Aging

According to Business Insider (link), IBM is being sued for age discrimination. There apparently exist incriminating emails in which executives disparaged older workers.

What caught my attention was the following defense by IBM's spokesman:

In 2020, the median age of IBM's US workforce was 48, the same as it was ten years prior, he added.

Hmm. I don't think he thought this one through.

If the statement were about gender equality, then it might be convincing. Say, the proportion of women in the workforce was 40% in 2020, and also 40% in 2010. They would be saying gender inequality did not worsen in those 10 years.

But... age and gender are not the same attributes - despite both being popular demographic variables. Gender (traditionally speaking) is a simple variable with primarily two values (male, female) and immutable. The age of each person changes each year; and in aggregate, the average age of a population also changes. In most developed economies, populations are aging.

This Statista chart shows that the median age of Americas increased from 37.2 in 2010 to 38.4 in 2019. In other words, we should expect the median age of IBM's workforce to increase, not stay the same if IBM were age-neutral. If no one were hired or fired, the entire workforce should have aged 10 years from 2010 to 2020. If the median age stayed the same over 10 years, it might suggest that older workers were being replaced by younger ones.

Comments

[Mikhail]

But demographics measure age of population from birth to death.
And IBM measures only workforce from 21 to retirement.
Are those measures of median age comparable?

[Kaiser]

Mikhail: In both cases, each person ages one year per year. If the work force did not change, then the median age should go up by one year per year, no?

[Antonio]

Only if nobody retires. When an employee retires and he is replaced by a new employee, his (presumably) high age is substituted by a zero one.
But I admit to know nothing about job market in US. Or am I missing something other?

[Kaiser]

Antonio: We can work this out in the comments. That substitution would barely change the median age. If a big chunk of the older workers left, and were replaced by younger workers, the median age might even decline. But that may be proof of age discrimination - as presumably older workers are in more senior positions and so should not be replacable by young workers.

The other factor is whether the total size of the workforce increased or decreased, and which jobs have been added or removed (age interacts with experience and job requirements).

The key point is that it is not obvious to me that age structure being invariant conveys much information (by contrast, gender mix being invariant is more informative).