'It Gets Late Early:' A conversation about ageism with Maureen Wiley Clough

We recently wrote about “youngism,” how younger women experience ageism in the workplace. Maureen Wiley Clough, creator and host of the It Gets Late Early podcast, explores what it’s like getting older in a world obsessed with 25-year-old digital natives. Clough first experienced ageism in her mid-20s while working in as a producer in the TV industry in New York City, where she noticed that “men were allowed to get silver hair and women had to look like they were forever 25.” After embarking on a sales career in technology, she distinctly remembers a younger colleague at one company who teasingly called her a “dinosaur” because she didn’t know how to put a GIF in Slack. She was 37 years old. Today, at 42, she is a speaker and strategist whose insights have been featured in Business Insider, Forbes and across LinkedIn. Clough, who lives in the San Juan Islands in Washington state, has partnered with AARP and worked with companies including Amazon to advance conversations about age inclusion and the future of work.

Sounds like that incident with your younger colleague opened your eyes? It was the “aha” moment that set me down this path. I immediately laughed and thought it was hilarious. And that just goes to show you again how casually and acceptable ageism is in our society. I myself had made plenty of jokes at the expense of my older colleagues. One of my podcast guests is my ex-colleague John, whom I absolutely adore. We had a great relationship, but I always made fun of him for being the “old guy” in the room. It was fun, not serious. It wasn’t until I brought him on the show that I started off with a wholehearted apology.

How prevalent is this in the workplace? This happens routinely. Ninety-two percent of companies based on a PWC survey from a few years ago do not focus on age as part of their DEIB initiatives. It’s just completely off the table. That’s why I started the show.

Where is ageism most present in tech? I’m an ambitious person and I had always wanted to continue to climb the career ladder, but I realized that part of that was self-preservation. It was a defense mechanism, because I thought if I could hit senior director or VP by 40, I’m probably pretty safe because you do see older people in those upper roles. (Ageism) is down the ladder.

Is ageism worse in tech than in other professions? Yes, but it’s advertising, fashion, beauty, Hollywood, acting. But I want to point out something I didn’t realize until I got into this whole mess: Ageism goes both ways, and this is true in other industries. If you think about it, when you get on a plane, aren’t you pretty excited when the pilot has some gray hair? Same thing when you go into a doctor’s office. We basically marginalize people who are younger because we don’t necessarily accept that they have value or skills. We make these gut-level assumptions based on their appearance in terms of their chronological age.

Is there also a lot of sexism in tech? Oh my gosh, yes, for sure. There’s this double whammy of sexism and ageism that really does set women behind.

Why is there so much focus on different generations with labels such as baby boomer, millennial or Gen Z? It’s click bait is what it is. I think it also comes from a real sense of wanting to belong. It’s a quick and easy way to identify someone who went through certain things on a global scale. There are generational norms, like Gen Z. You know that they grew up with digital devices. Unfortunately, the flip side of this is that there are really broad generalizations of stereotypes associated with people by age group. That’s the bad underbelly.