User:H2lam/Ageism

Lead
The article seems to be written neutrally and the content is relevant to the topic. The article discusses biases against old people as well as attributed stereotypes. It focuses on the effects of Ageism in healthcare and the workplace. Goes very brief about how different countries respond to Ageism, such as the United States and the Philippines. There seem to be several examples and statements made about them, but some of these statements are made about examples that aren't cited. Wikipedia's article on Ageism would improve from increased citation of examples as well as more detail about the effects of Ageism in employment. I've included a "Proposed Edit Start" and "Proposed Edit End" to provide more context into the location that I'm planning to edit of the original article. In my proposed edits, I've included workplace stereotypes as well as their effects on the view of older people in the workplace. The article lacked enough images so I added two as well.

Employment
The concept of ageism was originally developed to refer to prejudice and discrimination against older people and middle-aged people, but has expanded to include children and teenagers. Midlife workers, on average, make more than younger workers do, which reflects educational achievement and experience. The age-wage peak in the United States, according to Census data, is between 45 and 54 years of age. Seniority in general accords with respect as people age, lessening ageism.

Younger female workers were historically discriminated against, in with younger men, because it was expected that, as young women of childbearing years, they would need to leave the workforce permanently or periodically to have children. However, midlife female workers may also experience discrimination based on their appearance and may feel less visible and undervalued in a culture where emphasis is on maintaining an approved standard of beauty, e.g. 'thin, pretty, White, and young'. However, the same standard could have no effect on male colleagues of the same age. Proposed Edit Start:

Older people face workplace discrimination in the form of stereotypes, such as the inability to use technology as well as unproductivity. When applying for positions that have strong impacts, attributed stereotypes raise criticism toward their ability to function properly and efficiently. This age category of workers are often ignored and considered unable to make contributions; in some cases they are also given unfavorable tasks that wouldn't be assigned to anyone based on their old age. Faced with discrimination in the workplace, the older generation are lead to retirement around the age of 65 even though they are still capable of working.

Proposed Edit End

Many countries have a retirement age.

The United States federal government restricts age discrimination under the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967 (ADEA). That law provides certain employment protections to workers who are over the age of forty, who work for an employer who has twenty or more employees. For protected workers, the ADEA prohibits discrimination at all levels of employment, from recruitment and hiring, through the employment relationship, and through decisions for layoffs or termination of the employment relationship. An age limit may only be legally specified for protected workers in the circumstance where age has been shown to be a "bona fide occupational qualification [BFOQ] reasonably necessary to the normal operation of the particular business" (see ). In practice, BFOQs for age are limited to the obvious (hiring a young actor to play a young character in a movie) or when public safety is at stake (for example, in the case of age limits for pilots and bus drivers). The ADEA does not stop an employer from favoring an older employee over a younger one, even when the younger one is over 40 years old.

In the UK, age discrimination against older people has been prohibited in employment since 2006. Further refinements to anti-discrimination laws occurred in 2010. Age discrimination in hiring has been shown to exist in the United States. The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission's first complainants were female flight attendants complaining of (among other matters) age discrimination. In 1968, the EEOC declared age restrictions on flight attendants' employment to be illegal sex discrimination under Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. However, Joanna Lahey, professor at The Bush School of Government and Public Service at Texas A&M, found recently that firms are more than 40% more likely to interview a young adult job applicant than an older job applicant. To fulfill job postings with youthful staff, companies turn to recruitment companies to meet their needs. Many sources place blame on recruitment practices as it is the one way that age discrimination can go incognito at the hands of others. Sofica (2012) states "A study run in Washington in 1999 shows that 84% of the recruitment agencies are discriminating compared to only 29% of the companies that do their own." Dobson states that according to Weisbeck's (2017) research, "People have a natural bias to hire people like themselves" (p. 3). Lahey (2008) also stated within her research "Since it is more difficult for workers to determine why they failed to receive an interview than it is for workers to determine why they have been fired, firms that wish to retain only a certain type of worker without being sued would prefer to discriminate in the hiring state rather than at any point of the employment process" (p. 31). All states in the US prohibit youth under 14 from working with a handful of exceptions and prohibit youth under 18 from working in hazardous occupations. They are also paid a lower minimum wage and not allowed to work full-time.

Proposed image in this section: In film, the female body is depicted in different states of dress and portrayed differently depending on the age of the actress. Their clothing is used as an identity marker of the character. Young women are put into revealing and sexy costumes whereas older women often play the part of a mother or grandmother clad in a bonnet or apron. Aside from no longer representing the ideal female model, post-menopausal women are stereotyped as mentally unstable. "They become quarrelsome, vexatious and overbearing, petty and stingy; that is to say they exhibit typically sadistic and anal-erotic traits that they did not possess earlier (Freud 1958,323–24)."