Work has no right age (mostly)

I passed 50 a while back. I keep reading, training myself, testing every new tool before it even becomes trendy, and yet in certain settings I have the precise sensation of being invisible. This isn’t just a personal impression. It has a name: ageism. And the numbers tell a story far bigger than one person’s vague unease.

How widespread is ageism at work: what WHO, AARP and Resume Now found

Let’s start with scale. According to the World Health Organization’s Global Report on Ageism, one person in two worldwide holds moderately or strongly ageist attitudes. This isn’t a marginal issue, but a bias as widespread as gender or ethnic discrimination, except it gets talked about far less. The cost isn’t only human: in the United States, ageism generates roughly 63 billion dollars a year in excess healthcare spending, while in Australia a mere 5% rise in employment among people over 55 would deliver an estimated 48 billion Australian dollars in economic benefit.

On the employment front, the latest AARP survey of more than 1,600 American workers over 50 shows that 64% have seen or experienced age discrimination on the job, and 22% say they feel explicitly “pushed out” of their company. A Resume Now survey of 878 people arrives at an even starker figure: nine in ten workers over 50 report experiencing bias tied to the years they carry, often in the form of jokes, missed raises or exclusion from training. Experimental studies back up the picture: Swedish research found response rates to résumés dropping sharply from the early forties onward, and an American experiment found that profiles with names perceived as “older” received 36% fewer callbacks than identical applications with names associated with younger people.

In Italy, 40% of workers report it: what Cegos and PageGroup found

Italy’s picture isn’t reassuring either. A Cegos study on Diversity & Inclusion, surveying 500 employees and 60 HR managers as part of an international study spanning seven countries, finds that 40% of Italian workers have experienced age discrimination, roughly in line with the global average of around 40%, which offers little comfort. 63% have experienced at least one episode of exclusion or bias in the past twelve months, and 82% have witnessed one directly, usually from colleagues or managers.

A PageGroup survey of roughly 5,000 European professionals confirms that age remains the most common cause of unfair treatment at work, cited by 34% of respondents, ahead of gender (23%) and cultural background (22%). The paradox shows up at the top: among people in leadership roles, 31% report age-related bias, compared with 21% of non-management staff. Reaching a senior position offers no shelter. A separate report on recruiting trends also breaks the numbers down by age bracket: workers over 50 remain the most exposed group, with 50% reporting bias, but even people in their twenties report it at 37%, a sign that the problem isn’t confined to those past some fixed threshold.

In tech, you’re already “old” at 29: what the CWJobs study found

If there’s one field where this bias shows up earlier and harder, it’s tech. Research from British recruiter CWJobs uncovered a figure worth repeating: in the tech industry, workers start noticing age-related exclusion as early as 29, compared with 39 in other sectors on average. By around 38, many already feel considered “past it.” It’s no surprise that the average age of digital tech employees in the UK sits at 35: an industry that markets itself as the most innovative on the planet ends up being one of the least open to people who’ve built up real experience.

The same study’s numbers are unforgiving: 41% of tech professionals have observed age-related bias, compared with 27% across other industries. 47% say they weren’t hired specifically because of their age, 31% were passed over for promotion, and a full 51% left a job for this exact reason. Only a minority speaks up about it: 64% choose not to report it, likely wary of being labelled “behind the times,” the most feared accusation in an industry that runs on performative innovation.

The most striking case remains IBM’s, which found itself at the centre of a lawsuit in 2022 after internal emails surfaced in which executives referred to older employees as “dinobabies,” to be turned into an “extinct species” through faster staff turnover. An earlier investigation had already found that the company had laid off roughly 20,000 American employees over 40 since 2018, accounting for 60% of all US job cuts in that period. It’s worth reading our piece on tech layoffs and redundancies too, which looks at how these cuts often concentrate on people with more tenure, not necessarily on those who perform worse.

The voices of people living it every day

Behind the percentages are specific stories. Mathilde, 56, from Molise, told the local press she has sent out more than 150 résumés, hearing back from only two companies. She registered with several employment agencies, completed a certified training course, and widened her search from Molise all the way up to northern Italy. Nothing changed. Her summary cuts to the point: “We women don’t have an expiration date.”

An international survey by Women of Influence+, covering more than 1,200 people across 46 countries, offers equally blunt words. One respondent described the contradiction many senior women professionals live with: “Women are never the right age. We are either ‘going to get pregnant’ or ‘too old’.” In the same survey, 55.9% of women with more than 21 years of career experience report having faced age-related bias, with concrete effects on self-confidence, career progression and stress levels. When ageism intersects with sexism, it stops being a theoretical issue and becomes a very practical barrier to entering, and staying in, the workforce.

My own experience: up to date on everything, invisible anyway

Here’s where theory gives way to lived experience. I passed 50 and kept doing exactly what I did before: studying, testing new tools, following every shift in my field with a curiosity I’d call almost suspicious for my age bracket. Since 2025, I’ve also stopped dyeing my hair and finished the transition to grey: a cosmetic detail that, let’s be honest, doesn’t help. And yet there’s a subtle but unmistakable shift I notice: interviews that cool off the moment the recruiter, often not yet thirty, does the math on my graduation year; vague feedback like “very senior profile,” which in real terms translates to “you cost too much and we already know how this ends”; the implicit suggestion to “reinvent yourself,” as if a solid career were a problem to fix with a makeover rather than an asset to build on.

The most absurd part is that no one ever questions my competence. My birth date is what suddenly becomes the only relevant line on my résumé. Ageing isn’t the problem, it becomes one in a context that treats experience as a flaw to hide rather than a competitive edge. And it isn’t purely a generational issue either: in our piece on the generational clash at work, I made the case that mixing different skill sets is far more productive than pitting them against each other. Age bias, quite simply, always takes the lazier road.

What companies and individuals can actually change

There’s something to be done here, as long as we skip the easy rhetoric. Only 8% of diversity and inclusion strategies at major European companies, according to a 2023 PwC analysis, explicitly mention age as a factor to protect, a figure that says a lot about how far the topic sits from the spotlight compared with gender, disability or ethnic background. Companies serious about changing course should start with concrete steps: job ads free of coded phrases like “young and dynamic,” anonymised screening at least in the first round, genuinely mixed-age teams rather than ones that are just declared as such, and training paths open to every age. And above all, they should avoid what I’ve elsewhere called toxic positivity at work: inclusion statements that collide with hiring processes where, past a certain age threshold, the résumé still ends up at the bottom of the pile.

People job hunting past 50, much like the ones described in the job hunter’s heartbreak, don’t need tips on how to “look younger.” They need recruiters who stop confusing someone’s age with a skill’s expiry date. The rest, the willingness to learn, the ability to adapt, the clarity that only comes with time, that part we’re already bringing.