JEAN-PAUL writes:

I would be interested in reading your thoughts about something I have been noticing for several years. 

Put simply and brutally, almost all of the women whom my wife and I know as friends or acquaintances and who hold mid- to upper-level jobs, usually in public government organizations get fired under one pretense or other (e.g. their position is “eliminated”; not them, the position. etc.) when they pass childbearing age. I could name a dozen of them. They were thrown away when they reached their “use before” sexual expiry dates. Some were fired by other younger women hired as head choppers and who were themselves later fired. It’s unreal and vicious. 

These are all experienced, competent women who believed in the bureaucracy in which they swam for decades and who were fully committed to it. They are all shocked, disoriented and hurt when they are let go, (some with buyouts or pensions, some with nothing) being true believers, unable to see the forest for the leaves on the tree. 

One of them, a tall, blond and beautiful woman who was my friend for 40 years, took her own life with a handgun two years after she was disposed of by her employer of 20 years, a large advertising firm. It was the only time she ever used a weapon.

Laura writes:

Has the expansion of the labor market in the past 50 years to include most women and most men favored young workers? That is an interesting question. It makes sense that employers would favor the young more than in the past. The tradition of customary discrimination in favor of men perhaps checked the elimination of older employees. It would be interesting to know if this is true. The needs of the family once determined who would be left out – mostly women – and now it is the interests of the market. This is what feminism calls progress.

I do not know whether women are fired more often as they get older. It seems both men and women are vulnerable in late middle-age. Here is an article about older employees from today’s New York Times focusing mostly on women. The piece, called “The New Poor,” features a woman who worked as a corporate accountant for 20 years. Her husband is modestly employed and they have a house overlooking Puget Sound with no mortgage. (There is no mention of children.) This state of relative comfort is what’s called “the new poor.”

Feminists claimed women would find “independence” when they relied on jobs instead of husbands. How many women have divorced husbands only to find that the workplace is not a better spouse?The story of your friend who committed suicide is horrific. Imagine allowing one’s emotional life to revolve so completely around a job that one has nothing left when it is over and shoots oneself as if betrayed by a lover. Did she face real poverty? Whether younger women have some natural tendency to turn against older female employees, I couldn’t say. Younger workers will always be cheaper.

                                     — Comments —

Jesse Powell writes:

In the table below, I looked at the employment-to-population ratio of white men and women in their prime working years, 25 to 54 years old, and in the older part of that range, 45 to 54 years old.  Men tend to work a bit less in this older part of their prime working years, and women tend to work a bit more.  I don’t see any major difference in the decline of women working due to the recent recession comparing the 25 to 54 age group to the more narrow 45 to 54 year old age group.  I’m not sure the impression of women being fired because they pass childbearing age is backed up by the data, or at least after they are fired they go to work someplace else. 

I picked the dates I chose for comparisons because: November 2001 was the beginning of the recovery period after the 2001 recession; December 2007 was the end of that recovery and the beginning of the recent severe recession; June 2009 was the end of the recent severe recession and the beginning of the recovery period we are currently in (just announced today by the National Bureau of Economic Research); and August 2010 is the most recent data available. 

                       Employment-to-Population Ratio among Whites; Age Groups 25 to 54 and 45 to 54 

Sources:

Bureau of Labor Statistics
Economagic – Economic Time Series Page  

Data on recession beginning and end dates
National Bureau of Economic Research 

Jesse adds:

To address the issue of whether there has been a change in preference for younger workers versus older workers during the past 50 years, I will look at the employment-to-population ratio of white men and women in the 25 to 34 year old age group, representing younger workers, and the 45 to 54 age group, representing older workers.  The two dates I will use are January 1960 and January 2010, to represent the change over the past 50 years.  Looking at the data in the table below, the number of young workers has grown more than the number of older workers during the past 50 years, but this is entirely because of the very large increase in younger women, with only a large, but comparatively smaller, increase in older women workers.  Men, taken by themselves, had a greater drop in the labor force in the younger age group than the older age group, by a small margin.  Perhaps the greatest change in the labor force these past 50 years, comparing older workers to younger workers, is the great shrinking of the employment gap among women workers between their employment rates in the young age group versus the older age group.  The difference in employment rates, in absolute terms, of the older female age group versus the younger female age group was 14.4 percentage points in January 1960.  This gap shrunk to 3.4 percentage points by January 2010.  In terms of the ratio of the employment rate of older women versus younger women, older women were employed 46.9% more often in January 1960, but only 4.9% more often in January 2010. 

                                Employment-to-Population Ratio of Whites

Source:
Bureau of Labor Statistics
Economagic – Economic Time Series Page

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