to be tribalism and one upmanship especially when people are fearful scarcity makes us stupid and pits us against each other. So it's never going to be done. But the flip side of that is two things. One is the smallest action you take say, what do you mean by that or you know, go to a person that you've seen. I think it has experienced something prejudice in some way and say I saw this thing I want you to know I saw it and can I help you around it in any way and respect their answer. And another big thought I had was in the context of intersectionality. This idea which I find a very heavy idea in every sense that these different barriers weigh on people if you encounter gender discrimination, if you do not have financial resources if you have a disability and so on, but that they intersect and inform each other but so do different forms of activism. When you call out any form of prejudice, you chip away at the fear and ignorance that underlie them all The question, what do you mean by that? That works no matter what the offense is. And maybe it's not an offense, Maybe you misheard it. Maybe it's not what we think it is. That's part of it too. But it's a way to open the dialogue, It ripples outward the same way that these barriers affect us externally.
[00:20:56] spk_2: Absolutely. Ashton and I know just sort of thinking specifically now, I guess of ageism in the workplace and I know in your book you highlight several really potent reasons why the biases against holders in the workplace are unfounded. I love the term actually that you use older as a way of describing olders
[00:21:13] spk_1: and youngers. It works because it reinforces the idea that we age in relation to others. You know, a four year, I will assure you that she is older than her little sister and someone in a care home will assure you that she is younger and mrs so and so down the hall, we don't wake up old one day with everything gone to hell, right? It's a spectrum and olders and youngers also solves the eternal thorny question of what do we call old people.
[00:21:37] spk_2: Exactly. I feel like it's a kind of a gentle term as well because as you say, it is a spectrum and it's definitely not something that happens to us overnight, it always in process from the moment we take efforts breath
[00:21:48] spk_1: and it's an antidote with the minute you start dividing people into age groups. Well, this is what 40 to 55 year olds do. It's never accurate. That's a reason, a slight digression, a reason I would like to rid the world of generational labels entirely. You know, what does millennial mean? You describe yourself as a millennial Alexis and that means you were born between a certain year and a certain roughly other year that no social scientists agree on. There's no scientifically agreed upon, you know, definition of generation. How could anything possibly be true of the millions and millions of people born roughly around the same time? And it enables stereotyping and dumping people into buckets, which is always a mistake. But the longer we live, the more different from one another we become right as different experiences shape us. The geeky way to say that that scientists say is is that the defining characteristic of old age is hetero Geneti. So the older the person, the less that number says about what they're capable of, what their interested in. And the more problematic it becomes to lump us into X to y year olds, which is why just talking about olders and youngers polls and and run really handily around that whole problem. And it's more accurate and is more
[00:23:05] spk_0: inclusive and my brain is just buzzing with thoughts as you're speaking and Ashton because well, this concept of age being such a relative thing because again, sort of just reflecting my own personal experience and I played sports for most of my life and now as a 31 year old, I'm too old, Too old to be playing sport at the same level level 10 years ago. But in my job and in my career I'm very young compared to a lot of other perhaps thinkers and thought leaders in that space. Even
[00:23:30] spk_1: your experience on, you know, I don't know what you play for, you know, football in your spare time or that's what I play tennis or whatever. You will play less well than some older people who are really good at it and much better than some younger people ability is relative to, I have never been athletic. So the fact that I can't run jog anymore doesn't bother me because I never did jog, but it pains my partner because he really misses running and he can't do it anymore.
[00:23:58] spk_2: Um I think we've also so beautifully touched on some of these biases that we have, we assume there is this kind of characterization, I think of older people almost sort of all just becoming this nebulous gray cloud
[00:24:10] spk_1: elderly. Yeah,
[00:24:12] spk_2: yeah. And you unpack this so beautifully in your book, these biases against holders in the workplace and explain how these are actually completely unfounded and yet very pervasive, I'd love to hear a little bit about which of these biases you maybe would identify as like as most dangerous and why How does this impact older people and their careers and their experience in workplaces?
[00:24:31] spk_1: Well, we touched on the stereotype I dislike the most, which is not workplace specific, which is that old people are all alike. I mean, I'd also like to put a silver stake through the word elderly, which has a legitimate connotation in a sort of clinical framework. The main problem with it is the in front of it because it implies that people belong to some homogenous bunch when nothing could be further from the truth. And also it connotes frailty and while some older people are indeed frail and frailty does indeed increase with age, it is not true of most older people, right? So it fosters, you know, grouping and stereotyping the same way millennial labels do. I would say the most problematic stereotype in the workplace well to come to mind and there, I guess related that old people can't learn new things. You know, if I had to master nuclear physics in order to feed my Children who mercifully are grown up and I'm not feeding them very often anymore, but we learn what we need to learn, right? I mean, I'm embarrassed by this, but I'm a bit of a technophobe, but I have learned to master social media platforms. I was reading last night having to learn how to work mastodon if twitter bites the dust, but you know what, I'll learn it not because I want to learn, it not becomes, it comes easily to me because it's a really important means of getting my message out and that doesn't make me so special, that makes me human. It may take us longer to learn certain kinds of things, but there's tons of evidence that the older brain is better at certain kinds of tasks. Don't ever want to fall into the track of like old people are better, smarter wiser. The wise thing is just another stereotype, honestly, we want all ages in the workforce, we want mixed age groups, you know, just like we want all genders and all races and all, you know for the same reasons. So it is just simply not true that older people don't learn new things. One reason that the stereotype raises its head is the training opportunities are not offered to older people. So, you know, and these days, especially with the globalization and the rapid rate of technological change. We all need training life long and hand in hand with that is the idea that older people can't master technology in particular. You know, it's just without basis, you know, I know many younger people who are more resistant, who refused to be on social media, who like reading paper books, you know, one of the earliest adopters now was my mother in law who was an early adopter and a techno file, but she loved her kindle because she could carry a library with her at all times and you know when books are heavy to lift and that became hard for her. So it's the reason is never aged a smartphone adoption for eggs, example maps way more to class than it does to age right. There are tons of people in the majority world who don't have smartphones. That's not because they're too stupid or too lazy to master smartphones. It's because they can't afford them or because there isn't the broadband technology to support it where they live, it's never about age, it's about class, it's about opportunity, it's about equity. I warned you everything connects to everything we're in trouble? Well,
[00:27:45] spk_0: my brain is just a million miles an hour as usual. I was just reflecting on some research, I read a little while ago around the concept of neural plasticity and learning and how, as you mentioned over time we can continue to learn new things. We know that for sure. However, the way our brain learns new things may take, I guess different ways of learning or perhaps more time, whatever it may be. Do you think that there is, I guess where am I going with this? Is there a way where understanding our age and how it relates to things like learning can actually benefit us in understanding what we need to do to perhaps train employees of different age groups or things like that. You know,
[00:28:27] spk_1: I'm gonna lob the ball back over the net because the way I learned things is probably different from the way you learn things, but it was probably different from the way I learned as a seven year old and you learned as a seven year old and whether, you know, we had parents who, who read to us or dragged us to museums or don't, but then there are those people who grew up in homes, this has always puzzled me without a book in sight, you know, who grew up to be philosophy professors and people who grew up in a house is filled with books and I don't mean to make it all about books or you know, athletes who grew up in families where everyone was a couch potato and inversely. So I think we know that the brain remains plastic in the capacity to learn new things never expires. Scientists believe that using your brain is good for you, especially, I hate to say a task that require real effort and memorization, like learning to play a musical instrument, like learning a language. And the theory is that this builds what they call cognitive reserve. If you sit in a chair all day and do nothing but watch reruns on television, you are not giving your brain a workout. On the other hand, there are people who sit in chairs and watch reruns all day, who are sharp, you know, stay totally sharp to the end. So there are things we can do. Of course there's a big study in count based in California longitudinal study where they studied people over decades and they discovered that some people who stayed sharp to the end had brains that were filled with Alzheimer's type plaques and tangles and they looked at what those people had in common and they decided that they had a purpose in life, something that gave their lives meaning. And I think it's important to point out that that purpose can be to see the next rerun of that show. It doesn't have to be to cure cancer or end ageism, especially in the west. We have this sort of toxic notion that you have to keep being productive. Watch out for that word, you know, and keep making money and keep doing bigger and better and sooner or later. You can't do the same thing you always did and you can't do them bigger or better and there's luck involved. But purpose, you know, and social connection are really important. So it's really important to maintain a solid social network that is the single most important component of a good old age. And I'm going to throw a plug in here for understanding age bias and examining your attitudes towards aging, aging just like you pointed out in the beginning sally, there is a growing body of fascinating evidence about how attitudes towards aging affect how our body and our mind function at the cellular level. Most of it done by a woman named Beck Olivia at Yale who has a terrific book called Breaking the Age Code. It's up there in my bookcase which is all about this, how your beliefs about aging affect how long and how well you live. And she is a cautious scientist. I know her you don't publish a book with a subtitle like that unless you have your data. And one of her studies shows that people, she calls it a more positive attitude towards aging. I like to say people with a more accurate attitude towards aging because this is not happy talk, they are less likely to develop alzheimer's even if they have the gene that predisposes them to the disease. So one thing I can say with absolute certainty brain training was not going to make you better at anything except brain training, but educate yourself about age and aging and that confers protection against dementia. And I think that's all of our biggest fears. That
[00:32:05] spk_2: is some incredible data. And I have to say Ashton, even since delving into your work in the last few months in particular, I found myself really, you know, observing it myself quite some for example, I have an injury. I'll say something like, oh, I'm getting old, you know, I'll link it somehow to age in a negative way. And it's been so beautiful to actually bring that lens to it because it's really making me see how internalized that is and how dangerous it is. And I'm loving this data now because this is inspiring me even further. I think to maybe start calling out some of my friends, but also particularly myself on it. And I do just want to have to mention that My mom is turning 80 in February and her word all stats are off the charts. So she's got several purposes. I think that you really keep her spurred to keep going and I think hearing you articulate, that's really inspiring. So thank you so much for sharing
[00:32:53] spk_1: It. Well I can hear the smile in your voice. And one one thing I do say to people is reading my book or listening to what I have to say will make you feel better about the years ahead now. Part of it is because we think it's all going to be so dreadful in fairness, but my book is filled with science and facts and data and so you know, you really do, it really does wake you up to how biased and unduly negative our vision tends to be. And you just mentioned a really, really good tactic to examine whether we're blaming things on age when age is hardly ever. The reason you may be too lazy to do something, you may be too out of show shape to do something. You may be too smart to do that thing. You may have already done it before, whatever, but we are never too old, you're back may hurt because you cook dinner for 10 people or lifted something heavy. So a little bit of self examination is to think about how you use the words old and young. And is there a better adjective that would do the case? I just put yesterday on twitter, something was new york times headline. I live in new york, aging corporation in trouble, you know, because blah blah and it was like, whoa, aging is now like an all purpose pejorative for companies to how about mismanaged, how about you? Word that describes the thing, the attribute don't use old and young
[00:34:19] spk_2: or, or aging is a synonym for mismatch, you know, archaic
[00:34:24] spk_1: or young as a synonym for sexy or competent because you can feel ugly and incompetent when you're a teenager. God knows right. You know, it doesn't have to do with
[00:34:34] spk_0: age. Ashton, interestingly you said that I hope that people who read your book and perhaps listen to this conversation feel better about age, I'm currently feel Worse because I'm 31 and realizing that the reason I'm not surfing and playing football as well as I used to is probably because I'm too lazy to be pursuing those things to the extent I should be. So thank you for that. It's on me. So that's a good wake up call for anyone who's 31 like myself and say I'm too old for this crap, that tends to be my excuse pretty regularly for things and you know, to go back and you have briefly mentioned this earlier in our conversation ashton, that the generational terminology like boomer, like millennial, like gen, x, gen z is something that you're uncomfortable with and frankly would like to debunk. And I wanted to raise a point of contention here. That is something we hear about so regularly in the labor force and that is that there's a lot of concern about the impact of the boomer generation's departure from the workforce and this is both in terms of skills and the knowledge drain, but also the impact that this generation will have on the health care system or the perception of their impact on the health care system that the boomer generation will have, that older people will have
[00:35:49] spk_1: if it's health care, you're really talking about, what impact will people with chronic illness and disability. Now those increase with age. But again, to equate them with old nous is problematic, right? It is more about capacity. It is more about able ism than ageism in that context. And it is also if we zoom out if we live in societies of which there are a few examples in the world, you know, gasping leaf, you where people have subsidized medicine from birth to death and health care, affordable healthcare healthcare costs are not rising in proportion to population, aging people are living longer everywhere in the world and that is not causing health care costs to increase. So the assumption that older people are going to be economic drains or overwhelm the healthcare system are simply without basis. There are correlations, you know, we do need in the U. S. To revamp our health care system with an orientation on preventive medicine. Because many of the conditions, there are very few actual diseases of old age. Most of what catches up with us are conditions that we incurred earlier on in life that become symptomatic as our bodies function less well, I'm not pretending that's not the case, right? But if we had access to good health care from birth on that everyone could afford, we would have less chronic illness at the end. This assumption that it equals boldness, that they are in lockstep, that they are causal it is problematic and it's a really convenient discourse because it frames things as old versus young as healthy versus sick there too. You know, us versus them Binaries, why are we spending all this money on insert the category old people, sick people, disabled people and disabled is sort of a proxy for sick, although lots of disabled people will assure you they are not sick when we could be spending at on young people, right? And non disabled people and that is a toxic narrative in any case and you know, no prejudice makes sense. But given that we are all the lucky among us are going to age and that we are all going to age into some degree of incapacity. It is especially nonsensical and inhumane. Although racism is every bit as inhumane. And I don't mean to say, certainly not only is one form of bias more important than another, we cannot get rid of any of them without addressing them.
[00:38:26] spk_2: I think that's incredibly powerful words. Ashton, I think it's also what's concerning to me. I'm just reflecting on the fact that we sort of have this, we use generations and these kind of nebulous terms to dehumanize. I think sometimes, and to be able to talk about this group of people harming society. And then as soon as well, maybe not for everyone, but if maybe we have a parent or someone close to us who does suddenly need the health care system, then things change and it's very different. So, I think if we try to keep these discussions really focusing on the human and our humanity and that by letting go of maybe that scarcity mindset, which I can imagine in certain countries is challenging because the health care system really is, you know, incredibly trying to find a term that we can use on the show. But it's, you know, it really has a lot of issues and I know living in the Netherlands as I do. There is a stark difference compared to many countries in terms of the way the access that people have throughout their lives to healthcare, which means that as we grow older, there are less issues that occur and we have access to the care that we need. So it feels like a much more nuanced
[00:39:26] spk_1: response and young people need that access to right, We need a lifelong. The issue is a better world in which to grow old, but that is a better world in which to be female. That is a better world in which to be a person of color, A better world in which to have a disability is a better world for everyone, philosophically and literally, and we need support lifelong, you need support when you're a kid, you need support when you break your leg, you need to support if you start a family and you're trying to juggle career and family obligations and so on. It's not old versus young, it's equity across the lifespan,
[00:40:01] spk_2: love that. You touched on the term career there and you mentioned in your book also this term, an encore career and if you can impact for us and the listeners also, what is meant by the term encore career and what some of the benefits of more of us embracing this concept might have for workplaces and for society even more broadly,
[00:40:21] spk_1: I would reframe the question Now the term encore career was I I believe coined by a wonderful, lovely man named Mark Friedman who started a group called Encore and they have just changed their name tellingly to co generate and turned their focus to encouraging people of all ages to get to know each other to support each other because that is obviously the organic way we and ageism just as we, it's very hard to be racist if you have friends of all different ethnic groups and so on. So all car career. The idea behind it when he coined it was that there are lots of older people who retired but still had the energy and the desire to give back and stay productive air quotes around that in the world. In some way I think that what we need is a way more radical rethinking and I also think that is, and I think Mark would agree that is a somewhat narrow and privileged position. A lot of people can never afford to stop working right and cannot afford to stop and look around and think, gee what less well paying job, part time job, what I'd like to do to give myself meaning my life, meaning that is itself a privileged point of view. It's legitimate, it's great. I'm glad people are doing it, but I see the workforce as in far more radical transition for all of us. The whole concept of retirement is obsolete, People are longer lifespans and the demise of, you know, my dad started, worked for one company as all life, No one does that anymore. We are developing into a world where people are going to move into and out of different careers. Different companies just as women have always known this our lives have always been more discontinuous because of patriarchy because we've had to accommodate typically, you know, the demand if heterosexual terms, the demand of the partner who makes more money, which in heterosexual terms is typically the man, we do more unpaid caregiving whether of Children or of older people and so on. So we have always transition in and out of the workforce more often. You know, the entire landscape of work is in transition. It was before the pandemic provoked this massive shift to working remote and I think that the entire idea of retirement is becoming obsolete. We're going to have to move into and out of different careers, lifelong and continuously be trained in this new landscape. So I think the idea of an encore career is a little bit now out of date and I think we're beginning to see all sorts of more interesting alternatives emerging, although of course it maps a lot to how much freedom you have to make your own choices. An awful lot of people, you know, in a heartless, globalized economy are going to be scrambling for any kind of work they can get without the protections of unions and all of that. And of course people with less privilege are going to be more disadvantaged in that job market.
[00:43:22] spk_2: And I think that's certainly been my experience in finance lawyer to you, yoga teacher to turnout, researcher and co director of Human leaders. And I think a big part of our focus that human leaders is also on the onus that we have as people of privilege to do what we can to shift to support and facilitate that shift. That really dramatic agreed
[00:43:43] spk_1: a really good example. You know, that people with disabilities were asking employers for decades to make it possible to work remotely. And the minute the health of the general public, you know, became up for grabs, suddenly those changes magically became possible. So one thing that's very simple act of solidarity. Nothing is simple but is to ask that employers make these changes permanent so that more people can have access to
[00:44:08] spk_0: work Ashton, there's so much for us to take away from this conversation, but I'd like to ask a question, I guess, to leave us on here. And you know that the antidote to ageism is awareness, integration and active. How can leaders of all ages who are listening to this conversation actively embody these aspects of anti ageism?
[00:44:29] spk_1: Well, I think the answer is always, you know, it always starts with looking within ourselves at where our own bias is. And since ageism is less examined. Think about your own attitudes towards agent ageism and what biases you might have within you again, we all do. I say and think ages things all the time and think about how when you are whatever your cause or your mission is from a diversity equity and inclusion point of view. You know, I think for now I sometimes ask people, what do you think of as the categories for D. E. I. And everyone says gender and people say race. Sometimes they say ability. If age is missing from that conversation, asked why if everyone in the same room is the same age, asked why? You know, I've gotten pretty good at noticing when everyone in the room is white. You know, very seldom an equally good reason for everyone to be the same age. And when we leave young people out of the conversation and older people out of the conversation, everyone suffers because different people bring in. You know, it's not the case I'm dying to make, but younger people do have certain overarching, you know, can't even get the sentence out because I don't want to say younger people are better at things X. Y. C. Than older people. But it is diversity. The more diverse experiences you have around the table or whether it's the boardroom, you know, the kitchen table, whatever table, the richer the discussion and the more we are in touch with our own humanities humanity with our own capacity and lack of capacity with what we know and what we don't know and we need that to operate in this complicated messed up world and make it better
[00:46:11] spk_2: if your listeners could see how vehemently lex and I are nodding right now, our heads are about to fall off. We are in such deep agreement with you, Ashton, thank you so much for your time today. It's been a real delight, my pleasure to explore your expertise. And we're really excited to continue to follow your work. Thank
[00:46:28] spk_1: you. My pleasure, Thank you.
[00:46:36] spk_0: Thanks for being with us for this conversation with Ashton Applewhite. We hope that you just like us were able to sit and hold space in the discomfort to recognize ageism and how prevalent it is in our workplaces and societies. If you love this episode and would like to know more about Ashton Applewhite and her work. Find our show notes at w W W dot. We are human leaders dot com forward slash podcast. Thank you for being with us. And we'll see you next time.