Gendered agism in the media industry: Disavowal, discrimination and the pushback

Abstract

This study aimed to understand the experiences of older women media professionals whose age and gender had prompted discriminatory behavior (gendered ageism) towards them by their line managers and/or employers. It draws on the testimonies provided by 24 women media professionals who self-identified as ‘older’ and who were interviewed for the work. All the participants had worked (and some still work) as journalists, presenters, producers or actors, and alongside diverse and routinised micro-aggressions, their experiences included having their contracts summarily terminated or not renewed, being manoeuvred out of front-of-camera roles, seen their career opportunities evaporate when they reached their 40s or even earlier, and been replaced by younger, ‘fresher’ women. However, some participants are fighting back by creating their own media and developing opportunities for other women to thrive.

Keywords:

• Aesthetic labor
• gendered ageism
• media industry

Introduction

I won my case but I lost my career. I had some work afterwards but not very much. I regret that the BBC behaved in the way it did. But I don’t regret my behaviour. I would do it again in a heartbeat because it was the right thing to do. It was absolutely the right thing to do. (Miriam O’Reilly quoted in Sandhu, 2020)

In 2011, Miriam O’Reilly won the first UK tribunal case on ageism which she brought against the BBC when her contract was summarily terminated in 2008. In February 2022, Donna Traynor started legal proceedings against the BBC on the grounds of sexism and ageism. While the circumstances of the two cases were different, the substance was the same: that gendered ageism was at the base of decisions to either dismiss them (in O’Reilly’s case) or move them out of their existing presenting role (in Traynor’s case). Both these cases, but especially O’Reilly’s, have made the headlines but these are not the only stories and older women’s claims of gendered ageism in the media industry have a depressingly long history. One of the best-known cases involved Christine Craft who fought a long-drawn-out campaign against her employer, the Kansas City television station, KMBC. Within six months of being hired in 1981, Craft was reassigned to a backroom job because, allegedly, she was regarded by participants in a focus group as “too old, too unattractive, and not sufficiently deferential to men” (Craft quoted in Chambers et al., 2004, p. 140). Initially, a judgment was made in Craft’s favor finding evidence of sex-based discrimination and hiring fraud and she was awarded $500,000. However, when the station appealed, a second judge found in favor of the station and despite numerous efforts to have the case re-heard, Craft was ultimately unsuccessful and received not a dollar of compensation. A few years later, anchor Brenda Williams, who had replaced Craft, filed a discrimination claim against the station and settled out of court for $100,000. One of the largest ever pay-outs was awarded to Janet Peckinpaugh ($8.3 m) against local Hartford TV station WFSB-TV in 1999 although the agreed grounds were sexism rather than the gendered ageism she claimed (ibid), the opposite finding to O’Reilly’s case.

To provide a bit more detail, one of the most high-profile British cases of discrimination within a broadcasting context concerned Miriam O’Reilly whose contract, along with those of the other four women presenters (but crucially not the men) of the popular BBC TV show Countryfile, was not renewed in 2008. She subsequently took her case to tribunal on the grounds of sexism and ageism (she was 53 at the time) and in 2011, was awarded an estimated £150k although only the ageism claim was actually upheld. In the UK, an employee needs to show that they have exhausted their employers’ internal grievance proceedings before being able to take their case to an Employment Tribunal which is administered by HM Courts and Tribunal Service. Although the BBC had offered her a compensatory award, thought to be around £80k (cited in Andrews & Revoir, 2011), she would have had to sign a non-disclosure agreement and she wanted her case to have a public airing. After the judgment had been made, the BBC made an official statement and apology to O’Reilly, acknowledging that although it was committed to fair selection, it had not “got it right in this case” (quoted in Martinson, 2013). The statement went on to say that new guidelines on fair selection were being developed and that senior staff involved in the recruitment of presenters would undergo further training. Ironically, the BBC’s own survey of older viewers the following year found that they were irritated with the ways in which they were stereotyped in programs and complained about the lack of middle-aged and older women on TV (BBC, 2012).

More recently, in the US, Demetria Kalodimos, a news anchor at a local TV station, WSMV, left her job in 2015 aged 57 after 33 years on-air: her replacement was another woman nearly half her age. Karen Fuller, a news anchor at another local TV station (KCTV) was dismissed at 47. Both took their cases to court and both settled before their cases came to trial and are further discussed below. In 2019, five women anchors working at NY1, a prominent local US news channels, sued the network on grounds of age and gender discrimination, alleging a systematic effort by managers to force them off the air in favor of younger, less experienced hosts (Grynbaum, 2019). Ed Buckley, who has represented plaintiffs in numerous discrimination lawsuits against television stations in the US, said of this suit, “I’ve been doing this work more than [thirty] years, and I can’t tell you much has changed,” arguing that that TV stations regularly fire women because of their age, often using coded language such as needing ‘fresh talent’ or staff who ‘pop’ (Ed Buckley quoted in White, 2020, p. 1329). But as I discuss below, the (albeit few) high-profile cases taken out by older women over the years has not prevented broadcasters from continuing to implement gendered ageism against women who they feel have passed their ‘sell-by date’. In this study, I interviewed 24 women who have worked or still work in different parts of the media industry, as journalists, actors, presenters, filmmakers, and producers, to explore how and if their working lives changed as they got older within their particular professions. I wanted to know if Miriam O’Reilly’s widely-reported landmark judgment of age discrimination in the media in 2011 and Donna Traynor’s ongoing (2022) case of sex-based ageism, were minority, albeit devastating experiences, or if they represent the public tip of a much larger private iceberg which also includes the micro-discriminations and instances of professional undermining that many older women experience. As I demonstrate below, the answer is very much the latter.

In the UK, we have had 50+ years of equality legislation, from the Equal Pay Act in 1970 through the wider-reaching Equality Act in 2010. However, the majority of the research over the past fifty years which has focused on the experiences of women working across the wider media industry and in a variety of roles, from actors, directors, producers, anchors, and journalists, have highlighted the prevalence of persistent sexism, hostile male-ordered environments, discrimination and abuse, any and all of which can mitigate against women being able to achieve their career goals (Byerly 2013; Monika, 2007; Löfgren Nilsson and Örnebring, 2016; Melki & Mallat, 2016; North, 2016a; Ross & Padovani, 2019; UNESCO, 1987). If women in general find mainstream media environments less than friendly places to inhabit, then older women are doubly disadvantaged, especially if they occupy front-of-camera jobs such as presenter, anchor, or actor. In the UK, almost all surveys of media workplace diversity find that the media industry is generally a young(ish) person’s game and older women constitute a very small proportion of the workforce both as employees and as freelancers (Ozimek, 2020). Across the UK economy, the fallout from the pandemic has included a reduction (around 2%) of older people in the workforce and older women are nearly twice as likely as older men to be working part-time (Centre for Ageing Better, 2021), which means that they are likely to be more vulnerable to precarious contracts and redundancy.

A recent report by the UK’s media regulator, Ofcom, on diversity showed that 83% of workers in the TV industry were <50 yrs and there were significantly fewer 50+ women than men, especially at senior levels (Ofcom, 2019). The UK’s Office for National Statistics (ONS, 2021) estimated that in 2021, there were around 100,000 journalists working in the UK news industry and that a discernible trend was that more journalists were women (53%) and young (74% <50 yrs). Unfortunately, data disaggregated by both sex and age have proven impossible to locate. It should also be said that most research takes a binary approach to identifying gender-based discrimination, focusing on the different treatment of women qua men, although the last decade has seen a move towards understanding the intersectional nature of disadvantage, albeit that such an interest is yet to find its way into published findings.

The regular trickle of gendered ageism tribunal cases and the more frequent if broader criticisms of gendered ageism in the media have been accompanied by political, civil society and professional organizational efforts to strongly encourage the wider media industry to improve its policies and practices in relation to women, including older women. For example, in 2013, the Deputy Leader of the British Labour Party, Harriet Harman, initiated a Commission on Older Women and as part of its work, she wrote to the six major TV broadcasters, including the BBC, to ask how many women over the age of 50 they employed. While the data gathered showed that the overall percentage was 37, the percentage fell to 18 percent when it came to presenters, prompting Harman to comment that, “The figures provided by broadcasters show clearly that once female presenters hit 50, their days are numbered.” (Harman quoted in Sedghi, 2013). Harman went on to argue that,

It really is a black hole … broadcasters behave as though the viewing public have to be protected from the sight of an older woman and that’s just rude. There is nothing wrong with being an older woman. We’ve got to fight back against this sense that older women are less valuable, whereas men accumulate wisdom, authority and experience as they age. (Harriet Harman quoted in Martinson, 2013)

Chairing the part of the Commission which focused on women in public life, Miriam O’Reilly commented that, “There is still ageism in TV. We need to get to a position where women are not being shown the door simply because of their age and it is just as unacceptable to drop someone because of age as it is for their ethnicity." (Miriam O’Reilly quoted in Martinson, 2013)

British media unions such as Equity’s Women’s Committee and the Federation of Actors, along with professional associations such as Directors UK, the Writers’ Guild, and Women in Journalism have all conducted or commissioned research to explore women’s presence in and status across a range of media occupations and the challenges they face in developing their careers, including experiences of ageism, most of which make for depressing reading (Dean, 2008; Directors’ UK, 2018; Kreager & Follows, 2018; Reimers, 2019; WiJ/Man Bites Dog, 2021). Recent research conducted by Reimers for Equity’s Women’s Committee found that women performers of all ages engaged in different forms of aesthetic labor, including undergoing a variety of surgical procedures, in order to better align themselves to normative (male-prescribed) conventions of feminine beauty and thus more likely to be cast for the roles for which they auditioned, extending the years they had left in the industry.

On the other hand, men continue to appear in, present and host TV shows well into their 70s and even their 80s in the case of John Craven (Countryfile). While this is not to disparage their expertise or competence, it is to suggest that there are almost no women of similar age employed in similar roles. Jenni Murray, who retired in 2020 from her presenting role on the most famous and enduring BBC program for women – Radio 4’s Women’s Hour – after several decades’ service, has argued the case for more older women to be hired as presenters on the grounds that the viewing public need to see something different to what she describes as the ‘autocutie.’

My day of delight will be when we don’t have the avuncular, rather overweight, rather plain man with the ‘autocutie’ sitting next to him who is probably 25 and terribly pretty, with big eyes, lovely hair, and thin. What I would really love to see is a really plain, overweight woman presenting the news. (Jenni Murray quoted in Furness, 2015)

While Murray’s comments are characteristically acerbic and there are any number of successful women presenters who are considerably older than her somewhat glib dismissal of the twenty-something Barbie, her point is largely consonant with the few, albeit mostly historical studies, of the age-and-beauty profile of the conventional woman-man TV news presenting dream team (see Beasley, 1993; Carter-Olsen, 2012; Holland, 1998; van Zoonen, 1998). While age discrimination cases like that submitted by Miriam O’Reilly hit the headlines because their protagonists have not been shy about giving interviews, at least within the parameters of the non-disclosure agreements that most had to sign as part of their out-of-court settlements, other women in the UK have taken less visible exit pathways. For example, when former breakfast TV presenter, Selena Scott left her job in 2008 aged 57, she successfully sued her former employer on ageism grounds and won £250,000 but her case was not widely reported. On the other hand, veteran newsreader Anna Ford, the first woman to host the prestigious newscast News at Ten for ITN before moving to the BBC in 1986, quit ten years later aged 62, saying that she had been side-lined due to her age (both cases cited in Foster, 2009) although she did not take out a tribunal case. Moira Stuart was British TV’s first woman newsreader of color and her departure from the BBC in 2007 stirred the ageism row once again, with her colleagues openly criticising the decision. However, like Anna Ford, Moira Stuart did not take out a case against the BBC although she subsequently pursued a successful broadcast career in the independent media sector and currently (2023) hosts a radio show with Global’s Classic FM. This, then, is the landscape within which the current study is situated.

Methodology

As part of the initial secondary analysis, I used keyword search terms including ‘gendered ageing’ to identify media-focused tribunal cases which had made it into the news. While there are as many definitions of the term as there are cases, it is generally understood to mean that older women are treated less advantageously than their male colleagues and indeed the World Health Organisation argues that ageism is one of the biggest challenges facing the world (WHO, 2021). Using this method, I identified several women media professionals whose cases had indeed been covered. Where I found they had a LinkedIn profile, I reached out to them via that platform and that produced two interviewees, both from North America, both saying separately how delighted they would be to talk to me because there had been so little interest in their stories thus far. However, this method of recruitment was the least successful as most of the women I contacted did not reply. I also posted out short invitations via the websites of two UK women-focused professional media associations, the Women in Film and TV Network (WMTV) UK and Women in Journalism, and most of the participants came into the study via these two sites. The UK’s National Union of Journalists (NUJ) also convenes a 60+ council of members which regularly publishes a magazine, Senior Reporter, and I had an initial phone conversation with one of the editors, after which the magazine published my invitation text and this generated a further three interviewees. I also reached out to my own journalism colleagues both at my own institution and elsewhere who had contacts in the news industry and four participants were subsequently recruited with this strategy. Finally, the more serendipitous method of participant recruitment was via word of mouth from women who had agreed to participate and who mentioned other women they knew who might be interested in contributing their experiences. Three such women then acted as introducer for me and a further two participants came into the study in that way. Of the 24 women who participated, 17 have or had a journalism background and seven had worked (or were still working) in TV or film production.

All but one of the interviews took place on zoom and the remaining participant was interviewed via WhatsApp video. The interviews were largely unstructured, beginning with an invitation to tell me something about their careers, before moving on to discussing examples of the gendered ageism they had experienced. All the interviews were recorded and a link to the recordings was sent to all participants with an invitation to download their own copy if they wished to do so. I then listened again to each interview, wrote a short profile, and included three or four quotes which I considered might be used in the writing up of the research. I then sent the profile to each interviewee and asked if they were happy for the quotes to be personally attributed or if they wanted any of them anonymized. In the majority of cases, participants agreed to have their comments personally attributed although not all of them were eventually included in this article: in two cases, participants provided a revised version which they were happy to have attributed. However, in four cases, more complicated discussions ensued in relation to approval. In two cases, participants wanted all their comments to be anonymized. In another case, the participant said that she had consulted her lawyer and because she had signed a non-disclosure agreement, she was withdrawing her consent to have any of her comments included, even anonymously. In another case, despite several emails and promises to read and respond to the profile and quotes, approval to use the interview material never materialized. In all four of these cases, the participants were still working in the industry and three of them were still working for the same employer about whom they had made some negative remarks, so their reluctance to be cited was entirely understandable. In previous research with professional women, the rapport established during the interview process led to candid disclosures about their male colleagues which, when viewed in the cold light of distance, prompted similar misgivings towards attribution, so the anxiety expressed by some of the participants in this work was not surprising. Erring on the side of caution, I decided to give everyone a pseudonym although their actual names are listed in the Appendix as a grateful acknowledgment of the time they gave to the work.

After the initial review of the recordings and the provisional profiles I produced, I reviewed the recordings for a second time, re-read the profiles and comments, and identified the key themes which emerged and these then formed the structure and argument for the findings section below. As a convenience sample, I do not suggest that the views expressed by the participants in this article are necessarily representative but I would argue that they are certainly indicative of the range of experiences which older women media professionals have both endured but also, importantly, survived. Their testimonies constitute tiny slivers of the substantial iceberg of inequality which sits below the surface of the media landscape.

Findings

Past our sell-by date? Says who?

All the participants in this study had stories to tell about their experience of gendered ageism, from their contracts being summarily terminated or not renewed, to no longer being asked to pitch for work, to being told bluntly that they needed to have ‘work done’ or else risk being replaced by a younger model. However, there was a clear recognition that women who work front-of-house as presenters or actors are significantly more vulnerable to the unrelenting and socially pervasive myths about beauty and age, than women who mostly work behind the scenes in the newsroom or in production (see also European Parliament, 2018). All names have been changed.

There is pressure on women to not appear old, so the women on screen are putting botox into their wrinkles and getting rid of their grey hair but why is grey hair OK for Jeremy Paxman and not OK for Kirsty Wark? (Sue, academic/journalist)

The assumption that both women and men are disgusted by the sight of the older woman is a notion promoted regularly by managers and commissioners, women and men, and has resulted in terminated contracts and the contraction of work opportunities, but actual evidence of such a view is conspicuously lacking. Indeed, when audiences have been asked explicitly about this, their response has been in precisely the opposite direction. For example, in their survey of attitudes towards older people on screen, the joint report from the Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media and the NextFifty initiative found that viewers of all ages wanted to see more and more diverse representations of older people on screen (Geena Davis Institute on Gender and Media & NextFifty initiative, 2021).

If everything that we see or read or hear is dominated by a male perspective, a white middle-class non-disabled man, that’s a minority of the entire population, with everyone else feeling they have to fit into that norm and is further marginalising. For journalism to be trusted by the public, they need to see themselves reflected in the stories that are told on the issues that affect their lives, it needs to be fair, it needs to accord dignity to people, it needs to understand their lived experience. (Sheryl, photographer/writer)

On the other hand, some women were more circumspect about the push and pull factors affecting the performance of gendered ageing on TV. For example, Amanda questions whether it’s ageism or simply an understandable requirement to look good for the viewers, but she does acknowledge that perhaps she has internalized a set of values which demand more of women than men. She is also highly critical of herself, a gendered trait which is all too relatable. “When I watch myself, I think, oh! But then you learn to dress better and use more Clarins.” (Amanda, journalist/presenter) While a few women are able to sustain an acting career beyond Amy Schumer’s 2015 Comedy Central, ‘Last F**kable Day’ skit because of their early career success which provides a cushion of bankability against the pernicious gendered ageism which is prevalent within screen industries, most do not and see their careers stalled as they hit 40.

I certainly noticed in my early 40s that my work just sloped off. I remember doing my tax return for that year and looking at how much I had earnt and it had never really struck me, but I just burst into tears. It’s a bit different for me as I’ve always been a character actress so I’ve never done glamorous roles but for those women who did take those parts, they were the ones who really suffered because suddenly they were gone, never to be seen again and that’s absolutely to do with ageism. (Francesca, actor/writer)

Women talked with varying degrees of sanguinity about the ‘work’ they had or hadn’t had done in order to extend their shelf life in the ever more narrowed eyes of the thirty-something producer or casting director.

If I was going up for a big role, I can’t help it, but I would be thinking, perhaps I should consider fillers because it might extend how long I would be getting parts. I have a girlfriend working in LA who has had work done because she noticed she wasn’t getting as much work. Although they want her to be 50, they don’t want her to look 50. You are not allowed to sag. (Jenny, writer/producer/director)

Older women’s efforts to conform to male-ordered beauty standards constitute what Dean (2005) describes as aesthetic labour but as Dolan and Grist (2017) and Jerslev (2018) argue, the process is inevitably doomed to failure since it is oriented towards not looking old but cannot stop the reality of being old. This problem of the (alleged) fading beauty of the woman news anchor or presenter or actor has been well-documented by decades of research in several countries including the UK, the US, Australia (see for example, Engstrom & Ferri, 2000; Wolfe & Mitra, 2012), and Barbara describes this loss of ‘pretty privilege’ as being juxtaposed with the ‘sparkle’ of fresher, younger talent in the minds of media managers (Carolyn, academic/journalist). Most studies identify the problem of linking attractiveness with continuing employment, with gendered aging being considered as a significant aspect of career jeopardy by women media professionals. However, older women in ‘backroom’ jobs including working in newsrooms as journalists and reporters, also face gendered ageism from their colleagues and managers and Samantha, now an older woman herself, reflects on her earlier experience of newsroom culture.

When I was a younger journalist, there was an older woman in the newsroom and she was viewed as a tragic figure, why was she still there at her age (?), but that question was only asked about her. The newsroom was full of men in their 50s and 60s and no such stigma was attached to them. But she was regarded as a bit of a joke, as a granny figure. (Samantha, academic/journalist)

The mummy problem

Trying to achieve a satisfactory work-life balance is an aspiration for so many of us but the particular demands of many media professions mean this is especially tricky for women who have caring responsibilities at exactly the time when their age starts working against them, often caring for both children and aging parents.

Sometimes I get surprised that I’m still here! I did see one study which said that anyone over 60 with a family comprises 4% of people working in the media. (Anne, freelance TV production manager)

The organizational structure of much of the media industry is predicated on more or less an available-all-hours ethos which favors people without caring responsibilities or people with significant home-based support who mostly look like men (Berridge, 2019; CAMEo, 2018; Wing-Fai et al., 2015). In her study of 93 women working in the Australian TV industry, North (2016b) argued that the majority of women who were in decision-making roles did not have children, demonstrating the near impossibility of combining family life with achieving professional seniority. Amongst the recommendations made by Britain’s media regulator, Ofcom, in relation to retaining older media workers, is the suggestion to extend flexible working arrangements to better accommodate caring responsibilities, as well as removing age restrictions on particular jobs or schemes (Ofcom, 2019). In the UK, there are around 11 m people over the age of 65, slightly more than half of whom are women (Centre for Ageing Better, 2021). Ironically, in December 2022, it was reported that the Government was considering strategies to ‘lure’ retirees back into the workplace, offering some form of midlife MOT because of the labor shortage and its impact on economic growth. While the retirement age in the UK is now 66, the pandemic has had a significant effect on ‘mid-lifers’ employment decisions (Zeldin-O’Neill, 2022).

However, women who do take the decision to move to part-time working or even just take their full maternity leave, run the risk of being seen as less than fully committed to their careers or having limited availability or viewed as likely to be regularly absent from work because of childcare duties, and therefore make requests for flexible working with considerable caution (Wreyford, 2013).

In the newsroom, men are allowed to grow old and leave with great respect, but a lot of women, when they have kids, they put themselves into the background because they don’t want to put themselves in danger out in the field, or the hugely anti-social hours of reporting doesn’t lend itself well to family life. It’s definitely harder for women in the news in a lot of ways. (Lisa, academic/journalist)

The experience paradox

It’s easy to appreciate how annoying it is for younger people to hear older people reminiscing fondly about the good old days when the media industry has developed technological innovation at pace so surely these are the good days, but some skills such as storytelling or interviewing are independent of technology and improve with experience. However, the significant changes in the industry which have been brought about by the digital revolution have prompted hesitation amongst some women to re-enter the industry after a period of absence, particularly after a few years of child or elder care. This reticence has resulted in women deciding to take the freelance route with all its precarities but means that at least they can use the skills and experiences they have built up, and choose which work to pitch for, opting to balance flexibility with insecurity. However, Rosie makes the point that when she pitches for a freelance opportunity, her CV only mentions the work she has completed over the past twenty years.

My age is not on my CV and I’ve taken out all the dates from my key positions, because it’s all about the brand [programme cachet and popularity]. I was told to never put anything down before 2000 and even that’s a bit old. (Rosie, freelance producer)

On the other hand, experience can be valued by colleagues when developing new projects. Having been maneuvered out of her presenting job in her 60s, Tina took voluntary redundancy. In 2022, she was back presenting a new TV show, having been contacted by a former colleague who was setting it up and who said he needed someone that the public trusted and that she was such a person.

There’s been a great reaction to the programme on social media and the viewing figures have been terrific. I do feel in this programme, that my experience counts for something. One of the most important jobs I have as a presenter is to is make the person I’m talking to comfortable and prepared to share with me and everyone else, their experience and what they’re trying to get across and I think that’s what I’ve brought to the programme and also, I think people do trust me, and that’s nice. They know that I’m a granny. (Tina, journalist/presenter)

Managing the awkward squad

A number of the participants suggested that too many newly appointed young(er) managers, both women and men, did not embrace the older women they found sitting in their teams although they seemed to be welcoming towards the older men. In the case of young women, participants suggested possible reasons for this antipathy including feeling threatened by the greater experience of older women which would contrast with their own more limited knowledge, that they wanted to be the only woman on their team, or that they couldn’t use their feminine ‘charms’ to get their way. For young men, suggestions included that they wanted to work with people more like themselves (homosocial reproduction), that they assumed that older women were not tech-savvy or that they didn’t want to work with someone who could be their mother.

Sometimes I get talked down to, like, you’re so not with it. And when that happens, I have to go into business mode. Sometimes, the women are the worst and one woman recently said to me, ‘oh, Rachel, it just doesn’t work like that anymore.’ It’s that kind of stuff. (Rachel, film producer)

For women whose male line managers were more or less the same age, including men who had grown older alongside their aging women colleagues, they believe that these men recognized that they could not manipulate them with flattery or flirting or play the avuncular boss and/or didn’t want to work with someone who could be their wife or their ex.

When you’re younger, you want to be pleasing and you’re really keen to be there, you’re excited, you’re friendly, you’re good at doing the social oil for the more senior chaps. They say jump and you say, how high? And you are young and attractive, but then as you get older you become less pleasing both physically and in terms of pliability. (Grace, journalist)

They [older male managers] can’t get away with it with older women, not least because by then, we’re quite good and often better than them and we’ve been round the block. (Ruth, journalist)

Participants talked about their greater confidence (rooted in experience) and lesser malleability as being important ingredients in decisions to terminate their contracts. As Byerly (2022) points out, these management relations (for which read power) are a dialectical process which pits competing interests against each other, in this case, between what managers want (to work with peer-age colleagues) and the desires of older employees (to continue in a job they enjoy in which they are professional and expert). “What comes with age is confidence to stand up for myself. I don’t get messed about now and I’m told that I’m respected. I call out bad behaviour.” (Elizabeth, journalist)

I was replaced with a young blonde bimbo

While women talking about other women using sexist language is neither feminist nor productive, it is certainly an understandable response from women who have served for decades as well-respected and professional presenters whose contracts are summarily terminated because their (usually male) manager has decided to replace them with ‘fresh’ talent, a less-than-subtle euphemism for young, attractive women. As well as their apparent ‘freshness’, there are other reasons which participants gave for why young people replace older people, including that they tend to be cheaper, easily acculturated into the prevailing, male-ordered norms because they are hungry for success and approval, but also because there is an entirely unfounded perception that young media professionals will attract a younger audience. For Helen, that idea, “…comes from the very top of the BBC, it’s about the ‘theology’ of the BBC being there for all audiences but we know perfectly well that young people are not interested in terrestrial TV.” (Helen, journalist)

Ironically, several women who had been dismissed or left voluntarily had subsequently been re-hired by the same employer, usually as freelancers, in order to plug the experience gap which emerges when the team is young one. Reinardy (2017) suggests that young(er) news workers now constitute a ‘lost generation’ as the more experienced colleagues who they may once have looked to for informal mentoring are no longer around and indeed, several participants spoke enthusiastically about the relationship they now have with younger people.

I’ve worked with a number of crews who have said how nice it is to work with someone who knows what they’re doing, so crews do respect your experience. (Imogen, academic and freelance filmmaker)

I did feel valued in terms of being one of the longest established people in the newsroom and having that depth of experience of just covering the patch, and if anything happened, you knew what to do because you’d done it before. I’m a very calm person and that does come with experience. (Margaret, TV news producer)

While a handful of participants were still working in the media industry, several women had taken up academic jobs, mostly in journalism, and were the most positive about what they could offer younger generations.

Sometimes I wonder if they think, ‘what’s this old gal doing here?’, but when I’m doing seminars with them, they are always asking questions and thirsty for knowledge. From their responses, I truly believe I might be giving them something that they take away which could be used in advancing their careers in the industry. (Nina, film producer)

The perils of speaking out

Given the extent of gendered ageism, we might ask why more women do not pursue tribunal claims against their employers but not only is it an extremely time-consuming and costly process, even with union representation, but there are also issues of self-preservation which women weigh up in deciding (or not) to even make a complaint about discrimination, let alone start a formal grievance, particularly if they want to stay in their current employment or take up another job in the same industry (de Castell and Skardzius, 2019; Gill, 2014). Several women also made clear that when they had decided to take action, their managers made it very difficult to proceed, described by one participant as a process which was horrible, personal and nasty.

However, a few participants in this study have taken out tribunal (UK) or legal (US) cases against their employer, most settling before their cases were heard, strongly suggesting that their cases had merit and would have been successful had they proceeded. But there is a harsh price to pay for taking such action, especially for women in their 40s and 50s who still have decades of working life left and for whom early retirement isn’t a viable option: claiming a virtuous victory doesn’t pay the mortgage. When Demetria Kalodimos’ contract expired on 31 December 2017 and was not renewed, a letter arrived at her home the following day (New Year’s Day, a public holiday), delivered by courier from her (local US) TV station employer, informing her that she was not allowed to work as a broadcaster anywhere locally, as per the terms of her non-competition contract. This was how she was treated after 33 years of service at the TV station, mostly as a journalist/presenter. She subsequently filed a lawsuit against the station’s parent company on the grounds of sexism and ageism which she eventually settled out of court in 2020. However, as she now ruefully acknowledges, her age (then 57) proved to be a significant barrier to what she initially thought would be an easy breeze back into employment, given her experience and high audience approval ratings.

I thought I could just click my fingers and get any job in town and that turned out not to be the case. I didn’t have a single job interview for anything I applied for. I’m sure they looked at my age and the buzzer went off and that was it. Of course, we need young people coming into the industry but not at the expense of the people who can mentor them. (personal interview, 26 February 2022)

Karen Fuller was an anchor with another local US TV station, KCTV, which had the same parent company as Kalodimos’ previous employer, and she had a similar experience, having had her contract terminated in 2015 at the age of 47. While KCTV claimed that her contract was ended because of poor on-air and off-air performance and petitioned for Fuller’s case to be thrown out, US District Judge John Lungstrum ruled in 2018 that Fuller had produced sufficient evidence that she had indeed been dismissed because of her age and/or gender, to allow the case to proceed (Landsberg, 2017). This evidence included remarks made by members of the station’s management after they had watched a portfolio of work produced by a candidate for Fuller’s job, where the news director said that she had a “nice Midwestern ‘hometown girl’ look.” The creative director commented that the candidate could look, “…cute and young but also able to dress up and be more serious and respectable … how will she age I wonder?” (cited in Margolies, 2018). The candidate was subsequently hired to replace Fuller as the main anchor. Like Demetria, despite decades of experience, Karen has struggled to find another anchor position. “I’m not trained to do anything else. TV news has been the one constant, the one thing I could rely on [but] I have now accepted that I cannot be on television in a local news capacity anymore, and I’m grieving” (personal interview, 2 March 2022). Given the importance of work to our own sense of self and professional identity, losing a job that has been so sustaining for so many years for reasons entirely outwith one’s competence or control, namely the double yoke of sexism and ageism, is especially brutal. As Karen says, “I’ve had a hard wake-up call that TV news is not in my future, here or anywhere. It’s been a bruising realization to my ego” (personal interview, 2 March 2022).

Professional identity as sine qua non

Deborah (journalist) described the days after she left the job she loved as a period of mourning for the death of her professional identity. After news of her own ‘redundancy’ began circulating amongst her journalist peers, she was inundated with messages from friends and colleagues who fondly remembered particularly impactful pieces she had written, reminded her of how good a journalist she was. However, this was bitter-sweet because although she felt nurtured and validated as both a professional and a human being, it was nonetheless like, “…reading your obituary over and over again.” This feeling of loss and indeed erasure reflects findings from other studies where anxiety and depression were also mentioned by journalists who found themselves unemployed (see, for example, Reinardy and Zion, 2020). Other participants in this current study also talked with considerable emotion about coping with a life summarily deprived of regular routines, job satisfaction, and peer affirmation.

That was a big thing for me when I left the BBC thinking, “who am I now, what am I now if I’m no longer BBC Frances?” Even after all my years in academia, I still identify as a journalist. (Frances, academic/journalist)

It’s not that the roles aren’t there, it’s that men don’t want to commission them

There seem to be both push and pull factors which combine to produce an environment for older women which limits their work options. Raisborough et al.’s (2022) work with older women actors identified several problems including marginalization, typecasting, and gatekeeping and such issues were also mentioned by several of the participants in this study. Whilst it is certainly the case that there are relatively few older women on screen in leading roles, participants suggested that the cause is as much a problem of (not) commissioning work as it is of (not) writing roles. Over the past decade, not least thanks to any number of women actors who have used their various public platforms to call out gendered ageism in film and TV, more writers have taken up this challenge and have written compelling and credible roles for the older woman, but getting such work commissioned is another matter.

I’ve been on Equity’s Women’s Committee and the TUC Women’s Committee for a number of years and we tied up with the Writers’ Guild and they have a women’s committee who get as frustrated as Equity women do. The stuff [scripts] is out there but it’s the commissioning editors who choose which stories are taken forward. (Julie, Equity Women’s Committee)

There is also the problem of tick-box intersectionality which has emerged in response to both formal and informal targets and quotas which various parts of the media industry have developed to encourage diversity. Whilst absolutely laudable and necessary, such strategies can rather easily encourage commissioners and managers to swerve the intentions of diversity by, for example, casting or employing a visually-impaired older black lesbian for a particular role or position, thus ticking four boxes for the price of one without affecting the status quo in any materially significant way. This is not to undermine the talents of the individuals who are successful as a consequence of diversity initiatives but to reiterate the truism that you can prove anything with statistics at the same time as changing very little. While parts of the media industry have indeed started taking diversity seriously and produced any number of guidelines on the topic, the focus has been mostly on employment and commissioning rather than promotion or retention, see for example, the British Film Institute’s Diversity Standards Criteria, Channel 4’s 360 Diversity Charter and the BBC’s Diversity Commissioning Code of Practice (Newsinger & Eikhof, 2020). While it’s certainly good to start somewhere, such strategies quickly become so much waste paper if procedures for their monitoring and implementation are not developed in tandem or if promotion continues to constitute a discreet tap on the shoulder in the urinals.

The COVID effect

In the UK, at the start of the lockdown in March 2020, people over the age of 70 were deemed extremely vulnerable and were told to stay at home. This applied equally to employed and non-employed people but Beverley makes the point that although her older male colleagues returned to their media jobs when the restrictions were lifted, she never received the call-back and argues that she was either seen as more vulnerable than older men or that COVID was simply used as an excuse not to re-engage her.

The same was said to the make-up lady [to stay home] and she took it a lot worse than I did. Even now, more than two years later, I have heard nothing further but older men are now back in the building, so it seems that they [managers] are using COVID as an excuse to get rid of a lot of ‘excess’ people, where women are particularly vulnerable. I had not had that feeling of desolation at any other time in the industry. (Beverley, TV producer)

What Eleanor, Emily and Flip did next

While some women took early retirement after leaving their media employment and others became lecturers, some women decided to fight back by developing their own media including Flip’s You Tube channel, Women of a Certain Age (2013) and Eleanor’s website, Noon (2021), which aims to:

…tell inspiring tales of all the incredible things that midlife women are doing – so many are using this time to re-explore the dreams and ambitions they had as younger women. One woman has become a stand-up comedian in her late 50s, another retrained as a doctor at 48, one became a lingerie/curve model at 50. Many are following former FT columnist Lucy Kellaway’s path back into teaching through Now Teach, or going back to university to study themselves. (Mills, 2021)

At the time I interviewed her in 2022, filmmaker Emily Corcoran was bringing together the funding for her first feature film – Women with Balls – which centers her own experience as a middle-aged woman actor/director/writer trying to break into filmmaking, replete with comedy moments and relatable sexism. A year later, the project has been renamed as She’s Got Balls, and her website (https://www.corkfilms.co.uk/about) suggests that it’s in pre-production, which sounds promising. But while women like Eleanor, Flip, and Emily are making a difference to the working lives of older women by creating networking and career opportunities and shifting the dial on representation, the problem of gendered ageism continues to blight the media industry.

Conclusion

I argue, along with other feminist researchers, that gendered ageism in the media industry is scarcely a new phenomenon and one which has prompted action amongst a variety of stakeholders including media unions. As well as women taking their media employers to tribunals, women across the media industry as actors, producers, and union members have been developing strategies and campaigns to improve the situation for women, including older women. For example, the UK’s National Union of Journalists launched the NUJ Women’s Network in 2018 with a ‘Stamp Out Sexism: Plan of action’ campaign which included a commitment to “support #MeToo and other campaigns which expose sexual abuse in the media” (NUJ). In addition, any number of actors including Patricia Arquette and Nicole Kidman, have used their various public platforms to call out the industry, most recently harnessing the power of the #metoo movement to create their own campaign, Time’s Up in 2018 which aimed to ensure the safety of women in the workplace, level the playing field for women and disrupt the status quo. (https://timesupnow.org/about/) Kidman used her acceptance speech for winning the Screen Actors Guild award for outstanding performance by a female actor (in Big Little Lies) in 2018, saying, “How wonderful it is that our [women’s] careers can go beyond 40 years old because 20 years ago, we were pretty washed up by this stage in our lives…we have proven that we are potent and powerful and viable.” Polly Kemp, co-founder of ERA 50:50 (Equal Representation for Actresses) identifies a problem with the ‘gendered filtration system’ which operates in the performing arts domain, suggesting that if there were more women in executive positions behind the camera, they might take working women’s needs more seriously which could then change culture and practice (Kemp cited in Taylor Roberts, 2022). However, the critical mass thesis is yet to be adequately tested since no part of the media industry has sufficient numbers of women in senior positions to be able to make credible analyses about impact but the necessarily different experiences that women have to men suggests that some level of change would be highly likely to occur.

After more than half a century of equality legislation, in the UK and elsewhere, it is extremely disappointing to see that older women continue to be moved out of the front-of-camera roles as anchors and presenters or lose work as actors or are marginalized in their newsrooms when they are perceived to have reached their sell-by date. Lined up behind every 50, 60, or even 70-something woman who has managed to hang on to their job, are thousands of women who have crashed and burned at the hands of their (often younger, often male) managers, not because of a sudden loss of professionalism, experience, competence, expertise or audience pulling-power but because they are deemed to no longer look the part. It is depressing to note that tribunal cases for sex and age-based discrimination which are currently in play such as the one being pursued by Donna Traynor are almost identical in their substantive claims as that made by Christine Craft 40+ years earlier. But it’s hard to make sense of this kind of decision-making based on physical appearance rather than professional competence, in an environment in which older viewers make up the majority audience for terrestrial TV and where the few studies which ask the question directly, demonstrate that viewers of all ages want to see more and more diverse older people on screen, including older women. This is not a big ask but more importantly, it makes commercial sense to recognize the considerable purchasing power of the boomer generation and to give them a bit more of what they want.

Although intersectional concerns are part of the contemporary feminist landscape, such intersections are mostly focused on embodied characteristics such as sex, race, gender, disability, and occasionally age, but I would also like to return to an earlier intersectional interest which brings consumption, production and representation into dialogue, in this case, older women in their role as the audience, actor, producer, director, and journalist. I have argued elsewhere and do so again here, that who is behind the camera or in the editor’s chair has an impact on who is in front of the camera and in the news which then impacts on what the audience, viewer or listener sees, hears, and believes. Within the policy discourses of the cultural industries, much is made of workforce diversity but as the participants in this study make clear, and as is manifest in the various Ofcom reports which mostly report data on single characteristics, the particular (and mostly negative) situation for older women within the wider cultural sector is that they are largely invisible unless they make headlines in a tribunal case. Future research could therefore fruitfully explore the interconnections between cultural labor, workplace diversity, and a faulty market logic which determines when a woman’s sell-by date is imminent based on age rather than competence (see also Dolan and Hallam, 2017). In addition, this article has focused on gendered ageism and is centered on the two specific characteristics of sex and age, not least because all the women who participated in the study self-identified as older women and I recognize that the arguments I put forward do not pay attention to the particularities of media workers who identify in different ways, so future research could certainly consider the situation for older trans, non-binary and gender-fluid media workers. Nor have I made a distinction between majority and minoritized media professionals because none of the participants who are cited in this work were from minority ethnic backgrounds, so this could be another fruitful aspect to research in the future.

Ethics statement

Ethical approval from Newcastle University’s Ethics Committee was granted on 4 December 2021, ref: 16703/2021.

Video

Inside Amy Schumer (2015) Last F***able Day. Comedy Central. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XPpsI8mWKmg

Websites

Noon: https://www.noon.org.uk/

Women of a Certain Age: https://www.youtube.com/@flipandmaggie7661

Cork Films (Emily Corcoran): https://www.corkfilms.co.uk/about

National Union of Journalists: https://www.nuj.org.uk/about-us/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/women.html

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to the 24 women who responded to my invitation to talk about their experiences of gendered ageism in the media, gave up their time to talk to me, reviewed the interview profiles and gave me approval (or not) to use and attribute their comments, albeit that in the end, all names were changed. Without their generosity, this work would not exist.

Disclosure statement

The author reports that there are no competing interests to declare.

Data availability statement

This article draws on a series of qualitative interviews which were recorded on Zoom, all of which contain confidential information which cannot be made public in order to protect the identity of the participants. I have permission to use some of the material from the interviews and such material is what is included in the body of the article.

Additional information

Funding

The project on which this article draws has not received funding.

Appendix

List of participants

Barbara Henderson

Brid Fitzpatrick

Charlotte Smith

Claire Berry

Demetria Kalodimos

Eleanor Mills

Emily Corcoran

Flip Webster

Gaby Koppel

Jane Clinton

Jean Rogers

Karen Fuller

Leona O’Neill

Lesley Boden

Lesley Curwen

Lucy Jolly

Lynda Straker

Maggie Swarbrick

Natasha Hirst

Raj Ford

Rebecca Tranter

Sarah Collins

Sheron Boyle

Wendy Austin