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Age appropriate
The benefits of creating an age-friendly higher education environment .
Alysia Blackham interviewed by Emilie Lauer
Whether it is students or staff , the higher education sector includes people of all ages and all backgrounds , yet age discrimination still occurs .
According to Associate Professor at the University of Melbourne Law School Alysia Blackham , universities may make an effort to be age friendly but they often resort to voluntary retirement schemes in harsh financial times .
Blackham urges the sector to implement interactive training and collaborative work between age groups to develop an age friendly workplace .
She joined Campus Review to discuss how age affects the higher education sector and what strategies can be put into place to retain valuable skills and experience .
CR : How does age affect the workplace ? AB : Age is really a fundamental part of how we experience work and how we experience the workplace . The research I ’ ve been doing over the last two years has shown that age discrimination manifests at every stage of the employment life cycle .
We see it affecting people at recruitment , in how they access training or development opportunities , in performance management processes , right through to the point of termination , dismissal or retirement .
What are the effects of age discrimination on an individual ? It can be incredibly damaging , particularly at work . Obviously it ’ s how we get paid , it ’ s how we support ourselves , how we support our family . But it ’ s also , particularly in higher education , very important to our sense of self , to our sense of identity .
Experiencing age discrimination is incredibly damaging . It ’ s emotionally damaging . It might be financially damaging if it affects our ability to continue in work .
One of the key things that I ’ ve found through my research is that age discrimination doesn ’ t just affect us individually . It also affects our friends , our family and our community .
It has these ripple effects beyond the individual , and it is also very damaging for our colleagues .
Would you say the higher education sector is age friendly ? There are moves to try to make the higher education sector age friendly , and there are universities trying to take proactive measures to achieve this .
One of the challenges is that we are dealing with quite deep-seated assumptions and prejudices . Age friendliness or unfriendliness manifests in all of our conversations on a day-to-day basis , so trying to move to an age friendly workforce requires wholesale cultural change across the institution . And that ’ s a really big undertaking .
A lot of these age friendly initiatives can be quite fragile . Even universities that pride themselves on being equal opportunity employers might resort to things like voluntary retirement schemes during times of financial stress .
For higher education , I think becoming an age friendly workplace and educational institution is critical . We have a lot of people who move into higher education as a second , third , fourth or even fifth career . We are from all different ages , and it ’ s important for universities to respect that amongst their staff and also amongst their older students who might be coming back and retraining .
Universities are a critical point in terms of how we support lifelong education . I think we really need to emphasise that in our pedagogical approach , and also in our approach to staffing and supporting the people that are part of our institutions .
How does age affect those seeking a job in academia ? One of the challenges is that employers tend to have stereotypes in mind of what an ideal worker would look like : we talk about , for example , early career scholars , and in our mind , they might be young , even though actually we know that we can be early career at any age .
Academia attracts people from across the age spectrum coming back to create a new career , to undertake a postdoc for example . So we ’ re constantly battling these internal biases , these implicit biases , or these internal stereotypes that we might have in the recruitment process .
It can be very difficult for people of any age if they don ’ t match those ideas or stereotypes .
We also see potential challenges around redundancy and performance processes .
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