What happens when the baby boomers die?

[LargeSquareRock]

Sorry about the title, but that’s literally it. I’ve wondered this since I was a child.

Obviously we are about to enter a 20 year spike when a smaller number of tax payers support a higher number of elderly people in healthcare and elder care.

What happens in 20 years when the spike is over? Do we have empty care homes, plentiful housing and easily available health care?

I really have no evil agenda asking this- demographics has always fascinated me.

I think you are very naive if you think it is just small dodgy businesses who didn’t follow the laws and legislation

I worked for a branch of a multinational company in the 90s and was told I didn’t get the internal job I went for because the person they gave it to was a man and he would have a family to support one day

If discrimination against women in the workplace didn’t happen after laws were brought in, why are women still winning court cases against companies big and small over half a century later

I'm surprised that people would be so passive about it but then again how many women found it convenient to say they had to give up work

This just shows how little you understand about the real world of the 1960s

Taking an employer to court cost money. Money wasn’t in huge supply to women at the time. Remember Credit cards, loans, even mortgages weren’t readily available to women.
Nor was the internet where you could ask advice on what to do.

As for convenient to give to work.

It was for a lot of women financially reckless to pay out for childcare and go to work. It would have impacted the family finances and husband wanted a clean house and tea on the table when he came home as well

Although there were laws men and society didn’t suddenly change over night

Absolutely! It's like me, I don't (or didn't) have to replace my driving licence with a photo one because I'm so old. 😂

I started work in the 60s and never knew anyone who had to give up work because they got married.

As I said they made a concession for DMum so she didn't have to in end but prior to her they did expect it. She did say it was an older generation of management/owners and she lived in a less urban area ie more old fashion/small c conservative area but it was 70s.

She was certainly made to feel they were changing their long standing policy and doing her a massive favor - she often mentioned it to us her DDs that and her Dad not allowing her to stay on past 16 as she'd wanted - she was super keen on education especially for her DDs.

I was born in the early 1960s and when I was growing up I had the impression that it was fairly normal for women to stay on at work after marriage but leave towards the end of the first pregnancy. I remember a teacher at my school leaving because she was getting married and we all thought it was rather odd, although I have a hazy memory that she was moving away too, possibly because of her new husband's job. That would have been the mid 1970s. Not long after that the first teacher took maternity leave after it became a statutory entitlement. It felt quite revolutionary when she returned a few months later.

I know there were some big changes in employers' policies around forcing women to leave on marriage from the mid 1950s on, but were these as a result of changes in the law or was it a social change that employers either did or didn't adopt? I imagine the change in the civil service must have come from government. My MIL was forced to leave her job at the Post Office Savings Bank, then an outpost of government, when she married in the early 1950s. She got another office job in the City until my husband was born and much later went back to the Civil Service as part of a concerted drive to get former women employees back by offering part-time work.

I also imagine that women from strong union backgrounds were far more likely to fight against antediluvian atittudes to women working after marriage. I expect it varied a lot by industry, whether the woman lived in a big city noted for Radical or left-wing politics or in a sleepy backwater, and so on.

OK I'll try one more time.

I wasn't talking about discrimination,

I wasn't talking about pregnancy.

What I was talking about was someone saying that a woman had to leave her job in a local authority when she married in the 1960s. There was no marriage ban on married women in the civil service, post office or local authorities although there had been earlier.

I hope that makes it clear, if not I give up.

In local government, civil service and post office yes there was a marriage bar that required women to resign on marriage. It did end in the 1950s, except for the foreign civil service where it ended a bit later. I think it ended for teachers in the 1940s, maybe due to war.

I was talking about the marriage ban in the civil service/local government/post office. As far as I know other businesses could have other policies.

I think the other thing people don't realise is that it was hard to find childcare in the 60s/70s. When I was studying for my local government exams in the early 70s we were told that there were fewer nurseries than there had been 20 years earlier. Lots of wartime nurseries had closed or were closing.

And they think there are no advantages to being old!

I was a working married woman in the 1960s. Ever heard of teaching your grandmother to suck eggs?

This. Also loads of older people provide free childcare. Additionally, not every contribution to society is economic but is still valuable.

I think we’ve peaked in uk life expectancy and see a lot more chronic illness in younger people so will unfortunately need to provide the same levels of support in terms of health and social care - just go younger people

This. Especially with the increase in private renting including people aged over 45/50 (as published in the British Medical Journal, private renting is more harmful to health than smoking).

many women found it convenient to say they had to give up work

This lack of understanding of those times has been responded to well by other posters (examples below). Also stay at home parenting is a job. When both parents are in the workplace, other people simply get paid to do the job instead (childminding, nurseries etc).

Remember Credit cards, loans, even mortgages weren’t readily available to women.

I worked for a branch of a multinational company in the 90s and was told I didn’t get the internal job I went for because the person they gave it to was a man and he would have a family to support one day

More recently, about 15 years ago, a friend worked for a company where the owner (who was also the manager) rejected a candidate because she was "of child bearing age and hadn't yet had children so might go on maternity leave". The manager was a woman and a mother herself. So much for the sisterhood. Karma got her though as the successful candidate revealed she was pregnant one month into the job. She'd been chosen because she already had two children and the manager thought that was her done with kids.

Also as well as those SAHMs in the past doing the job of parenting, commonly women also did the unpaid job of caring for elderly or disabled relatives.

That's actually still happening, especially childless/childfree women (who often end up destitute, which is appalling and something that needs to be addressed). As you're from Australia OP, this Australian article might be of particular interest to you OP, but it's relevant to the UK too.

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2023/dec/03/i-fret-about-the-years-that-lie-ahead-the-unique-caring-burden-of-single-childless-daughters

Women who did work had lower wages than men at that time. I think it was the late 70s before the first equal pay act was passed. I recall my mum's cousin telling us that a teenage male in the Co-op where she worked complained when the women there first got equal pay.

Certainly, as a teacher in 1984, I didn't have the same right to pass on my pension contributions if I died in service. I think it was '87 before that changed.

It's only in the last few years that women in Glasgow Council gained parity with the men for work of equal value.

In this actual century, I know female teachers who were illegally asked about their childcare arrangements in interviews. They didn't complain because they wanted the job...

If you rent privately from a labour MP it’s definitely bad for your health!!

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/clyg1j0lv1go

Oh dear. It looks like I hit a nerve.

My point was that we have had laws for many years to protect pregnant women and women on mat leave from being unfairly dismissed because of their pregnancy and yet, even in 2024, that is still a regular occurrence. Therefore it is hardly a stretch of the imagination to realise that the same thing happened with the marriage bar. These types of discrimination may no longer be legal in themselves, but there are plenty of legal ways employers can dismiss staff to bypass employment protection rights.

It may not have happened to you or anyone you knew, but your experience is not universal.

Indeed! I'm not a teacher but I was asked at interview in 2007 about my childcare arrangements. I was the only internal candidate being interviewed and I was the only person asked - the role would have been (was) a change to my then hours. But when it is your current employer and you need your job, making a formal complaint is a risky business.

This is the situation both my single childless SILs find themselves in.

I was asked in a third interview in 1995 how many children I had. I'd just finished a three year full-time course but they obviously decided I had too many to be offered the job. I never heard from them again, though I'd previously been told that the third interview was "a formality".

I've worked in several small businesses where any CVs from women in their late 20's & 30s were automatically binned as they didn't want to risk having to pay maternity leave/ having a new hire leave in a year or two. It may be illegal to discriminate in this way but it still happens. If you can demonstrate that those you chose to interview were more 'suitable' it's pretty difficult for anyone to claim they have been discriminated against even though they have.

Yes that's what happened where a friend worked. The manager was a terrible hypocrite though because she was a mother herself. She particularly discriminated against women of child bearing age who hadn't yet had children because she didn't want staff to go on maternity leave.

An highly intelligent but ruthless old manager of mine would deliberately invite the nearest part time working mother for the company into interviews with women in their thirties in order to be able to bring up the subject of childcare without asking directly. She'd steer the conversation in such a way that it would be weird for the interviewee not to divulge her own situation.

Why would I lie? It was my lived experience and I don't think my colleagues were making it up just to fool me! It was in Scotland, the rules there may have been more in line with Ireland. But 60+ years later I can't provide any proof that it actually happened.

Just because something's illegal doesn't mean it doesn't happen, or we'd have no murders.