DEI Resources: Age

Ageism: Past, Present, and Futurepresents perspectives for understanding ageism and puts ageism in the context of specific social institutions. McNamara and Williamson uniquely provide a number of complementary ways to understand ageism, including social and psychological theories of ageism, economic development, ageism as frame or lens, and ageism at the intersection of various social categories such as gender and race. They then put ageism in the context of mass media, health care, employment, and public policy. This short text is an ideal addition to courses on sociology of aging, social policy, and social problems.

This volume of essays is concerned with the discrimination against older people that results from a failure to recognise their diversity. By considering the unique combinations of discrimination that arise from the interrelationship of age and gender, pensions, ethnicity, sexual orientation, socio-economic class and disability, the contributors demonstrate that the discrimination suffered is multiple in nature. It is the combination of these characteristics that leads to the need for more complex ways of tackling age discrimination.

These selections provide the reader with a comprehensive overview of the key themes, theoretical foundations, and empirical evidence relating to age bias in the workplace.

Age structures our lives and societies. It shapes social institutions, roles, and relationships, as well as how we assign obligations and entitlements within them. There is an age for schooling, an age for voting, an age for working, and an age when one is expected (and sometimes required) to retire. Each life-stage also brings its characteristic opportunities and vulnerabilities, which spawn multidimensional inequalities between young and old. How should we respond to these age-related inequalities? Are they unfair in the same way that gender or racial inequalities often are? Or is there something distinctive about age that should mitigate ethical concern? This book addresses these and related questions, offering an ambitious theory of justice between age groups.

We live at a time when the human lifespan has increased like never before. As average lifespans stretch to new lengths, what impact should this have on our values? Should our values change over the course of our ever-increasing lifespans?Nancy S. Jecker coins the term, the life stage relativity of values, to capture the idea that at different stages of our lives, different ethical concerns shift to the foreground. During early life, infants and small children hold dear the value of being cared for and nurtured by someone they trust- and their vulnerability and dependency make these the right values for them. By early adulthood and continuing into midlife, the capacity for greater physical and emotional independence gives people reason to place more emphasis on autonomy and the ability to freely choose and carry out their planof life. During old age, heightened risk for chronic disease and disability gives us a reason to shift our focus again, emphasizing safeguarding our central capabilities and keeping our dignity and self-respect intact.Despite different values becoming central at different stages of life, we often assume the standpoint of someone in midlife, who is in the midst of planning a future adulthood that stretches out before them. Jecker coins the term, midlife bias, to refer to the privileging of midlife. Midlife biasoccurs when we assume that autonomy should be our central aim at all life stages and give it priority in a wide range of ethical decisions. The privileging of midlife raises fundamental problems of fairness. It also suggests the possibility of large gaps in the ethical principles and theories athand.Ending Midlife Bias: New Values for Old Age addresses these concerns in a step-wise fashion, focusing on later life. Jecker first introduces a philosophical framework that extends moral theorizing to older adults, addressing midlife bias, the life stage relativity of values, human capabilities anddignity, time's passage, the narrative self, and justice between old and young. She then turns to policy and practice and explores ethical issues in bioethics, long term care, personal robotic assistants, care of the dying and newly dead, ageism in medical research, the allocation of healthcare,mandatory retirement, and the future of population aging.