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.