My job involves quite a lot of mentoring of younger colleagues, often women. I’m in my early 40s and they will typically be mid-late 20s. In general I get on well with them and enjoy the mentoring and the conversation, sometimes we’ll become friends and go for coffee. They’re definitely not intentionally being rude, but I find it very striking how many unthinkingly ageist comments towards older women they will make to me when we’re chatting in a more informal way, e.g. criticising or laughing at women in the public eye because they look too ‘old’ or supposedly aren’t looking as good as they used to (e.g. actresses), or with one we got talking about the word ‘spinster’ and how it’s still seen as so negative and she said she thought it was because people associate it with old women (so, obviously awful then!) Tbh I can remember having some of those biases myself at that age, but I feel embarrassed by them now, and I sort of thought this generation of women was seen as more consciously feminist and aware of not putting down other women. I think that’s maybe filtered through in terms of not being unnecessarily competitive with women their own age, but it seems very clear that it hasn’t filtered through to some of their attitudes about older women. I find it sad, not least because it just doesn’t seem to occur to them that they will ‘become’ those older women in the not too distant future, and very much won’t enjoy being written off when that happens. Sometimes I try to gently point that out to them, but I don’t really want to give them a lecture, and tbh it is surprising to me that intelligent young women can’t figure that out for themselves.
AIBU to think that a lot of young women still have pretty unreconstructed attitudes to older women, and to find that surprising and sad in this generation?