Ageism
[7] In the UK, at a meeting of the Bracknell Forest Council in June 1983, councillor Richard Thomas pointed out that age discrimination works against younger and older people.
While this might generally be true, many elderly individuals recover quickly from accidents, and conversely, very young people—such as infants, toddlers, and small children—can become permanently disabled under similar circumstances.
[30] On the other hand, when elders show greater independence and control in their lives, defying ageist presumptions, they are more likely to be healthier mentally and physically than other people of similar age.
[48][49][43] Today, visual ageism in the media tends to come wrapped in the guise of the positive attributes of third-age representations of older people, while adults in their fourth-age continue to be underrepresented.
[71] However, midlife female workers may also experience discrimination based on their appearance[72] and may feel less visible and undervalued[73] in a culture where the emphasis is on maintaining an approved standard of beauty.
[87] According to Robert M. McCann, an associate professor of management communication at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, denigrating older workers, even if only subtly, can have an outsized negative impact on employee productivity and corporate profits.
[100] As women reach their 40s and 50s, the pressure to adhere to societal beauty norms seen in films and media intensifies in terms of new cosmetic procedures and products that will maintain a "forever youthful" look.
[109][110] Furthermore, caregivers further undermine the treatment of older patients by over-helping them, which may decrease independence and/or interfere with their autonomy,[113] and by making a generalized assumption and treating all elderly people as feeble.
[citation needed] In 2017, the European Court of Human Rights ruled in favor of Maria Ivone Carvalho Pinto de Sousa Morais, who had had an operation that was mishandled and rendered her unable to have sex.
That assumption reflects a traditional idea of female sexuality as being essentially linked to childbearing purposes and thus ignores its physical and psychological relevance for the self-fulfillment of women as people.
In most sources prior to the very modern era, it was not only largely heterosexual-specific and gender-specific but was presented as a formula to calculate the ideal age of a female partner at the beginning of a relationship, instead of a lower limit.
According to Becca Levy's Stereotype embodiment theory, older and younger people might also engage in self-stereotypes, taking their culture's age stereotypes—to which they have been exposed over the life course—and directing them inward toward themselves.
[133][134] A 2020 study published in The Journals of Gerontology found that the vulnerability of older adults was seen as a problem to be solved through forced and indefinite segregation or isolation, and such measures were widely seen as acceptable by society.
[133] A 2021 study published in The Sociological Review characterized the treatment of elders amid the pandemic as "intergenerational discounting": "breakdown in reciprocal obligations of care, giving rise to accusations of hypocrisy, expressions of resentment and rage, and the description of the virus as the 'Boomer remover'."
[137] In September 2022, UN appointed independent human rights expert Claudia Mahler said that "as well as ageism and age-discrimination, even among Government officials, violence against older persons is an unspoken reality.
[citation needed] The District of Columbia and twelve states (California, Florida, Iowa, Hawaii, Kansas, Louisiana, Maine, Minnesota, Nebraska, New Mexico, New York, and Vermont) define age as a specific motivation for hate crimes.
In September 2016, California passed state bill AB-1687, an anti-ageism law taking effect on 1 January 2017, requiring "commercial online entertainment employment" services that allow paid subscribers to submit information and resumes (such as IMDbPro), to honor requests to have their ages and birthdays removed.
[167] On 23 February 2017, U.S. District Judge Vince Girdhari Chhabria issued a stay on the bill pending a further trial, claiming that it was "difficult to imagine how AB 1687 could not violate the First Amendment" because it inhibited the public consumption of factual information.
[168] In February 2018, Girdhari ruled that the law was unconstitutional, arguing that the state of California "[had] not shown that partially eliminating one source of age-related information will appreciably diminish the amount of age discrimination occurring in the entertainment industry."
The ruling was criticized by SAG-AFTRA, alleging that the court "incorrectly concluded there were no material disputed factual issues, while precluding the parties from acquiring additional evidence or permitting the case to go to trial".
The Blas Ople Policy Center, a non-governmental organization, asserts that responsibilities of making a livelihood in a household has shifted to younger members of the family due to bias against hiring people older than 30 years of age.
[217] The case concerned Seda Kücükdeveci, who argued that the German service related statutory minimum notice period, because it disregarded employment before the age of 25, was unjustifiably discriminatory against young people.
In Belgium, the Law of 25 February 2003 "tending to fight discrimination" punishes Ageism when "a difference of treatment that lacks objective and reasonable justification is directly based on ... age".
[217] The case concerned Seda Kücükdeveci, who argued that the German service related statutory minimum notice period, because it disregarded employment before the age of 25, was unjustifiably discriminatory against young people.
[citation needed] Barbara Robb, founder of the British pressure group, Aid for the Elderly in Government Institutions (AEGIS), compiled Sans Everything: A Case to Answer, a controversial book detailing the inadequacies of care provided for older people, which prompted a nationwide scandal in the UK in 1976.
Although initially official inquiries into these allegations reported that they were "totally unfounded or grossly exaggerated",[252] her campaigns led to revealing of other instances of ill treatment which were accepted and prompted the government to implement NHS policy changes.
[279] Although the price of papers was not lowered, the strike was successful in forcing the World and Journal to offer full buybacks to their sellers, thus increasing the amount of money that newsies received for their work.
[285][286] Aid for the Elderly in Government Institutions (AEGIS) was a British pressure group that campaigned to improve the care of older people in long-stay wards of National Health Service psychiatric hospitals.
[299] In 2006 Lydia Giménez-Llort, an assistant professor of Psychiatry and researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona coined the term "Snow White Syndrome" at the "Congrés de la Gent Gran de Cerdanyola del Vallès" (Congress of the Elderly of Cerdanyola del Vallès, Barcelona, Spain) as a metaphor to define ageism in an easier and more friendly way while developing a constructive spirit against it.
[300] Since 2008 "The Intergenerational Study" by Lydia Giménez-Llort and Paula Ramírez-Boix from the Autonomous University of Barcelona aims to find the basis of the link between grandparents and grandsons (positive family relationships) that can minimize the ageism towards the elderly.
