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  • Ageism in the workplace, how can technology help?

    Pranav Sathiadevan
    3 replies
    Ageism is a socially accepted bias in the workplace. Ageist attitudes (both self driven as well as otherwise) have led to difficulty for people to find a job, get funding for their business, get promoted etc. What role does technology play to mitigate and remove instances of Ageism in the workplace?

    Replies

    Anna Mandziuk πŸ‡ΊπŸ‡¦
    Interesting discussion! I haven't encountered ageism in my past and current workplaces, because I've had lots of older colleagues who were just starting out on a new career path. I don't have a specific answer to how technology could help. However, I do have some general observations about recruitment. When I was living in Warsaw, one of my university classmates was a recruiter at a large corporation. She told me that they don't read all CVs initially, but first run them through a specific system that looks for certain keywords related to the position. Surely, such a tool also has its issues, for instance, it may skip a totally qualified candidate just because they didn't use a specific keyword, but rather wrote it in different words. However, I feel like something like this system could help with the ageism problem. Second, when I was looking for a new job, I encountered not many, but still a lot of job adverts that were looking for an energetic person. Which is basically a lingo for "not older than 40"πŸ™„ I think that to solve the ageism problem, we first need to target people that make obstacles for older folk. Without people changing, there's probably not a lot that technology could do. Also, I think that when solving an ageism problem, recruiting and specifically interviews need to be paid attention to. Because even if a person went through all of the stages of the recruitment and gets to the interview part, that's when recruiters can let them down. In regards to promotions, I think that technology could actually help. The systems that companies use to measure KPIs should be made anonymous to concentrate on people's metrics first, not on age/race/gender. I'm very curious about solutions that others see!
    Pranav Sathiadevan
    @anna_mandziuk you have raised very true points of ageism happening all around us. The company I work for had actually done a talk on Ageism that prompted me to put this question out here. Do give it a look and let me know what you think:
    Kesavan KK
    Dost for MS Teams
    Ageism works both ways. People have been labelled as too young or too old, without regard to their skill or ability. Another issue how ageism propagates is through reiterating generational stereotypes. Example: Baby Boomers, Gen Z etc, which are sweeping statements and generalization about a large group of people.