Ageism at work

[Reallyyoungatheart]

Manager used to include me in projects, keep me up to date in person /e-mail. Very friendly and chatty and appeared to be interested in my life.

Fast forward and has done a complete u turn. Excluded from projects, work given to colleagues. Dropped of emails and no longer rings or talks to me but actually ignores which feels horrible.

Not done anything wrong workwise and unsure what brought this on. Before the behaviour change my date of birth was revealed. Am I mad to think this is down to ageism? Has anyone else experienced it?

It seems unlikely and a bit of a leap to make. Surely your manager could guess your age by looking at you? What difference does your exact date of birth make?

Excluded from projects, work given to colleagues. Dropped of emails and no longer rings or talks to me but actually ignores which feels horrible.

What are you doing to increase the communication flow? You need to 'meet your part of the deal' by putting regular updates into your manager's calendar and showing interest in the projects you're involved with rather than expecting the information to be coming to you without taking action to make that happen.

Put in 30 min weekly update meetings and be prepared to say "I'm not sure what's happening on this, can you tell me who I can work with to find out the latest and how I can be involved" etc. This shows your manager that communication isn't happening, and they can support you in getting back on track.

That's far more likely to get you improved results than thinking they're discriminating against you because of your DOB.

Sit the manager down and discuss how you’d like to be in emails, meetings, projects. Ask if there’s any reason for excluding

Tried discussing/ meeting but manager is too busy.

Why would it be down to ageism? What makes you think that?

Because DOB was revealed. Maybe I have annoyed manager. Don't know what caused the general decline. Lower priority than colleagues.

It’s one hell of a leap to assume it’s because of your date of birth.
Why not pull on your big girl pants and sit down with them and just discuss the situation.

I'd look for another cause rather than age.

Whatever the reason(s) for the change, it’s important to seek to address it if you’re being given poor work.

Your manager is likely able to freely access your date of birth eg from your personnel files.

Therefore you may think they just found out your date of birth before this apparent attitude change, but in reality they could have known your date of birth sooner including when they were nice