OldSchool @ Work Alliance Now Accepting Members

Research shows that 75% of adults 60 and older — and 65% of those between ages 45 and 59 — say they believe their age puts them at a disadvantage when looking for work. It’s worse for women. According to a survey of 1,550 women–786 who were women of color–The Riveter reports that 58% of the women thought their “identities and/or physical attributes impact their experiences at work” and that age discrimination was a bigger impediment to workplace equity than gender or race.

We’re starting the OldSchool@WorkAlliance to change this. Along with the incalculable human costs, both financial and to our health and human potential, this discrimination diminishes workplace innovation and forces people to take social security earlier than they otherwise would. 

We hope you’ll help us get started.  

What is [email protected]? 

[email protected] will be a collective whose members will establish best practices for holding companies accountable for rectifying systemic bias and making age a criterion for diversity. Our goal is to ensure accountability by providing the tools and metrics to measure (and report) respective employers’ progress and results. 

We hope to benchmark and report organizational policies and practices that support age-inclusivity, much like the Human Rights Campaign’s Corporate Equality Index benchmarks for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer-inclusivity. And to create resources to make the working world more age-diverse and inclusive.

To achieve this goal, we need to build an alliance with a diverse set of skills and experiences—from leadership and fundraising to research and data analytics (and everything in between). Through the online application, members can indicate how much time they can volunteer and the ways they want to help.

Through this open invitation, we expect to amass a robust group of activists with the skills and gumption needed to create an iterative system for measuring age inclusivity, and then continually finding and bringing about tools and influence to improve the results. 

In other words, we plan on building a Kick-Ass-Expose-Ageism-Alliance!

Are You In?

To join the collective, fill out this brief application.