Age does not define your career — lets recognise this professionally
I am excited to hear that the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (IOM3) ‘Younger Members Committee’ have reviewed their terms of reference and are considering a name change and have reflected upon their terms of reference.
This motivates me to write a little about why we should move on from sign posting committees and awards with words like “young” and remove all professional status assessments based upon age.
There is a vote currently open about the committees new name and I strongly encourage you to vote, though fingers crossed you’ll stick with me and read this short piece first! (There’s a link to the vote at the bottom of the post.)
While I focus this on the IOM3, this article extends beyond my own institute and towards other professional societies and how they consider ‘age’ within their structures
As I have written before to move beyond age, as “being young is old news”. Instead we should be persuading people to change their language, committee memberships, and award criteria to instead focus on career stage.
In a broader sense — why do we need to refocus away from ‘age’ and directly associated terms?
Firstly, age is a protected characteristic in the UK, as enshrined in the 2010 Equality Act. There is some interpretation of the act and the implications of it, and of course I am not a lawyer. From reading around a little bit, it would appear to be reasonable to interpret that act says that direct (or indirect) discrimination based upon age is not allowed, e.g. in a place of work or when you join a club or association.
In practice, avoiding discrimination is difficult. Many of our systems are established with built in groupings or clusters that rely on this discrimination to succeed, and some of them are well intended. Even beyond this, culturally we may have an emotive response to what we ‘feel’ is the ‘right thing to do’.
In terms of age and equality, we should treat people fairly across the board. We might choose to provide interventions and extra support to help people get re-connected, or connected for the first time, or to provide focused assistance to people who not as well connect as we hope. This usually is encompassed within the remit of these committees and their terms of reference, and provide a focused critical mass to enable the creation of specific networks which support individuals at different stages of their careers.
In a professional context, such as for a professional society, we must consider opportunities in terms of their benefit, which does not include a formal or informal inference of the number of years since they were born. This applies for the whole of the age spectrum.
In a professional context, age is a often used as a proxy metric for experience. We should collectively acknowledge this in everything we do. Age is our ‘go to’ for considering a group of people at a certain stage of their career and it is out dated, as ‘age’ as the classification statement discriminates and excludes people who should be also considered within a career stage grouping.
Fundamentally in terms of equality and inclusion, the use of ‘age’ as this criteria is fundamentally flawed. To explore equality and inclusion, we can look towards groups who are marginalised by an age based criteria, i.e. those people who should be included and receive the (equal) benefit of a career boost, but cannot as the metaphorical ‘draw bridge’ has been raised due to their bodies age.
How did we end up with ‘age’ as a criteria?
Age is a short cut. It’s simple, as we can look it up and we can ‘understand’ how it works.
The majority of folks, especially those in power within professional societies, will likely have had a linear career and there is a risk that decisions are made upon their own experience, especially when there is a lack of diversity amongst the decision making team. It is more challenging to reach beyond your own experience and explore the challenges felt by those who have been unable to experience the same path of you, for instance mature students or those who have changed career path.
If look towards why we might want to have a “younger members committee”, we could be looking at having a group who are provided opportunities to get a kick start to their careers. Perhaps this group will also provide focus for other members of the organisation to reach out to when issues need exploring.
Providing Opportunities
At the beginning of people's career, folk will be just out of their last formal education step, and this might be College or University. We can trace this against the timeline of FE qualifications, A-levels, their degree or doctorate and project how long everything ‘should have taken’ to establish the range of ages we focus our group’s membership around.
‘Should have taken’ is important here. Within the equality and inclusion landscape, we often extend the ‘should’ to a more generous ‘could’, taking into account factors which impact an individual’s trajectory.
These factors can be within an individual’s control, such as a choice to take a step back from their career development and education, e.g. through a gap year. Technically this could be out of an individual’s control, e.g. due to financial reasons, which may be co-correlated with socio-economic class, and thus overlap with others equality and diversity issues.
There are a huge range of factors that are outside of someone’s control.
What if you:
- Changed careers
- Had a career break (health)
- Had a career break (kids)
- Had a career break (caring)
- Had a career break (military service)
- Had a career break (financial access)
There are many other factors that may impact your trajectory and timeline.
This means that people may be older ‘than expected’ while at the start of their career. Many of these reasons will be co-correlated with other protected characteristics. This means that in keeping an age based criteria, and the name of a group with a reference to ‘Younger’ is a directly barrier to creating a fair and equal community.
In terms of fundamental human rights and looking after people, everyone deserves as fair a chance as possible to get started and progress in their careers.
If we want to be more ‘utilitarian’ about this argument, then we can consider the collective benefit of including these people who have valuable life experiences on which they may draw. These experiences are exactly why many of us fight for fair representation of individuals with a wide range of characteristics, i.e. diversity, in our professional lives.
But ‘young’ is just a word?
Words act as the first signpost concerning how people will treat a group, who will have access, and who will get engaged.
I have a specific issue with the word ‘young’ in these circumstances and I would love for it to be expunged from the glossary of all professional institutes and societies.
Not only is ‘young’ this an inferred quality based upon age but it also provides these awkward and cringeworthy moments where some senior in our communities fetishise the ‘young’. The feeling I get when this happens is that people are trying desperately to re-live their youth through other people. I am also frustrated by the culture of coddling that the age based reference encourages.
It does not matter if you tell people that “other people will be welcome at your events” — the word young is creating marginalisation for many people who are already excluded for so much access to opportunity within our communities.
What can we do instead and why should we?
The IOM3 is a professional society, here to support and amplify the voices and work of the those who work on the engineering and science of materials, minerals and mining. It has some formal functions, such as accrediting degrees and managing the license for Chartered Engineers, Scientists and Environmentalists in this discipline. It also convenes a number of committees to future the mission and vision of the community it serves.
As with any professional society, an aspect of their interests is in supporting two important cohorts of individuals: (1) those in school and getting them excited in the discipline; (2) those early in their professional career (academic, industrial, and more).
In the existing IOM3 culture, the ‘early learners’ in schools, further education colleges and more are engaged with the IOM3 through the school’s affiliate scheme, outreach, and other activities. The institute is keen to maintain their focus in this area as the skills pipeline involves encouraging the next generation of technicians, industrialists, academics, and consultants to understand how materials, minerals and mining underpin the firmament of modern society.
The next category of individuals that the Institute, like many others, wishes to support are those who are starting in their apprenticeships, at university, or in their first steps into the workplace. This is an important area that attention should be focused, as we need transparent and accessible spaces to support the formation of professional networks that enable people to get a healthy start in their career. From my understanding, this is the broad remit of the ‘Younger Members Committee’.
We can maintain the remit, and include members who are re-entering the discipline, or entering the discipline at a later stage due to a wider variety of circumstances very easily.
I urge you to vote on this with the IOM3 and select: “Student & Early Career Committee”. You can find the voting forms here: https://www.iom3.org/younger-members/news/2020/apr/14/ymc-survey
p.s. If you have got this far, can you lobby your local representative to remove the age criteria for the “Young Person’s Lecture Competition”.
Dr Ben Britton is a Fellow of the Institute of Materials, Minerals, and Mining. He is also a Chartered Engineer and Chartered Scientist.
Despite ‘only’ being 35 years old, he has been a Fellow of the Institute for Materials, Minerals, and Mining for four years. Apparently this is surprising and unexpected (or age based criteria and anchoring for professional status is incorrect).
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