Why the Benefits of Age Diversity Need to be Shouted from the Rooftops

Speech delivered on Champion Age Diversity Day

Age has been in the news.

In the UK, we just celebrated the Platinum Jubilee of our queen, now 96-years old, and still delivering value in the workplace. In her case, that happens to be the balcony on Buckingham Palace.

In the US we have the oldest man to be sworn in as President at age 78. At age 29, Joe Biden was one of the youngest people ever elected to the United States Senate. He may be domestically unpopular - hugely unpopular – but I am not alone in being grateful that an experienced statesman is in charge during the biggest crisis to face the West since the Cold War.

And on a June weekend, we saw a critically injured 36-year-old beat a 23-year-old at Roland Garros to walk away with his 14th French Open win, and thus be called the GREATEST OF ALL TIME, the best tennis player of his generation: Rafael Nadal, with two grand slams more than his closest opponents.

Yet we live in a world that worships youth. That dismisses the middle aged and the old. A world where if you are over 50, its going to be a nightmare trying to find a new job. And chances are, if you are employed, with stagflation, recession, whatever is coming, your employer is more likely to dismiss you if you are over 50, than if you are younger.

AGE DISCRIMINATION EXISTS AND ITS THRIVING

If I say to you, youth and innovation, youth and entrepreneurship, you won’t bat an eyelid.

If I say to you, an older worker and innovation, older worker and entrepreneurship…well, it doesn’t exactly slip off the tongue, does it?

In fact, I have my own story of age discrimination. In a bid to cut back on the household bills, I thought I would go grey, give up those boring visits to the hairdresser – boring and expensive – every six weeks. I bought a grey wig, to see what I would look like. Let me show you, as I showed my family.

(At this point in the speech, Karina put on a grey wig)

I admit it is a cheap, nasty wig. But what was even more horrific was my 21-year old son’s reaction: “Mama, you are supposed to be at the forefront of social change in the City, of Diversity and Inclusion. If you let yourself go grey, you won’t have any credibility.”

Let me repeat that:’ you won’t have any credibility. ‘

The conclusion is that if you are older, you don’t look like an agent of change, you don’t look like an entrepreneur, you don’t look like an innovator.

WHAT IS THE REALITY?

Let me give you 3 doses of reality.

First. The average age of a successful start-up founder is 45, according to a 2020 research study by Economica. Note the word ‘successful’.

Let me quote: ‘Among those who have started a firm, older entrepreneurs have a substantially higher success rate. Our evidence points to entrepreneurial performance rising sharply with age before cresting in the late fifties. If you were faced with two entrepreneurs and knew nothing about them besides their age, you would do better, on average, betting on the older one.’

Second dose of reality. The future of work. There is a lot of talk about automation taking away jobs from human beings. And about the older generation not being digital natives. We are digital immigrants. All true.

However, according to a study by The Inclusion Initiative at the London School of Economics, brains and heart win in the future of work.

Jobs that require abstract thinking, people engagement and soft skills are less likely to be automated, according to research. The authors also find that combining ‘heart’ with ‘brains’ will future-proof your job further. ‘Heart’ relates to jobs that involve soft skills and are high people engagement.

Now – and what I am going to say ain’t no research study – if I look at my peer group, we don’t need to prove ourselves anymore. We’re comfortable with our faults, with our qualities. We’ve either made it or we haven’t. We don’t take things as personally. We enjoy laughing at our own absurdities.

In a multigenerational workspace, that lack of ego, that lack of the need for struggle, can be very helpful.

Third dose of reality.

We have a vast, skills shortage in the Western world. Labour markets are in flux from the pandemic fallout and technological upheaval. Up to a billion people will need reskilling and life-long training by 2030, according to the OECD. We need more carers; we need more marketing executives; we need more quantum scientists.

And in parallel, on the plus side, we have a healthier population of people over 50, over 60, over 70, some of whom want to work longer, some of whom must, due to financial necessity, and many of whom will reinvent themselves.

As a microcosm of my third ‘dose of reality’, let me give you an example I have become very familiar with. The world of quantum computing. I won’t bore you with the details of how a finance and politics journalist has reinvented herself as a quantum guru – quantum involves geniuses with double PhDs, molecular simulation and Star Trek scenarios. Way out of my comfort zone.

In this ecosphere, the CEO of Google’s quantum spin out SandboxAQ, recently said, “The number one concern we have going forward is the skills gap. When people ask me, “what keeps me up at night?” – that’s what keeps me up at night – the lack of a talent pipeline in quantum and also lack of diversity in that pipeline.”

SEIZE THE OPPORTUNITY

What’s Jack Hidary’s solution? Work with universities to increase the pipeline. But also work with what he calls the “existing adult working population”. While at Google, they trained numerous staff in various quantum and other advanced math courses; they trained customers; they upskilled engineers and scientists that were already- ALREADY – in the workforce.

THAT’s the biggest opportunity. THAT’s the key to the skills shortage. Upskill, training, reinvention in any shape.

In Top Gun Maverick, the much-publicised blockbuster, ageing star Tom Cruise is dismissed by a younger protagonist with the words, “The future is coming, and you’re not in it”. Who can doubt that he, at 58 years old, saves the day?!

Not only are we, the older generation, the future. WE are the key. WE are the opportunity. WE are the solution.

This is the keynote speech delivered by Karina Robinson, Co-Director of The Inclusion Initiative, on Champion Age Diversity Day, as part of a panel on Valuing Age Diversity in the Workplace.

It was sponsored by The Age Diversity Forum and Hansuke Consultants.

A New Age for Old Age

The latest tech innovations

Dimmed lights are reflected on the heated sea water in the indoor pool, while New Age music wafts across the cavernous room. Aged bodies advance in slow motion from jet to jet, allowing each one to massage a different part of their arthritic bodies, while chatting desultorily with each other and with Nikkos, the Greek God of a lifeguard.

This vision of the future, courtesy of a thalassotherapy spa holiday near Athens, shocked me into a personal awareness of how the population of the world’s major economies is ageing, notably in Europe, Japan, China and the US. And what a wealth of opportunities and challenges arise out of it.

People over 60 are set to become the world’s fastest growing cohort. By 2050 there will be 2 billion of them. Their participation in the workforce will be crucial to make up for fewer working-age adults. For this to happen, more flexibility will be needed in the world of work, whose practices too often continue to be hidebound by tradition.

Adapting the tools of work is also vital. Sixteen-year old students at a recent workshop at ADA, the National College for Digital Skills in London, experimented with taping three of their fingers together and wearing dark glasses while trying to use a normal keyboard. The simulation of old age travails will undoubtedly lead to breakthroughs in workable technology.

In any case muscle weakening, for instance, will not be an irreversible effect of age. The Olympic-contest handshake between French President Emmanuel Macron and US President Donald Trump was won by the younger man. No surprise there. But bionic inserts, created using 3-D printing, are on the horizon.

Blurring science fiction and reality, Bristol-based Open Bionics creates 3D-printed robotic hands for amputees, mainly children. One child asked them for a pocket to store his iPhone on his bionic arm. In a few years, one can visualise an older person who has lost the use of their arms due to, say, Parkinson’s, asking for an app to be downloaded into their arm which would call their carers when they had a severe fall. (In fact, the latter already exists, albeit on an iPhone, not inserted into a body.)

Later that day at the spa, gently perspiring in a sticky seaweed wrap, I reflected that in 500 BC Greek physician Hippocrates came up with a revolutionary focus on preventing sickness instead of simply treating disease. The older people at the spa (and those of us who meander in the middle-age range) were doing just that. Monitoring our health is becoming normal through Fitbit and other wearable devices, while exciting apps are being developed that can tell when a depressive episode is about to happen or when a heartbeat is out of sync, as seen in the Flying Health incubator in Germany.

Robots will undoubtedly help with old age. Yet the warmth of human interaction is invaluable. Penelope, one of the personal trainers at the spa and the living image of a koure (temple maiden), led a keep-fit class in the pool and her smile, surely, encouraged us more than any robotic voice could have. In any case, the human/tech interface is emerging as the most productive piece of the puzzle in our new world. Take Vida, a start-up funded by Hambro Perks which aims to disrupt the carer market. The app lets customers book carefully vetted carers and includes capabilities like setting the tasks they are to accomplish. It sees itself as the Uber of carers.

Mental stimulation is essential both to quality of life and to being a productive member of society. Tech devices will help deal with, and possibly reverse the decline in our mental capacity as we age – but nothing can be as stimulating to our brains (and souls) as using our professional capabilities to help society. This can be seen through the work of United Nations Volunteers. Assignments can range from advising on dam building to editing a newspaper in Haiti or changing laws in Vietnam. There is also online volunteering in areas like proposal writing or social media management for an organisation in Cameroon. The UN is visionary is in not having any upper age limit for the skilled individuals it seeks, thus appealing to retired professionals, amongst others.

In fact, the Odyssean saga of Greek debt forgiveness/restructuring/bailout, which dominated the local papers during our stay, would assuredly benefit from the advice of old hands who dealt with the Latin America or Asian debt crises.

Touring the fascinating Acropolis Museum with my elegant 85-year old mother stuck in the customary wheelchair at groin height, I mused on the business opportunity in creating one that would allow the occupant to be at the proper viewing height for the exhibits. But an ageing population is not all about opportunities. It is just as much about facing up to the challenges and the biggest one is financing, not easy for politicians.

The difficulty of so doing became apparent as we landed in London to find that Prime Minister Theresa May had done a U-turn on a new policy to make pensioners pay more for their care. It needed more work, but the basic premise that more funds were needed was accurate. However, even on the funding side there are new ways of doing things, in this case using data to come up with risk-pooling initiatives via cloud communities, as mentioned in more detail in a FT piece.

To the young out there, embrace the older generation for their wisdom and experience; to the middle-aged and old, fear not advancing age but grasp it with the strength of a Hercules.

*Open Bionics and the Flying Health incubator both gave presentations at the fascinating annual Global Female Leaders Summit 2017 in Berlin. I am a member of the Advisory Board. The next one is April 23-25, 2018.