Why I Never Tell Anyone My Age
By Nisha Chittal
When I was twenty-two, I was working as a strategist at a digital agency, and I went on a business trip to Miami to give a presentation to a major Fortune 500 client on our recommendations for the company’s social media strategy. For weeks, I brainstormed ideas and slaved over creating the perfect PowerPoint deck for the meeting. The presentation, which I participated in with three more senior colleagues, went well. Afterward, as one of my colleagues and I waited for a taxi back to our hotel, my coworker, who was in her early thirties, congratulated me on a job well done and asked, “By the way, how old are you?” When I responded that I was twenty-two, her tone changed. She immediately squealed, “Oh my God, but you’re such a baby! And they’re letting you present to clients!”
Whereas a minute ago, she had been impressed with my presentation and my composure in front of major clients, now, having found out my age, she suddenly could only see me as just another twenty-two-year-old: too young to be taking on such a level of responsibility at work. From that day on, no meeting was complete without her making reference to how I was “so young!”—regardless of how good a job I was doing.
Welcome to the new age discrimination?
A year later, at twenty-three, I was at a new job, leading social media efforts for a cable TV channel. A colleague introduced me to another, older coworker, and said, “Nisha is our new social media manager. She sits in the office down the hall.” The older coworker responded, “Oh yes, I walked by and saw you in there, and I was like, wow, I didn’t know they started letting twelve-year-olds work here!”
Welcome to the new age discrimination?
Every woman knows this to be true: when you tell someone your age, you give them the power to decide how you’re perceived. No matter your qualifications, people are predisposed to judge what you are really “worth” to them based on your age. The point of someone asking your age is almost always so that the asker can make a judgment about you based on that age—what other reason is there? Finding out your age is a way for people to size you up, put you in a specific box, determine their expectations for you, and decide whether you meet them sufficiently.
For women, age unfairly becomes a standard by which society determines worth: Past a certain age, a woman is viewed as less important, less worthy of attention. Younger than a certain age, a woman is also viewed as less valuable, especially in the workplace—young women are typically viewed as too naïve, too inexperienced. And many young women are often stuck longer than they’d like to be in internship or administrative roles because they allegedly lack the“experience” (which I’ve found is often just a code word for age and seniority) needed to move beyond entry level.
Every woman knows this to be true: when you tell someone your age, you give them the power to decide how you’re perceived.
For better or worse, the practice of women hiding their age is nothing new. Look at any number of movies and TV shows, and you’ll see countless jokes about women and age, and countless female characters hiding and even lying about their age. In Sex and the City, Charlotte York declares on her thirty-sixth birthday: “I’ve thought about it, and I’ve decided I’m sticking at ’35.” She later adds, “Men are more interested in meeting 35-year-olds.” In Judd Apatow’s 2012 film This Is 40, Leslie Mann’s character pretends she’s turning thirty-nine and later gets caught lying about her birth year on paperwork at her doctor’s office. In September 2013, Sarah Silverman pointedly joked she was “embarrassed” to discover she was forty-two after a slew of ageist barbs were directed at her during a Comedy Central roast of James Franco: “Because it’s personal, that is just so woman-based …I feel like your joke is that I’m still alive. My crime is not dying.”
America’s youth-obsessed culture tends to favor the young, and women of a certain age indisputably face unfair biases, particularly in the workforce where some 65 percent of boomer workers report facing age discrimination, and a recent case affecting workers over forty went all the way to the Supreme Court. More magazine reported in 2008 that older women were filing more age discrimination complaints with the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC) than ever before. Earlier in 2013 in Salon, writer Tira Hirpaz summed up what it felt like to be an over-fifty woman in the eyes of society: “If you want to make a person invisible, just put them in the shoes of an over-fifty woman and abracadabra, watch them disappear.”
I am not interested in being anyone’s measuring stick.
I am not interested in being anyone’s measuring stick. In my experience, older people often use the moment to reminisce about what they were like at my age or to give me unsolicited advice from their newfound position of seniority. “You’re twenty-two? When I was your age I was still partying every night!” is a statement I’ve heard many a time (for the record, I do not party every night). That I don’t fit their expectations for someone of my age—or their memory of what they were doing at my age—can be flattering but also embarrassing, and I am never quite sure how to respond. Should I have not accomplished anything at my age? Their surprise at a young person charging ahead in her career suggests to me an underlying assumption that most twentysomethings haven’t amounted to much—an idea that seems to be more and more common in this post-recession era. My age places me in the “millennial” generation, a title I have quickly come to despise for all its baggage and negative connotations. Millennial is a word that for many people a generation or so ahead of mine seems to conjure up images of young people who are lazy, entitled, attached to their devices, incompetent, and unable to do a job well, or even hold down a serious office job. These days, youth isn’t so much desirable as it is loaded with connotations of inexperience, laziness, and naiveté.
Should I have not accomplished anything at my age?
Want proof? Look no further than your nearest newsstand. Last year, Time magazine featured a cover story on millennials, the headline of which proclaimed: “The me, me, me generation: millennials are lazy, entitled narcissists who still live with their parents. Why they’ll save us all.” The cover also featured a young woman taking a “selfie.” A 2010 New York Times Magazine cover story pondered, “What is it about twentysomethings?” and explored the question of why twentysomethings are “taking so long to grow up.”
The cliché of the college graduate nowadays is the barista or the perpetual intern, but most millennials I know couldn’t be more different from the stereotype. In fact, I would argue that the differences in this generation’s approach to careers are largely because we graduated and entered the workforce during a crushing economic recession, one that wasn’t kind to many of us. Because we graduated at a time when jobs were scarce and student loan debts were high, we know the value of hard work and the importance of going above and beyond.
It turns out many young, successful women follow the same rule: they avoid telling anyone at work their age at all costs.
I’ve been writing online for seven years. I work on social media strategy at a major cable news network, and previously at another cable TV network; I regularly speak on panels and at conferences, and have had my writing published in several online publications, magazines, and two anthologies. I say this not to brag, but to give you a better understanding of what people are reacting to when they then find out my age. I do everything I can to make it the last thing they discover about me—there are only so many infantilizing “You’re just a baby!” responses you can hear before you learn the subject is best avoided.
The irony is, while older workers love to judge a young worker’s age, lots of millennials are getting hired in high-level roles because of their digital experience. Gripe all you want about millennials’ supposed faults, but many young people with a few years of experience under their belts are becoming highly desirable hires for companies and organizations looking to innovate, try new things, and adapt to the ever-changing digital landscape. Frequently, those millennials are managing teams that include employees who are older than they are. This is usuallynot a problem until coworkers find out their manager may be younger than them, which can make working relationships awkward and cause a few bruised egos. This gives ambitious young professionals all the more incentive to hide their age.
As I started talking to friends about my frustrations, similar stories came pouring out of the woodwork. It turns out many young, successful women follow the same rule: they avoid telling anyone at work their age at all costs. They have college degrees, possibly advanced degrees, big ambitions, and a desire to work hard, hustle, and prove themselves. They also take great pains to never reveal their age to a coworker.
Here’s my secret to getting ahead early in your career: never tell anyone your age.
Each young woman I talked to kept returning to the same point: that no matter how hard they worked, how polished their presentations, how good their work, how many people they managed, when their coworkers found out her age, that became the first thing people associated with her, ahead of her credentials, work, and résumé. Her success was worth less because she was so young. Older coworkers who made jabs about younger colleagues age seemed to feel that they [A1] may not be able to avoid having this millennial in the office, but they could make themselves feel a little better and undermine her credibility by reminding her how young she is. And that’s exactly why more and more young women are subscribing to the idea that has for so long been the dreaded lot of older women: to get ahead you have to keep your age a secret, no matter how much you excel in your work.
And so, to my fellow twentysomething women who have ambitious goals and big plans to get there here’s my secret to getting ahead early in your career:: never tell anyone your age. You’ll feel more empowered and more in control of your professional image when you don’t let people reduce you to a number—the second they know your age, they start to judge you. Instead, show people your work, your experience, and your ideas. I’m certainly not suggesting you lie about your age. But I am saying that you’ll have a leg up at work if you let your experience and smarts dictate how people perceive you—factors which are so much more important than your age.
Nisha Chittal is a journalist and social media strategist in New York City. She is the Social Media Content Editor for MSNBC, developing social media strategy for the network’s 22 show units and working closely with the show teams on editorial content, strategy, and campaign development. She also writes for MSNBC.com, and also contributes to the Huffington Post, Ms. Magazine, The American Prospect, and Jezebel. This is an excerpt from her essay, “Why I Never Tell Anyone My Age,” from The 10 Habits of Highly Successful Women on Amazon Kindle.
