Ageism: the number one vector of workplace discrimination in Europe?

When we talk of diversity and inclusion, one category of person is often excluded: the over-50s. This exclusion is seen most clearly in discourse around online hate speech, where the focus is almost exclusively on racist, misogynist or ableist language, and rarely on ageism. At least before Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter (now X) social media platforms appeared to try their best to remove dehumanising posts or memes targeting ethnic or sexual minorities, but there was never such eagerness to censor the dehumanisation of the elderly. 

It was and is acceptable to hate the “boomer”. The most famous example was the mainstream use of “OK, Boomer” to dismiss the irrelevant input of the elderly; on Reddit, a site known for its removal of offensive content, one can find a subreddit called “Boomers Are Tumors” with 4,000 members; on 4chan and beyond there was the “day of the pillow”, “a hypothetical mass killing event against Baby Boomers carried out through the means of them being smothered with pillows in nursing homes.” 

The resentment is not limited to the anglophone world. Anyone taking a cursory glance at the online right in France will encounter the so-called “social contract” meme, in which young professional “Nicolas (30 years old)”, weeps as half his paycheck goes to welfare for unskilled immigrants and “giant pensions” for “Bernard & Chantal (70 years old)”.

Going hand in hand with this form of exclusion is the condescending assumption that the over-50s are less capable, both physically and intellectually, of contributing to society, especially when it comes to the workplace. In France, as Mélanie Mermoz reports in l’Humanité, “the diversity policies of companies are now starting to incorporate the fight against ageism”, but “there is still too much tolerance of discrimination against seniors”. Mermoz points to the International Labour Organisation’s 17th barometer on the perception of discrimination at work, published in December 2024, which found that “a quarter of unemployed seniors claimed to have been told that they were too old for the job during an interview”, and “50%declare having experienced demeaning interactions at work in the last five years”. When these workers reported their experience to their employers, only half “felt that they were listened to”.

Pascale Hardy-Amargil, founder of diversity and inclusion consultancy and communications agency Yes We Are, tells Mermoz that “older employees are made invisible in company communications [...]. You don’t see older employees in video clips [...] or LinkedIn pages, and what you don’t see doesn’t exist”.

In La Tribune, French Minister of Labour and Employment Astrid Panosyan-Bouvet is upfront about the discrimination faced by older workers: “Age is the number one vector of discrimination in the workplace: after the age of 50, you have less access to training, you are three times less likely to be called back for an interview, and when you are unemployed, you are unemployed for longer. But experience has value. We should stop talking about senior citizens, and start talking about experienced workers.” 

Talking to Marjorie Cessac in Le Monde, Frédérique Jeske, founder of Senior for Good, also says that “ageism is the number one form of discrimination in the labour market”, adding that it is “silent, socially acceptable, and rarely discussed”.

In Kollega, the magazine of Unionen, Sweden’s largest trade union, David Österberg talks with Uppsala University economist Stefan Eriksson about his research on work-related age discrimination. In one of Eriksson’s studies, “they sent out 6,000 fictitious job applications and stated the age of applicants. The result: already in their 40s, the probability of being contacted by an employer decreased. The probability then dropped more as the age increased, and for those who approached retirement age, the likelihood of being contacted by the employer was very low”.

“What surprised me”, Eriksson says, “was that it began so early. In the general debate, it is often claimed that age discrimination occurs around 50-55, but we could see that already in one’s 40s there is a reduced likelihood of being contacted. [...] It was everything from manual professions to administrative professions. We didn’t see a clear pattern based on profession. One might have thought that more people would be rejected because of their age in more physical professions, but this was not the case”.

Eriksson’s research also found that employers tend to have negative stereotypes regarding older employees’ “flexibility” and their ability to “learn new things” and be “driven and enterprising”. These stereotypes also lead to older employees having less chance of being promoted. Thus, for Eriksson, there is a contradiction between the push for people to have longer working lives (by raising the statutory retirement age, for example), and the fact that older people face incremental discrimination as they age: “we are very strongly urged to work longer, but it is difficult to achieve this if employers are reluctant to employ elderly people. People must be willing to work, but employers must also be willing to hire”.

In Demos, the bulletin of the Netherlands Interdisciplinary Demographic Institute (NIDI), Jasper Bosma and Hanna van Solinge present a slightly rosier picture of older workers, or at least those in the Netherlands. According to the Rijksuniversiteit Groningen researchers, despite “the pension age being a strong social norm for people to stop working, [...] the employment rate has increased sharply among pensioners in recent years. Statistics Netherlands figures show, for example, that employment for 68-year-olds increased from 10% to 26% for men between 2003 and 2023, and from three to 8% for women”. The researchers also found that “Health is an obstructive but not an exclusive factor: 8% of pensioners with moderate or poor health were still active in the labour market”. On average, older employees also intend to keep working until they reach 75 years of age (the Dutch retirement age is 67).

Perhaps most interestingly, financial concerns were low on the list of motives for pensioners returning to or remaining in the workplace. All categories in the researchers’ study chose “fun” as their primary motive, followed by “social contacts”. “Income” was between the third or fifth motive, depending on the category of worker. 

With fears that labour shortages will only increase as the European population ages, the NIDI researchers argue that gaining insight into the motives and preferences of pension-aged workers can help us understand how to better integrate these experienced workers into the workplace, and “the results of this study suggest that pensioners work mainly because they like it”.