My "Mesearch," Then and Now
Lisa Finkelstein was so affected by her father losing his job in his mid-50s, she made studying age discrimination in the workplace her field of study. As she's gotten older it's taken on new meaning.
When I was in high school in the 80s, my dad lost his job as a salesman for a candy distributor. He had taken a leave from work after a heart attack—he was in his mid-50s. I was 14. He had always been successful and energetic. The word around the company, in hushed but undisguised tones, was that he was over the hill and wouldn’t be able to keep up the work. After this, he struggled to find a good position and ended up starting his own (not very successful) business for a while. My parents relocated and downsized several times before he retired, earlier and less well-off than either of my parents anticipated.
Several years after the initial incident that kicked off this trajectory, I got into a PhD program in industrial-organizational psychology. In my second year I was still battling imposter syndrome and trying to figure out what to focus on for the master’s thesis that needed to be completed along the way to the PhD. In my social psychology courses, we were studying stereotyping and discrimination, and it finally clicked that I wanted to understand what happened to my dad. My first foray into “mesearch.”
My dad had always been successful and energetic. The word around the company, in hushed but undisguised tones, was that he was over the hill and wouldn’t be able to keep up the work.
If you haven’t heard the term mesearch, I’m sure y’all can figure it out pretty quickly. As much as science (even social science) is touted as objective, scientists are human and have interests, desires, emotions, sore spots, etc. At least some people are starting to come around to the idea that pretending we don’t isn’t going to make the research process more objective. Acknowledging our interests and biases can allow us to be even more planful and cognizant of the rigor of our methods. One of my favorite quotes regarding this idea, though honestly I forget where I first saw it, is “Be passionate about the question, not the answer.”
My master’s thesis was a meta-analysis (that’s like a statistical summary) of the nascent experimental age discrimination literature, and much to my surprise it won a best student paper award at my national conference and ended up being the only scientific publication I had when I went on the job market as an academic. It led to a career-long pursuit of understanding perceptions of age in the workplace. I am now a bit more than 28 years into my career as a professor, and I’m still at it.
When I first started, others in the field who would meet me at conferences were clearly both bemused and amused that Professor Finkelstein was not a greying and bespectacled, poorly dressed, schleppy old man, but a stylish young woman in her 20s who on several occasions was mistaken not only for an undergraduate but for a freshman. Why would this “young girl” want to devote her research career to thinking about old people?
Turns out that up until that point, at least in my subfield, not a lot of people did care, or at least it hadn’t occurred to them to care yet. Finally, it began to sink in that there were about to be a lot of older people in the workforce, and a much more age-diverse workforce than ever before. Researchers started paying more attention, and I was happy some of my work was being recognized and cited by researchers turning their attention to age and how we judged others because of it.
My master’s thesis was a meta-analysis of the nascent experimental age discrimination literature, and much to my surprise it won a best student paper award at my national conference. It led to a career-long pursuit of understanding perceptions of age in the workplace.
A funny thing happened then, gradually and then all at once, as these things do: I got old. As I finish writing this piece, I am just a couple of weeks away from my 56th birthday. If I wanted to, I could now buy a condo at the “old people place” where my parents lived before my Dad passed. I am no longer mistaken for a grad student, let alone a freshman. It’s mesearch in a whole new way.
Being an older worker studying age stereotyping really has provided me with new insights. The evolving lived experience is sparking some new ideas.
For one, some of my research has uncovered that younger people worry more about how they are being stereotyped (this is called “metastereotyping)—and it turns out that in some cases the stereotypes about younger people can be even more negative, on measure, than those about other age groups. Generational labels and caricatures in the media don’t help much with that either, no matter what age we are. People who would never think to speak harshly of another social, ethnic, gender, or ability group can throw pretty nasty and blatantly discriminatory barbs across generational lines without realizing what they’re doing.
During the start of the pandemic there was a lot of finger-pointing toward certain generations for contributing to the health crisis, and strangely some were identical critiques. One story would berate those Gen Z spring breakers in bikinis sharing drinks in red solo cups, while another would reprimand the elder Baby Boomers for going through with their Bahamas cruises.
If I wanted to, I could now buy a condo at the “old people place” where my parents lived before my Dad passed. I am no longer mistaken for a grad student, let alone a freshman. Being an older worker studying age stereotyping really has provided me with new insights. The evolving lived experience is sparking some new ideas.
I was invited to write a commentary to an academic journal on aging, at the time, about whatever I wanted in relation to aging and the pandemic, and what struck me in thinking about the age stereotypes that were emerging was that they were also steeped in privilege. You need money to go on Spring break trips and cruises. It got me thinking of some other popular stereotypes: entitled for the young; technophobic for the old. Aren’t these privileged too? Is what we know about age stereotypes and their effects on people’s work lives mostly based on mid- to upper-class, mostly white people? This idea was eye-opening for me and has started me on a path to trying to broaden samples, questions, and voices in my work.
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While I approach the tail end of my career as an aging re(me)searcher, I am heartened to see both in science and in the media (yay, Oldster!) an increased focus on promoting successful aging and shining a light on the tremendous scope of experiences that aging can bring.
Check out Lisa Finkelstein’s “happiness blog,” Demand the Shimmer.
 | A guest post by
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Having spent some time in the world of executive search and recruiting, I can tell you that on numerous occasions there were "private" conversations in the board rooms about a candidate being too old and over the hill to be considered seriously for even an interview. If the interview took place in order to show there was no age discrimination, other reasons were found for passing over that candidate preferring a younger, more vital one, in the opinion of the Board. Then I became an older, post-retirement candidate! That was around age 62 but I managed to secure some short term contracts after then, and one year-long as late as age 72. I am now 87 and still work part-time, independently of course. Age discrimination is alive and well in many quarters.
From my point of view, at age 83, you are a just getting started. I think it takes till we're 50 to figure out who we're not. The journey from there is finding out who we are.