Youth, interrupted

My favorite audiences for the corporate trainings I do are people in their twenties and early thirties. They want to learn, so they are usually interested and engaged. They are curious. Often they start asking me questions about difficult work situations, even if they aren’t connected specifically to the training topic. The women ask me more questions, because I am not shy about talking about my experiences as a woman in corporate America. Some of the questions that arose in a recent training made me think about the other side of ageism. I have written many words about the unskillful ways I and other people over 40 are treated in the workplace. Which is true. And ageism is a frequent topic served up to me by the Almighty Algorithm that is predicting subjects that interest me. What I hear less about, possibly because of the Almighty Algorithm, are the ways in which people in their twenties are treated badly in the workplace because of their age. It may also be because the posters of words on LinkedIn and various trade publications don’t talk to many people early in their career. (Yes, I said posters of words as opposed to writers of words because we know many of these people are using AI to aggregate the words of actual writers like me and pretend they are their own. But I digress.) Two examples that came up in this recent training were younger women being repeatedly and consistently interrupted by men in work meetings and younger people of any gender being questioned about their age in a demeaning way. Listen for more and please share or review! Get full access to Fierce Grace at speirolo.substack.com/subscribe