Maureen Clough - Ageism in the Tech Industry
The Brand Design Masters Podcast
with host Philip VanDusen
Episode 137
Maureen Clough - Ageism in the Tech Industry
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Maureen Clough: People really do have these very ageist beliefs, and they don't even feel ashamed saying them. Imagine if you sub in race or gender for something like that, and your brain would explode. It's not okay, but with age, for some reason, it's open season. So first and foremost, people don't even get that societally.
It's wrong. One in two people, according to the World Health Organization, are ageists. And I think half those people are lying. And we've been fed these stereotypes our entire lives.
Philip VanDusen: Hey, everybody. Welcome back to the brand design masters podcast. I'm your host, Philip Van Dusen. And today I am super excited because I am here with Maureen Clough, who is the host of It Gets Late Early podcast. She's an age inclusion advocate, speaker, podcaster, obviously, career strategist for people over 40.
She's been seen in Wired. Business Insider and Inside Edition. And she describes herself as an ex journalist. And we're going to make sure to dive into that one. I first became aware of Maureen when a colleague of mine forwarded a viral LinkedIn post that she had made in reaction to the discovery of Indeed's career guide, which contained incredibly ageist language.
And we connected on LinkedIn. I invited her on the show. And here we are. So with that, I'd like to welcome Maureen.
Maureen Clough: Thanks so much. I'm really happy to be here. And I love when, social media actually does good things and brings people together. So we're here having this conversation.
Absolutely.
Philip VanDusen: So your podcast is called It Gets Late Early. Talk a little bit about how that podcast came about for you.
Maureen Clough: Yeah. So the title itself is exactly emblematic of how I feel about getting older in life and especially in the workplace. So you feel old real fast, and especially in the tech industry.
That's true. And I was 37 at a tech company when someone referred to me as a dino. 37 dino. And the worst part about it, I laughed it off, right? Because that's what we do, right? When things like that happen, we laugh it off. What happened was some real serious reflection because I looked around that organization.
I realized, oh my gosh, like he's actually not wrong. I am one of the older people at this startup. And how can that be possible? And in fact, some people in the C suite were younger than I was. And if there were older people in the organization, they tended to be at least at the director level.
or above. And then I started doing a retrospective analysis of all my past companies and I realized that even at the bigger market leader companies, the same thing was true. And I just thought, we're all living to a hundred these days and no one's saving enough for retirement. So how does this math?
And what I found was once I started opening my mouth and actually talking about this with people behind closed doors, Everyone else was worried about it too, and yet no one was talking about it. And I thought, especially in light of all the facts that that at least performatively, people were talking about inclusion and diversity in the workplace of late, age was somehow just not on the table, and the research that I found suggests that 92 percent of companies fail to include age as a factor in their DEIB initiatives, and that's based on research from PwC.
I hope that was a few years ago, I hope it's a little bit better, then now but a little bit of progress, but yeah, it's the one form of discrimination that's coming for literally all of us And so why can't we get our arms around this and figure out how to not discriminate against either our past or future selves?
Seems like a very obvious thing. We should be fighting
Philip VanDusen: absolutely, and why do you think it's such a hot topic right now like you did this, we're going to get to talking about your post on LinkedIn that went viral, but why do you think it's got so much magnetism to it right now?
Maureen Clough: I think it's reached a fever pitch because people are really fed up with seeing ageism all over the place, especially in the workplace, so that's one aspect of it, particularly these layoffs that are happening all over the tech world, they are impacting older workers at a much higher clip.
And it's the report, it's the story that's not really being reported. And it's driving me mad because I want this everywhere. And I'm trying to find the data to back that up. We'll get back into that later. But I also feel like. The media has a big hand in this in the sense that there's finally a lot more representation of older people on screen.
And they're not being cast as like the joke older person or, the old cat lady or anything like that. It's like people are being portrayed as very much in charge in their older years. Like you think of all those recent shows like the new Sex and the City reboot and the one oh gosh, what was the one?
It's Jane Fonda and Lily. Oh, gosh, Grace and Frankie. Yeah. And so you're seeing people actually in these roles that are really vibrant and exciting. And it's not all the old standard stereotypical tropes that you would typically find. And so I think there's just the representation that helps people think about, huh, Why have I been assuming that my older years were gonna be so terrible, and why have I been typecasting people who are in a different era of their existence than I am?
So I think it's a lot of different things, but I do feel like representation in media really actually does matter to the everyday person and it gets conversations starting.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah. I think also that just pure demographics of the baby boomer generation moving Oh yeah. Into, oh yeah. Early retirement and many of them either, coming up against ageism very directly in their own employment or starting to become hyper aware of that.
As it occurs around them, another piece of it, I think that, and this is just something that kind of came out of COVID I think is that as we went entirely digital and virtual with COVID, we lost that Personal interaction and presence in the workplace and managing relationships in a virtual environment is a lot more difficult in my opinion, one of the things that I talked to a lot of my coaching clients about who.
Can be very senior creatives and agencies and corporations is how do you groom? How do you how do you challenge? How do you bring up new leadership who are underneath you in a virtual environment is a very difficult thing to do. And I would think that it would be just as difficult to balance. Giving equal opportunity and equal focus and equal exposure to people across the age spectrum in that kind of a working environment.
When do you think about that?
Maureen Clough: I think you're 100 percent right when it comes to relationship building and how difficult that is in the era of remote work and across a pandemic. Gen Z, there was a survey that came out of Adobe recently, and they said that Gen Z was super desirous of mentorship.
83 percent of Gen Z said, I really want a mentor, and only 52 percent of them said that they actually had one. Now, that seems even high. I would have assumed it would have been lower. because in my experience, companies have not done a really good job at fostering mentorship opportunities. And it goes, it actually is important to note here that mentorship does go both ways.
It's not just like the elders passing down their wisdom, like the way we've used to think of it. But I learned stuff from younger people all the time. They're some of my greatest advisors and it really is a bidirectional thing. Mentorship. But I think, this sort of world is just, we lost a lot of the human connection during COVID, right?
That was extremely difficult. We were in these isolated environments. It was really hard to feel human in that period. And I feel like we're still seeing the PTSD impact of that in our lives for sure. And for, Younger employees, especially they haven't necessarily had a lot of experience in the actual workforce the way it used to be traditionally.
So it's I actually, my heart really goes out to people who were, entering the workforce around the COVID era and beyond because things have just shifted so much. And all the things that I learned so much from my peers and from my older, more experienced employee colleagues. I don't think that's facilitated very well by companies in a remote environment in many cases.
So there needs to be a lot more emphasis on that and the intergenerational aspect of like, how do you get people from different sort of cultural norms based on when they were born to interact and engage and collaborate with one another, especially if the tools that they're using to do that. are different and you haven't necessarily grown up using one versus another and companies really just aren't doing that work and it's causing them to lose a lot of Productivity and innovation.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah, I read a study about a year ago that said that 85 percent of your success in your career is based not on your performance in your job and what you are actually doing, but on your exposure to senior management.
And I thought that was number one, my experience in 30 years in corporate, I completely believe that's true and the, but that begs the question then in a virtual environment, it's when you're.
Communicating on zoom and virtually in a hierarchical fashion. You may be talking to your manager, but you may have no Accidental exposure to senior management unless that's completely intentional on the part of your manager and i'm not sure that's happening. So that makes it really difficult to get that exposure And get that kind of that jump recognition so to speak
Maureen Clough: 100 percent Yeah, those sorts of hallway water cooler as conversations are just not really happening as often and to your point, you have to be extremely intentional about it.
And it's a hard thing to do, especially if you're early in your career to reach out and say, Hey, I'd some help with this or Hey, I want to learn from you. I want to shadow you. It's all just tougher remotely. It's not to say that it can't be done. It absolutely can. But I think companies need to help springboard those conversations and those relationships and give people exposure to the leaders that are possibly going to show them what's actually available to them in their career progression.
That's inspiring. People should see that. So companies really need to work on that.
Philip VanDusen: Okay, so we met because of a post that you made on LinkedIn that went viral it got like how many impressions was it in? The millions you said something like that.
Maureen Clough: It was not in the millions It was in the hundreds of thousands though, but still on linkedIn pretty damn impressive for a content creator So what was this post about?
So I This is an embarrassing share, but I sometimes deal with insomnia, one of the many wonders of getting older, right? So I woke up at around 3 in the morning, Pacific time, and I, because I'm super cool, I went on LinkedIn, and I started scrolling, because obviously you pick up your supercomputer, And look at that, because that's going to help you go to sleep, right?
So I pulled up this LinkedIn post that just came on my feed, and it was from someone in the UK. And her name was Victoria Tomlinson. And she does some age advocacy work. And what she did was she posted a snippet from Indeed. So Indeed, if you don't know, it's the largest career site in the entire world's large job site, number one.
Big deal. And she took a snippet from what they had called a career guide and it showed your career by age and stage and they labeled them in such a way that my head exploded. It was like late career was from 45 to 55 and mid excuse me and decline. Was 55 to 65. So you went from late career to decline like decline seriously What is going on?
Yeah, how do you like being, you know defined as a generation of the workforce? You are decline
First of all, it's ridiculous to actually put age bands on career stages to begin with, but to label 55 plus decline, just mind boggling, right? And what was worse was actually the literature buried within the guide, which was like, hey, if you're in late career, start identifying a successor and stop with this silly stuff like learning and obtaining new skills.
I was like, what? And then when they got into the decline era, they said, now you should really focus on learning new things like painting and, all spending time with friends and family. And it was just, it was all so ludicrous. The whole thing was just, it was like indeed published the internal career sort of ethos for their hiring organization or something.
Like they said the quiet part out loud. And so when I read it, I fortunately actually grabbed some snippets of the guide itself. I don't know in my like haze and stupor at 3am because if I hadn't done that, I wouldn't have had access to the actual literature later because they pulled the ad down or they pulled the whole guide down so fast, which was wild.
But so anyway, the long story short is I, Put a post together based on my just absolute horror at what I just read and I scheduled it on LinkedIn to hit at 8am my time thinking, Oh I don't know anyone in the UK. There's no reason for me to publish this in the middle of the night. People don't think I'm a weirdo for publishing on LinkedIn in the middle of the night, but LinkedIn fumbled and actually published it right away.
And I was like, Oh, whatever. I'm not gonna I'm not gonna delete it and redo the whole thing. So when I later woke up, It had gone nuts, like you said, and just went all over the place. We shared a gazillion times and actually Indeed itself, the social media group handle of Indeed, had written an apology on my post and pulled down the guide.
So they acted really swiftly to their credit. Other organizations have put up ageist language and stereotypical sort of advertisements forever and never even apologized or taken months to pull them down. So to a newt's credit, they acted swiftly, but There are lots of questions that remain for me.
I invited them to come on to the show. I did a whole deep dive into why this ageist career guide was so wrong and the implications for it and what we could learn from it and even their chief marketing officer, Jessica Jensen, indicated she wanted to come on the show. And so that was really cool. But.
Eventually, as we went through scheduling, trying to get someone from the organization there, their crisis com PR team was like, yeah, no one's coming. So they didn't show up and therefore I had to do a solo episode.
That's so lame. So lame. I know. And I was like. Wow, pulling the rug.
Yeah, it was a shame because honestly now everybody can just make up their own narrative about what happened there.
And it's not going to be a good one benefiting Indeed. They should have owned it. And furthermore, Indeed's own CEO, Chris Hyams, he's 55 or 56. So he's firmly squarely in decline. Which was just like the cherry on top as an ex journalist. I think that's where the story is Yes, it's a Personality profile professional profile of the owner or the CEO of LinkedIn as being in decline.
Yes I think that's definitely it So today you actually did a you did a video post on the EEOC the equal opportunity and the equal employment opportunity commission and they did a report called high tech, low inclusion diversity in the high tech workforce and sector from 2014 to 2022 what happened in that report?
First of all, throwing it back a little. The last time they did one of these reports was in 2014 and age was a mere footnote at the end. They were like, by the way, we know age is underrepresented as a group in the tech industry and it needs to be studied more. It was 10 years until they released this latest report.
So I'm glad they did it, but it was a long time coming. But, so this report specifically calls out all the marginalized groups within the tech industry and their levels of inclusion in the tech workforce. And as you can imagine, they got pretty bad grades on all fronts, but age was one of them. And I was happy to see it actually as a point of focus because so often in this conversation, age is left off the table.
the table. So what the report found was that basically there are a large number of people employed between age 25 and 39 in the tech industry and that tech is hiring people under age 25 at a rate that's like 9x across versus across all other US industry. And that despite the fact our population is aging super rapidly, our percentage representation in the workforce in the tech industry has declined from 2022 to, so 2014 level was 52 56% participation, and now we're down to 52% participation based on in 2022.
So we're getting older, but there are fewer of us in the tech industry. And we're also hiring people over age 65 in the tech industry at a reduced rate to that across all U. S. industry as well. Very heavily hiring under age 25 versus all U. S. industry, and then most people are concentrated right there between 25 and 39.
What was great about the report was we actually have raw data now to support what we already knew, which is ageism is a massive problem in the tech industry. And up until this report, what we really had was more of a gut sense and survey data based on people's feelings. So that's why I was so thrilled to see the EEOC actually give us this data so that we could actually sink our teeth into it.
And then you correlate that with the survey data. And that's okay we have a real problem. I was thrilled because I hear so many people who question the validity of ageism even as a thing and, suggest that it's not happening and gaslight even themselves as they're going through the job search process.
And I'm like, this is real. This is real. So I'm really pleased that it's out there because it's a jumping off point, right? It grounds us in some data.
Philip VanDusen: I think the data piece of it is really important. The AIGA, which is a professional organization for graphic artists, they did a big, they do a big design census like once every five or eight years.
And the last one they did was in 2019 and they had a couple of pie charts in there that one of them was the age of designers who are currently working in the industry and 50 to 60 years old. It was 10%. And above 60, it was 1 percent of the working designers and they made absolutely no point about what that data really says.
But I saw it and I was like, this is nuts. And so that's what actually precipitated my doing a big video on YouTube about ageism in the graphic design industry. And one, when I went independent about 10 years ago. I burned out in my last corporate gig and I was trying to find myself deciding whether I even liked doing branding and design anymore and I was doing a lot of digging on LinkedIn on career forums and stuff like that and I found this post someone asked where have all the 40 year old creative directors gone and there were 1400 comments.
And I went through, because I had nothing better to do the moment I was trying to figure my life out, I went through and I read all of them and it became super apparent that the advertising industry is one of the absolute worst. If you hit 40 and you're a creative director in the advertising industry, you're like super long in the tooth and you have a big target on your back.
And, but there are. In the creative industries in general, they tend to be extremely atheist tech. Tech is like that on steroids. And what do you think that we can do? This is the thing that drives me crazy. It's we can all be aware of it. We can all know it sucks. But when it comes down to it, where's the accountability?
Like how can we as ageist act, advocates start to actually affect change or hold these companies that are bad actors accountable for what they're actually doing? What does that look like? Do you have you.
Maureen Clough: Yeah, I do think a very important part of it is awareness building for sure.
We have to know that there's a problem. The fact of the matter is a lot of people don't even know ageism is wrong at all. It's just thrown about casually in our society. Remember during COVID when people were like, oh, just go out in public, who cares let all the old people die?
It's just there. It's, and people really do have these very ageist beliefs. beliefs. And they don't even feel ashamed saying them. Imagine if you sub in race or gender for something like that and your brain would explode. It's not okay. But with age, for some reason, it's open season. So first and foremost, people don't even get that societally.
It's wrong. One in two people, according to the World Health Organization are ageists. And I think half those people are lying. And we've been fed these stereotypes our entire lives, right? Like my own kids will be like, mom, you're old. I'm like, what? Like, how are you leveling that at me? I didn't teach you this.
Like, where's this coming from? But these are very embedded in our society. So first we need to tell people it's actually bad to be prejudiced against people younger or older, whatever were their age. That's just that needs to be laid down. As far as taking ownership of it, I think you're really speaking to what can we do okay, it exists.
What can we as individuals do about it? The company thing, that's another story. We'll definitely get to it, but I think there is a lot of power in just owning your age, I think there's a lot of power in trying to flip the narrative in your head, because if you come into a job interview. bash, like ashamed and, making jokes about being older or whatnot.
That's what people are going to think about you. If you come in with the right mindset of, I know my stuff, I've been doing it for however many years. You don't have to tell them how many years you've been doing it, by the way. In fact, sometimes that can not be helpful, but if your stuff and you have the goods and you have experience, looking around corners and figuring things out.
And you have a track record, that's a great thing. So if you can take it in your mind from the liability that some people think of it as to an asset, it's going to help you. And you're going to have that pep in your step, that confidence, and you're going to show up as your best self. There are some people out there who I think take a little bit more of a passive sort of victim mentality and that is not helping you.
Yes, ageism is unfair. It's deeply unfair. It sucks. But life is unfair. And here we are, and we have to put our best foot forward. So I would urge people to do that and to see what they can draw from their experience that can help Put them ahead and there's a lot there that you can do. So your network in and of itself, if you have been working for a long time, you have X colleagues, X bosses, X partners, X vendors, X everything.
You have such a rich, Tapestry of a network to draw from and tap into and that's something like I feel really bad for recent graduates or people who are early in their careers because they don't have that right and so that's an asset you have so it's I think it's you need to know what's going to happen.
You might be in a situation where you need to find any job a job right away as soon as possible because of financial reasons or something like that and in those situations you might want to. Go ahead and try to remove any sort of indicators of your over 40 status just because people are a just like it's not an if but a win.
You're going to face an ageist recruiter or hiring manager. So in those instances, it's like you want as many at bats, right? So you might want to take off age identification markers, maybe leave off early experience on your resume, that sort of stuff that just gets you in the door. And then you gotta wow him, right?
But if you're in the position of Relative privilege where you can be like, I'm going to take my time. I'm going to come in. I'm not dying my hair I'm going to come in just rocking my grays, I'm going to say hey, I have 30 years of experience Hey, here's what I offer whatever Awesome more power to you And then it's if they don't want you that's not the right fit And you move on to the next one until you find the right place that actually values you For who you are and the experience that you bring to the table So there are two ways that you can go about it when you're looking for jobs and thinking about your career in that way If moving on to employers and how we can make them aware of it.
I'm very intrigued to see what will happen with the new case that is being allowed to proceed in the state of California against X Twitter. So there was a complaint filed by a man named John Zeman, and he alleges that X let go of a disproportionate number of workers over 50. The judge in California allowed it to move forward, which hopefully is indicative of merit on the case.
X tried to throw it out saying, Hey these guys all signed NDAs and said that they would go to, to mediation that they can't sue us. And the judge said that there was sufficient evidence to suggest that there might be an ageism problem there that she would let it go. Now I'm watching it closely because it, and by the way, I think it's also important to note that part of the reason this claim was allowed to move forward was that Elon Musk and leaders at the company, I think it was at least Elon, if not multiple leaders at the company had made ageist Remarks, and I know one such remark that Elon made was something to the effect of like older people asphyxiate society.
Not a great look, Elon. Thanks a lot. So there was that. So it wasn't just merely that there were older people who were let go disproportionately that potentially could be explained by cost cutting initiatives if those senior level employees were actually paid more highly than relatively younger people.
But what I'm concerned about is. If this lawsuit fails and flops, it's going to create a chilling effect about age discrimination lawsuits because this one's so high profile. So we'll see what happens with it. But so let's say they move forward and X gets hit with the lawsuit and they lose or they have to settle for some exorbitant amount of that.
Can actually help employers see that this is something they need to focus on because that is going to be a hopefully a very costly settlement or lawsuit. Fine, right? So that's one way is the example what not to do, right? There are other ways. There are ways that they can start opening the door to the conversation.
They can have people come in and give lunch and learns, for example, yours truly, and talk about the importance of age, diversity, and inclusion in their organization. They can bring people who are experts on productivity. And for example, one past guest of mine on my show, Dr. Daniel Jollis, he works at the London school of economics inclusion initiative, and they're doing a study alongside consulting firm productivity that is explaining the value and the innovation and productivity potential of multigenerational teams.
That is the other way. In my view, you've got to, you have to have a two pronged effort when it comes to age at work. A lot of people, I think, only think about it from the perspective of talent acquisition, hiring managers, recruiters, and that's basically the gatekeepers who are looking for candidates to come into the company, right?
So telling them it's important to look at people across the spectrum of age. Sure that's important, right? That's the tip of the spear. Sure. But where you're really going to nail it is if you're working with hiring managers, because hiring managers are those who actually make the hiring decisions and they're people and they have bias too.
So you have to actually come at it from both angles in my perspective, in order to actually get an age representative group within an organization. And the way you hit hiring managers and. company leaders is to tell them that they're not going to make as much money if they don't hire people across all ages.
And so that is the critical component that I'm hoping we're going to see more research on. I think it's going to be tough. Given how entrenched attitudes are about age, but I think you do have to come at it from both angles. So very long answer to your question, but that's the way I'd approach it as a candidate or a person within a company looking for career progression, as well as how I hope companies will have this change.
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So are you going in and talking to companies as as a, an expert to do lunch and learns within corporations to disseminate the wealth of experience that you have and knowledge that you have in on the subject inside of an organization? Are you doing that? What does that look like?
Maureen Clough: I am just hanging out the shingle. Yeah, I'm really excited about it. I have a couple of what are you gonna do? I'm going to just get in there. Yeah. So I think the first thing you have to do is just get people to say it out loud. I think this is something that's just like hushed hallway whispers. And it's guys, this is you wear your age on your face like you can't pretend it's not happening.
We have to have this conversation. Talking through examples of how not to do it will be a really important part, but really just getting people to open up and kind of chill and calm down, but relax in the situation and get them to be a little bit open, which is sometimes hard.
And it depends on the organization. But having them take a look at their actual, their age inclusion at their organization, as well as having them take a hard look at their job descriptions, and look at the language they're using, right? If you have a hungry ninja request in a job description, I guarantee you no 50 year olds applying for that job.
If you're like rockstar, like we're looking for an end, decline, new X,
we're looking for a 60 something, and then even when you go to people's websites it's laughable to me how ages is not, it's like obviously an afterthought or not thought about at all, because you'll see these tech companies and their entire pages are filled with images.
They might be people of different genders and races, But you see all young people across the whole thing. And so it's even looking at it from that perspective but for these kinds of conversations, the workshops and whatnot, I think it'll depend on the group assembled, talent acquisition, we'll have a certain sort of talk and we'll discuss certain things versus hiring managers.
But I think ultimately it will have to be really tailored to each organization because people are also in different stages, companies are in different stages of their ability to address this. And some people are going to need 101. Like this is a problem and we should talk about it. And others could be like, Hey if you don't get this right, you might find yourself on the other end of a phone call from the EEOC.
Which, which is, I don't want to lead with a stick, but like that also is a possibility.
Philip VanDusen: I think sticks are the only things that corporations understand. Seriously, I've been in very senior executive roles in corporations and they, citizens united, notwithstanding corporations do not act like people they do not respond like people, they do not act like people they live in service to shareholders.
And the only thing corporations understand is a stick. I tell you that one of the things that were framed the way I approached that then.
I think that, some of the stereotypes that we have in our and, I'm a creative, I do marketing and do media, and some, a lot of times I'm searching on stock sites in order to get stock photography or stock video to represent companies and give them visuals for their websites or their social media posts.
And you look at stock sites and just when you look for certain ages of. Of people, genders of people, the stereotypes are rife throughout the availability of stock imagery. And I think that the same thing as what you're talking about in terms of job descriptions, same thing, a lot of times, a lot of times, job descriptions are written by HR and they're cobbled together and cut and pasted from previous job descriptions.
I think most job descriptions are pieces of Frankenstein job descriptions. The fifties personally, they lived through but one, one of the things I wanted to talk to you about was continued learning, like how do you, one of the things that the stereotypes that older people, carry with them is that they don't learn as easily or they're down, they don't accept or are not willing to uplevel their skills around technology and they just aren't up to speed.
And so how do we combat. Those conceptions.
Maureen Clough: Those are pretty entrenched. I can tell you, anecdotally, it's great to share stories of that being absolutely untrue. And for example, I was setting up a LinkedIn live for the first time. And who did I call? I called my boomer friend, who's a career coach.
And I said, how do you do this career like LinkedIn live? thing. And he walked me through it and he was like, I can't wait to share this story with people. I'm like, same here. It's to a person. You can't typecast people across generations, but that is one that is really pervasive and very discriminatory and really holds people back, which is extremely frustrating.
But again, I think we have to recognize that people have these thoughts. And so when you go into a new organization and I remember doing this in my last job too. Being very mindful about how I approached people in terms of saying, they hire me for my experience. Oh, you've done this, that, and the other thing.
We want you here. We want you to help inform our path. By the way, a lot of times they really don't. They just want yes, none. You're like, let's do it this way. They're like, nah, you're no longer invited to these meetings. It's wait, why am I here? But there's a way that you can approach it that seems open and like you're willing to learn from the people who are there.
You're willing to see things from a different perspective. And then there's a way that makes you sound like a curmudgeon, right? We've, I've been doing this for 30 years and we always did it like this and you're wrong. That's not going to help, right? So it's not fair that these are the stereotypes that exist, but they're real.
And so if we want to make a dent in them, we have to be mindful about how we show up. It's the same way when I go into a meeting at an organization back when I worked in corporate and I had a cell phone, right? And I was in a meeting and I was typing notes on my cell phone. I would proactively tell people, Hey, I'm taking notes on my phone.
So that they knew I wasn't texting my friends and rude, right? It's, you have to know the stereotype. I'm a millennial. People are very connected on their phones as millennials, right? And so you get out ahead of it, right? Again, not fair, but reality. And do we want to get ahead? We got to deal with reality.
It sucks, but it's where we are. So yeah, I think making sure that you also are proactively demonstrating, I think you talked about this a little bit on your last episode, but proactively demonstrating your aptitude and your hunger for new skills and getting to be ahead of the latest and greatest is really important.
And unfortunately, I think it increases in importance as you get older. even from, I hate to say this, but like performatively it does because people will assume the wrong thing about you as you get older because people suck. And so to proactively defend yourself against that, if you are constantly showing, Hey, I've learned this new skill and whether you put it on your LinkedIn or your resume or whatever.
It just shows that you're ready, willing and able to learn and grow and it'll prove people wrong. It'll actually do all of us a service. So anyone who does this, thank you. It's going to help all of us and coming up behind. But yeah every chance you get proven wrong, I just let that sort of underdog mentality fuel me.
It really helps. I love it. It keeps me rolling. And I think you can let it fuel you a little bit. Don't just get angry about it. Let it fuel you.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah. Yeah. I, my coaching clients who tend to be mid to late career, I try to instill them the important of building personal brand has become this hackneyed term and I'm trying to actually move away from it because really what.
When I am coaching people is building professional agency where you can own your own destiny and we will all run up into ageism and a lot of my clients are, or they are about to, and I'm trying to prepare them for the fact that they are going to run into an embankment and they just don't see it because of the fog right now and building that professional agency by posting on social media, doing getting involved in higher levels of media in terms of content development is a way to prepare yourself for the agency.
You're going to need to have when you start consulting or start to work independently because you are going to have to work independently at some point. And that's a realization that's very difficult to get across to people because we all don't stay corporate people until the very end generally you always will end up in some sort of freelance consultative sort of role and it's my mission in life to give people the tools to survive that.
I want to backtrack to a conversation that we had just before we hit record and that was that I was walking my dog the other day and I was talking to a woman who I know in the neighborhood who used to be an account manager at a big multinational advertising firm and she was laid off and when she was laid off, they provided her with a list of over a hundred people by, there were no names attached, but the title was attached and the age was attached in terms of the people who had been transcribed Part of this massive layoff because the company wanted to be accountable or at least have transparency around the ages of and the roles of the people who had been laid off in this restructuring do you have you heard of that sort of thing it was the first time honestly that I had ever heard of something that transparent happening because usually companies have no accountability like to X's you know point they have no accountability because there is no.
It's very difficult to prove. So they make it very difficult to prove. What do you, what are your thoughts about that?
Maureen Clough: It is difficult to prove. Yes. And that company was not just doing that to be nice and transparent. They were doing it because the law requires them to do that. And that is the older workers.
And very few people do, which is why sometimes companies get away with literally not providing it or giving incomplete or misinformation so that things are Pushed under the rug. So that's the Older Workers' Benefit Protection Act that was in place. So when companies over a certain size, I think it might even be over, employ a hundred employees when they let go of people in a layoff.
And I think it has to be of a certain size, but if they do a layoff, they are federally. obligated to provide departing employees over age 40 with a list of those titles and ages of the people who were let go in the layoff as well as the people who remained. In the company. Oh, so it's per department.
Yes. So this is something that is meant to help protect older workers And unfortunately, it doesn't always do the job So first of all getting back to the importance of awareness A lot of people don't know that they should get this document and so they just lost their job Their head is spinning. Their heart is hurting They're freaking out about their next paycheck and their health insurance and their kids and on.
And they just sign their severance agreement because they need the money. They don't go see a lawyer, right? If they had gone to see a lawyer, the lawyer would say, where's that document? I've seen companies, people have reached out to me even about Dell, literally Dell all off the record, unfortunately, understandably though, all off the record, they've said Dell has given them incomplete information about their layoff, put certain people in certain departments that weren't actually accurate, like it looked like they were tweaking it so as to make the case that they weren't discriminating based on age.
They also backdated documents, like again, like this is all. I don't have actual proof of this. So please no one come after me for this, but this is what people have told me off the record is happening at even companies like Dell who definitely know better. And so I wonder maybe it is totally normal what they did.
I don't know for sure. Again, haven't seen it, but companies will do this kind of stuff and mismatch, titles and mismatch departments or shift people from one department to another. And and a lot of it is so that they can avoid getting hit by the EEOC and finding themselves embroiled in lawsuits from their ex employees.
But this is actually a protection that is offered to us. How effective it is another question. But that is why your your Peer got that document. So it's good. They were complying with the law. But yeah, I don't think the law goes far enough is what I'm trying to say. And again, age discrimination cases, the hardest to prove of all legislation the Supreme court case was decided.
I think it was back in the nineties that made it harder for age discrimination cases to be one. It made it so that it has to be the quote, but for cause of lack of employment or termination. And that means it cannot be one of a mixed motive thing. It cannot be like, she's a woman and she's older or He's black and he's older.
It has to be the sole reason for you either not getting a job or getting laid off. Now there's legislation in the works that's bipartisan that seeks to reduce it to the level of mixed motive like it is for every other sort of point of discrimination. It's Just insanely hard to win an age discrimination lawsuit and that was done to try to help Employers I guess with costs and shareholder and all that but it needs to change because it's insane that it has to be that Ironclad versus other sorts of discriminations because this is a protected class element you hit 40.
You are a part of a protected class
Philip VanDusen: I am so encouraged to hear there is anything bipartisan going on in our world at all right now. But that is super encouraging also to know that's actually happening because I think that's that's so sorely needed and Maureen, this has been such an amazing conversation.
I knew it was going to be as soon as I got, Oh, there's one other thing before we close that I want to talk about. And that's the one thing that I said we were going to talk about, which is the whole upper out idea. I think that you brought that up in your podcast. And I was walking my dog when I was listening to your podcast.
And I'm like, I'm going to talk to Maureen about that when I get her on my boss has podcasts because I have seen it so much. And in my world, in the creative professional world, there are people, there are a lot of creative professionals who don't have the aptitude or the desire to go into management. And one of the things I coach people on is that you are going to meet a salary ceiling at some point in your career, you're going to get to be senior designer. And many times they say there's no cap on salaries and senior designers bullshit. There are salary bands for titles and we all know that you may be able to squeeze past it for a while.
But when it comes right down to it, if you don't move into some sort of. Management position where you're responsible for other people, you are going to top out on your salary. And if you are not moving into management, you also are limiting yourself to the amount of promotions, the amount of flexibility you have, how long you're being able to generally stay in the industry, in my opinion.
So there's this idea of up and out. Why don't you talk about what that is and what that means?
Maureen Clough: Oh, man, that I feel like it's probably part of every industry to some degree, but that's essentially the concept that if you don't move into a management position that you're going to be forced out of the organization, and you just spoke to it right there is a salary cap.
But think about it. If your company is acquired by a private equity company, firm or something and they're looking to cut costs and you are a senior designer making the salary cap at the very top and there's someone who has the same title who might be 15 years younger than you are doing the same job in air quotes guess who's going to lose the job It's going to be you.
It's going to be you if you have been at the salary cap level, because they're going to look at it from a pure cost perspective. They don't value experience, especially coming in an acquiring company or a private equity firm, whatever. They're just looking at numbers on a spreadsheet and you mean nothing to them at all.
And it doesn't matter that your boss, Bill loves you. You're gone. You're just gone. And that's just a really harsh reality. And it's not, again, it's not fair, but it's just how it goes. And so I think the work that you're doing with your clients is really imperative because people don't see this coming.
We are as humans, hardwired to kick the can down the road. And we just get ourselves into these positions where we just never saw it. Never saw it heading for us. And no one thinks they're going to get older. I'm still 29, by the way, in my brain. It's just, it's a weird thing that we do. But this is a very real fact.
I'm not suggesting that everyone who, everyone out there should just go and try and get to be a manager, because like you suggested, sometimes there are real reasons you shouldn't. Maybe you'd suck at it. Maybe it's terrible. Maybe you have other responsibilities or desires or interests that would keep you wanting to just do more of the 9 to 5 or whatever it might be.
Many cases a lot longer than that, but I think we just need to be aware of this scenario And like you said build for the future because as you mentioned a lot of people we're gonna find ourselves in our later years Which gets earlier and earlier it seems by the way Having to be independent in some form and I'd also say that The way the world of work is moving.
It's moving towards a gig economy type of world anyway in jail right Exactly. And so I don't like that. I love the idea of yesteryear where you spend 30 years at a company, you get a gold watch and a pension, but that's gone. And we have to realize that. And it's a tough pill to swallow for people, but upper route is a thing.
It's a thing across industries. It's not fair. I don't like it, but it's real. So I do think that companies can and should do a better job of giving sort of the distinguished individual contributor metal, if you will, or title principal, senior designer or something, because again, there's a really huge value in having experienced people at your workplace and the mentorship that they can provide to people younger and earlier in their careers is really important.
So I think you should preserve the right for people to have that track. But even still, we all know when the layoff times come in. They're looking to cut costs or you just got acquired. It's just real reality bites Sometimes it really
Philip VanDusen: does and I hate to leave our listeners with this fear mongering But it really is true and I spend a lot of time fear mongering and you know in the group talks and the videos that I do because It's one of those things that it's you got I'm slapping people across the face and saying, wake the up at the moment, because like you said, you never see it coming.
I, and I shared this with you. I had a very close friend who was 20 years in a tech company senior management director level, and they his manager changed. So his manager who we had, it was a great advocate for him for, a dozen years left. The job and went to a new company. And so he got a new manager who he didn't click with, who did not see that value in him, who did not have that long history of him and seeing his performance, et cetera.
And he ended up getting laid off after 20 years with the company and got ridiculously like pathetic level laughable. Severance and that's the sort of thing that you don't anticipate. Like you're like, I've been with my manager for 12 years. They're always going to be here. I'm always going to be here.
I've been here 20 years.
Maureen Clough: We're always one management change away from hating our jobs.
Philip VanDusen: Yeah. And, or some company comes in and you get acquired, that's happening more and more with holding companies. Especially in the agency world is that agencies, independent agencies get purchased and a lot of people start agencies in order to sell them.
So they get acquired and suddenly there's, you are suddenly you're a name and a salary on a spreadsheet and you are so right about that.
Maureen Clough: So sad. But yeah, it's really just about taking accountability and ownership of your life and your path. And I know it sounds like fear mongering in some ways, but we're saying it out of love.
Please protect yourselves because your corporate job does not give a shit about you. Like you have to know that and it's painful to recognize, but you have to. And so you're going to have to go through some uncomfortable stuff to just get comfortable posting and being yourself and sharing what you've done and taking it outside of the four walls of your company.
It's just reality.
Philip VanDusen: I love you're saying that because I'm and I'm sitting here smiling because I literally just did a rant. I don't need rant videos very often And I did a rant video when my friend got laid off and I was just like i'm doing a video about this So I did this rant video about your job doesn't care about you That was the name of the video and it was just like this wake up call to people to say look You are not You may have invested a lot of emotional equity in your company, but your company does not have equity in you.
You are literally expendable. And we, I think as ageism advocates, that is part of our, we're not the doom and gloom. We are the agency advocates that we need. You had to be able to see the realities. That do exist and that we would love to change but they aren't going to change To the level we would want to be able to snap our fingers to But you have to then own and take on yourself This level of personal responsibility that will give you that agency in your career
Maureen Clough: Beautifully said couldn't agree more.
Philip VanDusen: Maureen you there's been a great conversation. I absolutely loved it so much I want to know what is next for you. What do you got? What do you got planned?
Maureen Clough: Ooh there's a lot coming up. I'm really excited and I hope to be doing a lot more work with companies, but I have some hopefully really exciting news to announce soon.
I will find out shortly whether or not that is the case, but I am hoping to continue to be very loud on this topic and ensure that people bring this into the fray when it comes to their initiatives at their companies and holding people accountable to making sure that this matter Finds its way into their corporate playbook because it, it has to, we're getting, we're going to be, I think by 2030, the percentage of the workforce age 50 or over in the United States is about 50%.
We're getting older really quickly. So the companies that recognize that they need to be employing older workers and start doing that now, they're going to be ahead and they're going to be well poised to win the future and the rest, they're gonna be struggling. So I think there's. There's a ton of good that's going to come out of all the work that you're doing that, that hopefully that I'm doing just shedding a very wide light on this wide light, a strong light on this issue that has been just like, I think that's good.
I like the feeling of that. We're shedding a white light spotlight. I don't know. Wrong idiom. Anyway, hopefully you get the point, but yeah, lots of cool stuff ahead. And if I do Have the announcement to make that I'm hoping I will fingers crossed cross your fingers for me I will let you know
Philip VanDusen: The one thing we didn't talk about that I said we were going to talk about the second one thing we were going to talk about was the ex journalist Thing that you put on your linkedin profile.
Yes, so I See for you in the future a book because you gotta resurrect this journalist thing and because there is a book screaming to happen and what you have been talking about and you are so articulate and so knowledgeable about this maureen that You gotta make that happen. If there's something I wish for you, it's the book.
Maureen Clough: I so appreciate that. And spoiler alert. Yeah, that's something happening. Okay. All right. Cool. Thanks for lighting the fire. I appreciate that. But yeah, it's been a blast and I feel honored to be able to have this conversation. It's, a privilege that was made possible for me via a basically a layoff.
That was not really a layoff. It was more of a retaliation, but we're not going to go into that. And by the way, do not look at my LinkedIn. That's the second episode. We're going to have a follow up
Philip VanDusen: we are, because then we're going into that because I, now you can't bring that up at the end of a podcast, Maureen, because now I'm like hungry.
I'm like, okay, we're going to stay for another hour and we're going to record episode two right now because I have to know this.
Maureen Clough: It was bad. I have receipts too.
Philip VanDusen: I hear another LinkedIn post in here too. Oh yeah.
Maureen Clough: Yeah, I you're actually going to hear a little bit of this story, not the retaliatory lay layoff part, but one of the things that led me to think the company was not a great place to be a female that, yeah, I'm going to detail that in my next step.
Oh boy. This is like a cliffhanger. I feel like we're like Netflix binging here almost perfect on age discrimination topics. Binge. The first person who's ever done that.
Philip VanDusen: Maureen Clough. It is a pleasure. I'm so glad to have you on the show and I hope you come back and talk to us again real soon.
Thanks so much, Philip. This has been a blast.
