Accidental feminists, p.17
Accidental Feminists, page 17
Losing your job and being unable to find another one, not being offered interesting opportunities in your field, being despised in general, are bad for your income, of course, but they are bad for all sorts of other things as well, including your mental health. As I write this, I can’t help remembering—a little guiltily—an ad agency I worked at in the 1990s, when I was still in my oblivious forties. There was a lovely older bloke who no longer worked at the organisation (I have no idea whether he’d left voluntarily or not) who nonetheless used to appear in the lunch room a couple of times a week. He’d arrive mid-morning and often hang about till mid-afternoon, just shooting the breeze with whoever was around. He wasn’t miserable or bitter. On the contrary, he was always cheerful, enthusiastic and interested in what you were doing. He’d often share experiences with you from his days running important accounts. He was a little old-fashioned: smartly moustachioed and bow-tied, and the sort of guy who stood whenever a woman entered the room and pulled the chair out for her. He was a throwback to the Mad Men days of yore, but in the nicest way. Younger (and employed) staff would often make gentle jokes about him behind his back. Never to his face, I am pleased to say—everyone was very kind to him. It was hard not to be: he was charm itself. However, we all felt vaguely sorry for him and, if we had only admitted it to ourselves, a little uneasy. Was his inability to let go of his job, his obvious sense of being at a loose end, going to be our fate too? Looking back on it, I see a man with skills, talent and energy to burn desperately trying to find an outlet for them. I wish I knew what happened to him. I hope it was good.
I defy anyone to reach their mid-fifties without having been left open-mouthed by suddenly being the recipient of assumptions based purely on your age. If you haven’t, you are either extremely lucky or extremely rich and powerful. For the rest of us, it hits us like a slap. However, considering the baby boomers never give up anything without a fight (hello, are you looking at me?), this is perhaps why there is such a stirring of new energy around ageism and the determination of many older people, not least older women, to fight any attempt to dismiss us as past our use-by date. For many women, our fifties are just when we are revving up again.
All stereotyping and discrimination against any group in society is fundamentally stupid, but ageism has to be the dumbest of all. After all, every time a younger person discriminates against, disrespects or dismisses someone purely because of their age, they are shooting their future self in the foot—if they are fortunate and live long enough to get old, of course. The increasing likelihood, however, is that most people—particularly the economically fortunate—will reach what are patronisingly referred to as their ‘senior years’.
The average lifespan for a woman in Australia today is 87.3 years. One hundred years ago, in 1918, it was 63.3. That means women today can expect to live twenty-four years longer than our grandmothers did. However, it sometimes feels as if nothing about our society has caught up with that fact. For example, the average age of ‘retirement’ (voluntary or not) is currently 58.8 years for men and 52.3 years for women. Yet if you, like me, were born after 1 January 1957, you are not eligible for the old age pension until you are sixty-seven. If you have superannuation (and remember, one-third of women currently retire with no superannuation at all), you can access it between the ages of fifty-five and sixty, depending on when you were born. Nonetheless, given so few of us have much put aside for our old age, if so many women leave the workforce—either voluntarily or not—a good fifteen years before they can access the pension, what on earth are they living on? Not all of them can be depending on the financial support of their husband, particularly considering the rates of divorce and widowhood.
There is a particularly cruel irony in this, given how much more difficult it becomes to stay employed and get a new job, or even new contract work, as we age. The way governments are increasingly expecting older Australians to support themselves financially and the way the workplace airily sheds those same older people are fundamentally at odds. No wonder the fastest-growing group among the homeless are women over fifty-five. Since 2011 there has been a 10 per cent increase in homelessness for women, particularly older women. And in 2016–17, for the first time since records started being kept, more women than men sought assistance from specialist homelessness services. Far too many older women are facing a perfect storm of disadvantage.
I have spoken to women over fifty who have been made redundant and now find it almost impossible to find other work—of any kind, no matter how skilled they are. Teri’s story is typical: ‘I became a full-time carer for my mother. Since her passing I have been unable to gain employment. Being on Newstart is extremely difficult. I am unable to afford rent and live with both my children in order to survive.’
Too young for the age pension, too well for any disability support, these women are condemned to try to exist on unemployment benefits. Forget the appallingly small amount of money they receive or even the increasingly punitive, guilty-just-for-needing-it hoops they must jump through. All unemployed Australians must now put together a ‘jobs plan’ and meet a set of what are called ‘mutual obligations’. If you are over fifty-five, these include thirty hours per fortnight of paid work, self-employment, approved voluntary work or a mix of these. Imagine how soul-destroying it must be every fortnight to rack your brains as to how you can put all that together when the workplace has already told you, in no uncertain terms, that you are surplus to requirements. We toss these women aside and then we rub their noses in their irrelevance. If they fail to fulfil their (ahem) mutual obligations they can be judged to be ‘in breach’ and lose their income entirely for a time. Our cruelty sometimes knows no bounds. The women I have spoken to tell me their stories with tears in their eyes.
Perhaps that’s why so many older people, both men and women, take their redundancy payments, if they get them, or their super, if they have any, and buy themselves a job by purchasing a business or a franchise. Older Australians are increasingly taking on other people’s ironing, mowing lawns, packing supermarket shelves, doing nannying work and cleaning houses. All of which is all very well—as long as their health holds out.
And that’s the rub. Our very occupation can have a compounding effect on our health as we age. This can be a particular problem for men who have worked in physically demanding occupations. A lifetime spent as a brickie or plumber or builder can mean an old age spent struggling with arthritis, painful joints and a bad back. However, many female jobs are physical, too. Nursing is notoriously hard on the back, and child care can exert an immense physical toll. Years hunched over a computer can have excruciating consequences. Repetitive strain injury, carpal tunnel syndrome and other conditions resulting from overuse of our fine motor skills are the most common workplace-related injuries, costing the US economy over US$20 billion a year in workers compensation payments.
The way we earn our income can negatively affect that very same income in later life. Expenses inevitably go up in unexpected ways as we age due to deteriorating health, but if we are forced by economic necessity or government regulation to work long hours at whatever occupation we can get, meaning one that is often low-skilled, low-paid and physically demanding, there is an extra catch 22. Judged as too old and past our use-by date for the work we can do, we may be compelled to undertake work our ageing bodies can’t do. Which means our health may be directly affected by our work, starting a vicious downward spiral. The terrific Ken Loach film from 2016, I, Daniel Blake, was all about the descent into just such an economic and bureaucratic hell of a 59-year-old carpenter. Diagnosed with a heart condition, he is advised by his doctor not to work until he can get the necessary surgical treatment. Unfortunately, the British welfare system, now as heartless as its Australian counterpart, will not accept his doctor’s diagnosis. Blake becomes captive to a system that refuses to believe him or his doctor on principle. The punitive and suspicious attitudes that now characterise welfare systems in the West (thanks, neoliberalism) mean that everyone seeking help is assumed to be guilty until proven innocent. Australia experienced its own version of this during the recent Centrelink robo-debt collection debacle, where welfare recipients of all kinds, from the very young to the very old, were sent letters demanding repayment of often large sums that the agency claimed the recipients had been overpaid. Vulnerable people all over the country went into meltdown in response, with many unable to discover whether the sum they were accused of owing was correct or not. In the Loach movie, the effects of this punitive attitude towards the unfortunate were fatal.
Even if you are not relying on welfare or a menial occupation to survive, ageing itself can get expensive. GPs understandably are aware that the odds of developing life-threatening conditions increase exponentially the longer we live, so they do their job and take precautions. Anyone over sixty can tell you how much of their time is taken up with medical tests and specialist appointments of all kinds. Our health system is pretty good, but Medicare generally does not keep up with what doctors—particularly specialists, pathologists and radiologists—charge. The gap between the Medicare rebate and the actual cost can be a huge hurdle for people on low or fixed incomes, even if they get some kind of pensioner discount. If they are fortunate enough to have paid employment and so are ineligible for any support, they may have to save for weeks to afford a medical appointment. Also, as people age, they find they are prescribed a bewildering array of medications. Once again, Australians are a great deal more fortunate than the ageing citizens of places like the US, for example, thanks to the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme, which helps insulate us from the true cost of drugs. Like many foreign tourists, I was gobsmacked when I travelled to the US and had to seek medical help when I wrenched my back lifting a suitcase (I always pack too much stuff). It cost me well over US$500 for one visit to the doctor and for the medication he gave me. I got it all back through travel insurance, but it did make me wonder how on earth Americans manage, particularly those on low incomes. I dare say many of them, particularly the ageing poor, don’t.
My parents are well able to support themselves financially and are now in their late eighties. They are both also hale and hearty. Nevertheless, the number of pills they must take each morning has to be seen to be believed. They have those daily pill organisers to keep their medications under control. Obviously, given my parents’ vigour, whatever they take is doing them good, but none of their pills are free. How must it be for elderly people who do not have the financial good fortune my parents enjoy? Do they simply do without the medication they need so they can pay the gas bill? A 2017 Productivity Commission report said that 900,000 Australians put off going to the doctor because of cost, and 7.6 per cent (that’s almost two million of us) do not buy the medications they are prescribed because they are too expensive. Not all of the Australians putting off needed medical treatment will be elderly, of course, but it is a safe assumption—given the pernicious intersection of increasing medical requirements due to age and lower incomes for the same reason—that far too many of them will be. And dental care is even more inaccessible for too many people. A school principal I know who has always worked in schools in disadvantaged areas says that if you want to know what the socioeconomic status of an area is, don’t look at income or taxation data, just look at the state of the local residents’ teeth. Yep, even in prosperous Australia.
There is an increasing body of research that reveals that where you reside, how educated you are and how much you earn have a real impact on how long you can expect to live. And this is just another example of how the divide between the women over fifty who are fortunate and those who are not is exacerbated. Poverty directly affects lifespan. Not just your own lack of income, either: the poverty of your neighbours also affects how many years you may have left. A Dutch study done in 2000 found that people who lived in neighbourhoods with high levels of unemployment, disability and poverty had a higher mortality rate than those who lived in neighbourhoods with lower levels of these things. So if you are forced to sell your house to provide yourself with an income and must therefore move to a less expensive area so you can afford the rent, that’s another way that becoming impoverished in old age can directly affect both your health and your longevity.
If you find yourself unable to pay the rent even in a crappy area, according to another Dutch study, conducted between 2001 and 2010, homelessness has a greater impact on women’s life expectancy than it does on that of men. Life expectancy for a homeless man at age thirty was eleven years lower than that of the general population. For women at age thirty it was 15.9 years lower. There is some (very) small comfort for those who find themselves on their beam end, however, and it is that this difference decreased with age.
A similar lethal effect of homelessness has been reported in Australia, although the study that showed this only looked at men. A 2014 Tasmanian study into men staying at a homeless shelter in Hobart discovered that the average age of death for those who had passed through its doors was forty-eight.
Remember earlier in this chapter when I referred to the average life expectancy? Well, as with all averages, that means some people will live longer than average and some people will have much shorter lives. According to a 2015 report, life expectancy for wealthy baby boomers has increased but life expectancy for those who are poor has not and may even be declining slightly. Wealthy male baby boomers can expect to live for 88.8 years; the poorest for 76.1. For women, the richest can expect to reach almost ninety-two, while the poorest are unlikely to make it to their seventy-ninth birthday. These are US figures, but it is unlikely that Australia is very different, particularly given the shameful stats regarding the life expectancy of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. Indigenous Australians can expect to live an entire decade less than the rest of us: Indigenous men have a life expectancy of 69.1 years and Indigenous women 73.7. Indigenous Australians generally still experience more disadvantage across the entire spectrum of their life, from before their birth until their (usually much earlier) death. Nevertheless, anyone who is living in poverty, regardless of their background, has their health negatively impacted. In fact, low socioeconomic status cuts 2.1 years off an Australian’s life. To put that into perspective, like domestic violence and its effect on the health of women, that’s more of an effect on lifespan than obesity, excessive drinking or high blood pressure. Of course, one of the other consequences of doing it tough is what health professionals refer to as ‘co-morbidities’. What they mean by this is that people living precarious lives tend to have a complex web of other, related problems too. For example, disadvantaged people are more likely to smoke than other Australians. Fifty per cent of Indigenous Australians are smokers, as are 70 per cent of homeless people, as many as 90 per cent of people with a mental illness, up to 91 per cent of those with drug and alcohol problems, 60 per cent of young people deemed ‘at risk’, and 46 per cent of single mothers. Forty-two per cent of low-income smokers say they prioritise buying cigarettes ahead of food. All forms of addiction, including gambling, are possibly ways of self-medicating for those living marginal and difficult lives. They provide an escape from reality, a moment of relaxation, and are a source of (relatively) affordable pleasure.
There may be another, hidden morbidity that results from homelessness, and it ranges from self-harm to suicide. The homeless man with the bottle of fortified wine in a brown paper bag is so ubiquitous he has become a cliché. We may even automatically assume that to be homeless is to be an alcoholic, and blame homeless people’s shorter lifespan on their consumption of booze (as we censoriously sip our chardonnays and sav blancs). However, if the caller who rang a recent radio program about older women and homelessness is anything to go by, there may be another even more drastic way out. The caller was herself an older woman, and she rang to tell us that she had been homeless in the past and was once more facing the loss of her current residence. This time, however, as she said in a steely voice, she was not afraid. She was certain that she would never spend another night without a permanent roof over her head. If what she feared came to pass and she was evicted, she said calmly, she would simply kill herself. Death was vastly preferable to living on the streets.
It is hard to blame the woman who rang the radio program for contemplating such an extreme solution. After all, there can be no more emphatic way to tell a person that she is past her use-by date than to cast her out onto the streets—twice. This woman, as she confided later off air, was educated and had worked part time for most of her life in relatively low-paid occupations—a very typical work history for a woman of her (and my) generation. Redundancy in her fifties and then a series of health crises had eaten up what little super she had, so she had sold her house to live off the capital. Unable to find even the lowest-skilled work, she quickly ate through the equity she had in her house and found herself unable to cover her costs. No-one, it seemed, much cared. Past her use-by date in every way possible, she came up with a plan to avoid what she saw as the very worst fate. She already knew what it felt like to experience the terror, shame and misery of having no fixed address. Fortunately, thanks to the radio producer and announcer and her courage in sharing her story, the radio station got her details, contacted the social housing provider in her state and managed to find her a permanent and affordable home.
