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Carri Bugbee

The next #MeToo movement: Older women confront ageism - Chicago Tribune - 0 views

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    Similar to the shame women felt about sexual harassment prior to the #MeToo movement, many professional women remain silent when subjected to ageist behavior in the workplace. They choose silence, afraid to complain and draw attention to their age for fear they'll lose their jobs. Because then what? For many, it's almost impossible to get rehired as a woman over 50.
Carri Bugbee

Done With Silicon Valley | Perspectives | Perspectives | KQED - 0 views

  • I’m now 49, and I have had three Valley tech jobs in four years, two of which I lost after clashing with mediocre, insecure men. I’m tired of the toxic, dysfunctional work environments they created and the blatant, disturbing sexism and ageism experienced there.
  • It’s hard to be your best self if you are always forced to play politics and justify your existence to those who think they can do your job better than you can. I know I can still be my best self, at 49 and beyond - just not in Silicon Valley.
Carri Bugbee

If You're Over 50, Chances Are the Decision to Leave a Job Won't be Yours - ProPublica - 0 views

  • between the time older workers enter the study and when they leave paid employment, 56 percent are laid off at least once or leave jobs under such financially damaging circumstances that it’s likely they were pushed out rather than choosing to go voluntarily. Only one in 10 of these workers ever again earns as much as they did before their employment setbacks, our analysis showed. Even years afterward, the household incomes of over half of those who experience such work disruptions remain substantially below those of workers who don’t. “This isn’t how most people think they’re going to finish out their work lives,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist and veteran scholar of the older labor force who worked on the analysis. “For the majority of older Americans, working after 50 is considerably riskier and more turbulent than we previously thought.”
  • An additional 13 percent of workers who start their 50s in long-held positions unexpectedly retire under conditions that suggest they were forced out. They begin by telling survey takers they plan to keep working for many years, but, within a couple of years, they suddenly announce they’ve retired, amid a substantial drop in earnings and income. Jeffrey Wenger, a senior labor economist with the RAND Corp., said some of these people likely were laid off, but they cover it up by saying they retired. “There’s so much social stigma around being separated from work,” he said, “even people who are fired or let go will say they retired to save face.”
  • Taken together, the scale of damage sustained by older workers is substantial. According to the U.S. Census Bureau, there are currently 40 million Americans age 50 and older who are working. Our analysis of the HRS data suggests that as many as 22 million of these people have or will suffer a layoff, forced retirement or other involuntary job separation. Of these, only a little over 2 million have recovered or will. “These findings tell us that a sizable percentage, possibly a majority, of workers who hold career jobs in their 50s will get pushed out of those jobs on their way to retirement,” Burtless said. “Yes, workers can find jobs after a career job comes to an early, unexpected end. But way too often, the replacement job is a whole lot worse than the career job. This leaves little room for the worker to rebuild.”
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  • in recent years, employers’ pleas for greater freedom to remake their workforces to meet global competition have won an increasingly sympathetic hearing. Federal appeals courts and the U.S. Supreme Court have reacted by widening the reach of the ADEA’s exceptions and restricting the law’s protections. Meanwhile, most employers have stopped offering traditional pensions, which once delivered a double-barreled incentive for older workers to retire voluntarily: maximum payouts for date-certain departures and the assurance that benefits would last as long as the people receiving them. That’s left workers largely responsible for financing their own retirements and many in need of continued work.
  • The share of U.S. workers who’ve suffered financially damaging, employer-driven job separations after age 50 has risen steadily from just over 10 percent in 1998 to almost 30 percent in 2016, the analysis shows.
  • The turbulence experienced by older workers is about the same regardless of their income, education, geography or industry. Some 58 percent of those with high school educations who reach their 50s working steadily in long-term jobs subsequently face a damaging layoff or other involuntarily separation. Yet more education provides little additional protection; 55 percent of those with college or graduate degrees experience similar job losses.
Carri Bugbee

40 Online Resources All Women in Tech Careers Should Know About | PCMag.com - 0 views

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    48 percent of women in tech reported a marked lack of mentors and advisors.
Carri Bugbee

New Evidence of Age Bias in Hiring, and a Push to Fight It - The New York Times - 0 views

  • It is complicating an already challenging juncture of life. Workers over 50 — about 54 million Americans — are now facing much more precarious financial circumstances, a legacy of the recession.More than half of workers over 50 lose longtime jobs before they are ready to retire, according to a recent analysis by the Urban Institute and ProPublica. Of those, nine out of 10 never recover their previous earning power. Some are able to find only piecemeal or gig work.
  • “If you lose your job at an older age, it’s really hard to get a new one,” said Richard Johnson, an Urban Institute economist who worked on the analysis.‘The Look in Their Eyes’Tom Adair dressed in a sharply pressed white shirt and a blue blazer with gold buttons for the weekly meeting for ExperiencePlus, a group for job seekers over 50 held in the small library at St. John the Baptist Church in Madison, Ala., near Huntsville.A former quality manager at Toyota and an Air Force consultant, Mr. Adair said he has had temporary consulting assignments over the last decade but has not been able to get a steady full-time job since the recession’s nadir in 2009.
  • “I ace the phone interviews,” Mr. Adair said. “They say: ‘Your résumé speaks volumes. You could hit the ground running. It looks like you’re the perfect fit.’”“But you come in, and you’re D.O.A.,” said Mr. Adair, who is 71 and has neatly clipped gray hair. “You can see the look in their eyes.”“My wife says: ‘We need to get you a face-lift. We need to get your hair dyed,’” he said.Older workers are much more likely to wrestle with prolonged joblessness than younger ones, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. On average, a 54-year-old job hunter will be unemployed for nearly a year.Repeated inquiries can go unanswered, like space probes lost in a distant galaxy. In one of the most comprehensive studies, résumés were sent out on behalf of more than 40,000 fictitious applicants of different ages for thousands of low-skill jobs like janitors, administrative assistants and retail sales clerks in 12 cities. In general, the older they were, the fewer callbacks they got.
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  • Those in their 60s “never do better, and often do worse,” than those a decade or two younger, said David Neumark, an economics professor at the University of California, Irvine, who oversaw the research.It is toughest for women, who suffer more age discrimination than men starting in their 40s, the researchers found. “The evidence of age discrimination against women kind of pops out in every study,” Mr. Neumark said.
  • As for Mr. Adair, he said he had been through the same job-application routine so many times that it felt like “Groundhog Day.” Over the years, he consulted three lawyers about age discrimination. Each time, they advised that an individual lawsuit would not be worth the legal costs.
  • With a small pension and Social Security, he said, he and his wife are “just getting by.”“It’s devastating,” Mr. Adair said. “You go through the stages just like dying. First you can’t believe it. You’re so sure and your wife is so sure, and even the recruiter is. Then you get mad.” By the end, you feel like giving up, he said.Wanted: Greener EmployeesHiring complaints and lawsuits are rarely filed because they are difficult to prove and the cost is high, said Robert E. Weisberg, a regional attorney with the federal Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in Florida.
  • To bring a case against Seasons 52, a national restaurant chain, Mr. Weisberg said, the commission looked to establish a pattern of bias over a period of years by combining statistical analyses with testimony from applicants.The agency examined whether the chain could have hired so few applicants 40 or older if there had been no age discrimination, and calculated the odds at less than one in 10,000, according to court documents. The commission also collected affidavits from 139 applicants at 35 restaurants.George Simmons was 45 when he applied at a Seasons 52 in Lone Tree, Colo., in 2014. “My interview was going well until the interviewer asked me my age,” he stated. After he answered, he said, he was shown the door. “I asked what was the problem,” he said, “and the interviewer responded that the restaurant was looking for younger people.”
  • Heidi Barsaloux was 44 when she applied for a bartender position at a Seasons 52 in Schaumburg, Ill., in 2010. “An interviewer told me that they were not looking for people with that much experience and wanted people who were more green,” she said.
  • A third applicant was told, “We are not looking for old white guys.”Ultimately, the chain, part of Darden Restaurants, agreed last year to pay $2.85 million and hire a monitor to prevent discrimination against applicants over 40. As part of the settlement, the chain denied any wrongdoing.There have been other legal offensives.The Communications Workers of America has filed a lawsuit on behalf of millions of older Americans against Amazon, T-Mobile and Cox Communications, accusing them and hundreds of other major employers of systematic age discrimination in hiring based on targeted online advertising.
  • The union and several workers have also filed complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission against more than 70 employers and employment agencies related to age discrimination in recruiting. It expects that some of those will turn into class-action lawsuits.By exposing so much of the help-wanted process on the internet, “the transformation to digital recruiting has shined a spotlight on how discrimination happens, and it’s made it much easier to do so,” said Peter Romer-Friedman, a lawyer at Outten & Golden working with the union. “We’re going to start going after these companies, one by one.”And in a broad settlement with civil rights groups and the union, Facebook agreed to eliminate the ability of advertisers to screen out minority groups, women or older job seekers from seeing particular help-wanted listings.
  • “We want the E.E.O.C. to declare that this type of exclusionary advertising is unlawful” on any online platform, Mr. Romer-Friedman said.Joe Osborne, a Facebook spokesman, said the company had taken steps to combat hiring discrimination and was exploring what more to do.A Cap on ExperienceDale E. Kleber had been out of work for three years when he saw a posting in 2014 for a legal position at CareFusion, a medical technology company. At 58, with three of his four children living at home, in a suburb of Chicago, he was feeling the financial strain of prolonged unemployment.So even though the ad specified that applicants should have no more than seven years of experience, Mr. Kleber applied. CareFusion ended up hiring a 29-year-old.
  • Mr. Kleber, a veteran lawyer and former general counsel of a national dairy and food company, sued, arguing that a limit on experience effectively ruled out older applicants.“Litigation is a terrible way to settle disputes,” said Mr. Kleber, who during his career had defended companies against complaints filed with the E.E.O.C. “It’s a very uncertain process, it is fraught with risk, and sometimes it comes out wrong.”Putting a cap on experience, though, “just seemed so egregious,” he said.The United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit did not agree. In a ruling this year supporting CareFusion, it stated that recruiting practices that have the effect of screening out older applicants — what is known in legal terms as having a “disparate impact” — did not violate the law.
  • The decision mirrored one involving R. J. Reynolds Tobacco made earlier by the Court of Appeals for 11th Circuit in Atlanta, which the Supreme Court declined to review. It ruled that unlike employees already on the payroll who can show that a policy has a negative impact on a group regardless of the motivation, applicants would have to prove intentional discrimination.Troy Kirkpatrick, a spokesman for Becton Dickinson and Company, which owns CareFusion, said, “We are deeply committed to providing equal employment opportunities and a workplace free from discrimination, and as such we are pleased with the decision from the Seventh Circuit Court of Appeals.”In April, Mr. Kleber and the AARP Foundation asked the United States Supreme Court to review the case.“It defies common sense,” Mr. Kleber said, to think Congress “intended to offer greater legal protections to people who have jobs than people looking for jobs” when it passed the Age Discrimination in Employment Act in 1967.
  • Other older workers and advocates elsewhere are making the same argument, pushing for a broader interpretation of the law.In a federal court in California, a class-action lawsuit against the global accounting firm PwC that claims “substantial evidence of age disparities in hiring” was certified in April. The company noted on its career website and in reports that the average age of its 220,000-member work force was 27, and that 80 percent of the staff members were millennials (born after 1981).PwC responded that the company’s “hiring practices are merit-based and have nothing to do with age.” It added, “The plaintiffs’ accusations are false, and we will prove that in court.”
Carri Bugbee

Is Homework for Job Applicants Effective? - 0 views

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    In California, pre-employment training must be paid, but employers don't have to compensate candidates for tryouts that: Truly qualify as skills tests. Involve productivity that is of no use to the company.
Carri Bugbee

Women Did Everything Right. Then Work Got 'Greedy.' - 0 views

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    American women of working age are the most educated ever. Yet it's the most educated women who face the biggest gender gaps in seniority and pay: At the top of their fields, they represent just 5 percent of big company chief executives and a quarter of the top 10 percent of earners in the United States. There are many causes of the gap, like discrimination and a lack of family-friendly policies. But recently, mounting evidence has led economists and sociologists to converge on a major driver - one that ostensibly has nothing to do with gender. The returns to working long, inflexible hours have greatly increased. This is particularly true in managerial jobs and what social scientists call the greedy professions, like finance, law and consulting - an unintentional side effect of the nation's embrace of a winner-take-all economy. It's so powerful, researchers say, that it has canceled the effect of women's educational gains. You have 1 free article remaining. Subscribe to The Times Just as more women earned degrees, the jobs that require those degrees started paying disproportionately more to people with round-the-clock availability. At the same time, more highly educated women began to marry men with similar educations, and to have children. But parents can be on call at work only if someone is on call at home. Usually, that person is the mother. [Sign up for In Her Words, a twice-weekly newsletter on women, gender and society.] This is not about educated women opting out of work (they are the least likely to stop working after having children, even if they move to less demanding jobs). It's about how the nature of work has changed in ways that push couples who have equal career potential to take on unequal roles. "Because of rising inequality, if you put in the extra hours, if you're around for the Sunday evening discussion, you'll get a lot more," said Claudia Goldin, an economist at Harvard who is writing a book on the topic. To maximize
Carri Bugbee

Gender pay gap: new study shows it worsens with age | Considerable - 0 views

  • New data from PayScale shows that women age 45 and older earn 70¢ for every dollar that men earn, before adjusting for factors like experience and industry. By comparison, women age 30 to 44 earn 78¢ for every dollar men earn, and women in their 20s receive 83¢.
  • That gulf between so-called controlled and uncontrolled pay gaps represents what PayScale calls the “Opportunity Gap”—societal and business forces that keep women in lower-paying jobs and industries while men continue to advance and earn more. 
  • Women are opting out of—or being excluded from—some of the highest-paying industries, such as technology, where women make up just 29% of workers, and they’re not being promoted into management as quickly as men are.
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  • In addition to earning fewer promotions and smaller raises, women are more likely than men are to take time off from work to care for family members throughout their careers. Over time, that absence contributes to the widening pay gap. In an earlier study, PayScale found that workers who took at least a year off from a job earned 7.3% less on average than similar employees who did not take a break.
Carri Bugbee

Women Do Ask for More Money at Work. They Just Don't Get It. - 0 views

  • In a 2017 study titled Do Women Ask?, researchers were surprised to find that women actually do ask for raises as often as men — we’re just more likely to be turned down. Conducted by faculty at the Cass Business School, the University of Wisconsin, and the University of Warwick and using data collected from over 4,600 Australian workers, the study was expected to confirm long-established theories around women’s reluctance to negotiate. Instead, the analysis showed that men’s and women’s propensity to negotiate is roughly the same.
  • Women are far more likely than men to work in jobs where salary negotiation isn’t necessarily possible, such as low-skilled hourly wage jobs or part-time roles. Previous studies that reached the “women don’t ask” conclusion often failed to account for certain types of jobs (and industries) being dominated by one gender, focusing instead on the overall number of men or women who’d reported salary negotiations,
  • women actually negotiate for pay raises at a slightly higher rate of 31 percent to men’s 29 percent.
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  • Now for the bad news: Both McKinsey’s research and the Do Women Ask? study found that while men and women ask for pay raises at broadly similar rates, women are more likely to be refused or suffer blowback for daring to broach the topic.
  • hey also reveal an uncomfortable truth about society’s propensity to assign blame to women for situations outside their control. By buying into the “women don’t ask” narrative, employers who should be doing more to rectify gender pay gaps in their own organizations get to ignore their role in fostering said gaps, and pass the buck back onto us.
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    In a 2017 study titled Do Women Ask?, researchers were surprised to find that women actually do ask for raises as often as men - we're just more likely to be turned down.
Carri Bugbee

Over-60s being overlooked for job interviews 'because of their age' - Starts at 60 - 0 views

  • “Our position is that ageism is not a highly recognised form of prejudice or discrimination, it’s very normalised, it’s so much a part of our language and what we’ve grown up with around what it means to get older. But it just doesn’t acknowledge the changing realities about what it means to get older.
  • “Essentially we think of ageism in three aspects; the prejudicial attitudes towards older people, discriminatory practices, so that might be employment practices, but also institutional practices and policies, and the choices that older people have.”
Carri Bugbee

We Asked Men and Women to Wear Sensors at Work. They Act the Same but Are Treated Very ... - 0 views

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    This indicates that arguments about changing women's behavior - to "lean-in," for example - might miss the bigger picture: Gender inequality is due to bias, not differences in behavior.
Carri Bugbee

Google And The Structural Sexism Of The American Workplace - 0 views

  • If burden of proof and the possibility of retaliation aren’t enough, there’s the lack of legal protections in favor of victims of sexual harassment. The current legal landscape includes a messy web of non-disclosure agreements, out-of-court settlements, and arbitration provisions that can limit what employees are allowed to say about the harassment they suffered. Silence is the verdict in most cases.
  • And even when women do risk it all, there is no guarantee of change. Remember that Uber CEO Travis Kalanick remained in his position for almost half a year after former engineer Susan Fowler published a blog detailing a culture of sexism at the company including a story about being propositioned by her manager on her first day and HR’s response that the manager was a high performer and would receive a “warning.”
  • Harvey Weinstein remained at the helm of The Weinstein Company until more than 70 (SEVENTY!) women came forward to accuse him of sexual harassment, assault, or rape. Aside from the sheer number of women required to come forward to remove just one man from a position of power, we must ask ourselves the question: Why aren’t men fighting sexual harassment?
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    Formal reporting is the least common response a woman shows in a harassment situation in the workplace, which makes sense when considering the possible repercussions.
Carri Bugbee

The truth about the gender wage gap - Vox - 0 views

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    The highest-paying jobs disproportionately reward those who can work the longest, least flexible hours. These types of job penalize workers who have caregiving responsibilities outside the workplace. Those workers tend to be women.
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