If you are over 50 years old and looking for a job, you might as well just sell your house and move in with your kids because no one is hiring! It doesn’t matter if you have three undergraduate degrees, two masters’ degrees, a PhD, and 25 years of experience; you are over the hill and out the door, especially if you are a woman—and even more so, if you are a woman of color.
My friend Hannah mails and/or emails 40 to 50 résumés a week to companies within a 100-mile radius of her home. Ninety percent of the companies she contacts never bother to even respond. Seven percent telephone or email and ask a horde of personal, illegal questions, which they attempt to disguise through deceptive and conniving methods such as questions about her age, religion, marital status, credit scores, buying habits, sexual preferences, and whether or not she drinks or smokes.
The human resource departments of the 21st century have a new handbook for discrimination. These people know exactly what questions to indirectly ask, in order to manipulate you, so you will blindly disclose this private information. For example, they wear a friendly face while enticing you to talk about your family. “How many kids do you have—four girls and two boys—that’s amazing,” they say, “And how old are they? In college, you say, and the two oldest are married? Any grandkids? Three grandkids, wow? You must be so proud.”
And then suddenly, the phone interview is over and you never hear from that company again. Why, because grandkids mean you are probably over 50. But age is the easy one. You should hear what they ask when they are trying to discover your religion, your political affiliations, or if you’re a gay smoker who devours expensive wines and imported brandies that you charged on your over-extended credit cards. And race, well they can usually find that plus your age, credit score, and criminal record (or not) on the Internet—one of our greatest achievements and, possibly, the source of our downfall.
So, back to the percentages: the remaining three percent of the companies she contacts request either a second telephone conversation or an in-person interview. In two years, she has had two dozen telephone conversations (that’s one a month) and four in-person interviews. That’s two interviews a year: the result of 2600 résumés. Is our country really that depressed?
She gets so excited at the possibility of finally getting a job. She has her best suit cleaned; polishes her favorite shoes; buys an auburn-brown rinse to touch up those very-slightly gray hairs around her temples; and picks up a new pair of stockings.
She prints out several copies of her résumé, updates her portfolio, buffs and polishes the scratches off her brief case, then cleans and vacuums out her car. She schedules the interview for the afternoon, so she has plenty of time to get ready, and make that 50-mile (one way) commute to the company’s location. On her way out, she spends her last $40 on gas, and then drives through the car wash, on the off chance that someone at the company might notice her car. She wants to make a good impression, so it has to be clean (even if it is nine years old).
But the results are the same everywhere she goes. Employers are rude, insensitive, and have no qualms whatsoever implying and even, in many cases, boldly announcing that she is TOO OLD to work for them. She faces age discrimination at every interview, even though many of the men who interview her are older than she is. Her qualifications and experience never even make it out of her portfolio, because once they see that her age is somewhere between 45 and 60, she’s immediately disqualified.
I have heard this story from hundreds of women from New York to New Mexico and everywhere in between. Women over 45 are no longer considered useful in the current workforce unless you already have a job, a Harvard degree, or Ivy League connections. The following posts are TRUE stories from today’s women that are searching for jobs. For details (and warnings about specific companies) see the following posts.
